Ten years ago, the composer David Lang was a maverick outsider who was tolerated but somewhat patronized by the classical music establishment: too light, too pop-influenced, too superficial. Today, David Lang has won the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy, been featured at Carnegie Hall, and has just been named Musical America’s Composer of the Year.
“I’m really sort of amused by it,” says Lang, 55, of his newfound prestige. “After [you win] the Pulitzer, people go, ‘It’s okay to listen to your music now.’”
Lang’s latest work, “Love Fail,” is an example of the kind of circles the onetime outsider is moving in these days. Its roster of co-commissioners include the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Kennedy Center’s Fortas Chamber Music series, which will present it at the Terrace Theater on Wednesday night; and it was written for the popular a capella vocal group Anonymous 4. Not bad for a composer who used to be better known for organizing 12-hour marathons of music by himself and other composers nobody had ever heard of.
The thing is, Lang isn’t doing anything different. He’s still helping put on marathons along with his two co-conspirators, composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, with whom he founded the collaborative Bang on a Can in 1987; they’ve since founded a performing ensemble, a record label (Cantaloupe Music) and a summer music institute, and this year’s marathon drew upwards of 10,000 people. He still believes that classical music needs to be more open to influences from other kinds of music — pop, jazz, world music. He still writes thoughtful, quirky pieces, though arguably with less of the in-your-face quasi-bratty humor of earlier works such as “Cheating Lying Stealing.”
It’s just that finally, a lot of his ideas are being more widely embraced by the music world, and the classical establishment is at last able to look past its erstwhile horror of the “crossover” label to appreciate the music Lang writes.
The obvious watershed was “The Little Match Girl Passion,” the piece that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It’s hardly a flashy piece: a half-hour long a cappella work for a vocal quartet. It was conceived as a way a Jewish composer could join the heightened world of suffering and transcendence depicted in Bach’s great passions: a religious oratorio based not on the life of Christ, but on Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Match Girl.” Lang thought he might encounter backlash on religious grounds; instead, the work’s mixture of spareness and profundity had a powerful effect on many listeners.
Although Lang didn’t think of the work as a major stylistic departure, there were a couple of things that set it apart. For one thing, Lang largely abandoned the slightly satiric stance he had often adopted in the past — though there is some humor implicit in the idea of turning the story of “The Little Match Girl” into a religious work, the result was actually pointed and direct. “I think because I was trying to be honest with myself,” Lang says, “people realized something personal in it for them as well.”
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