David Lang is an extraordinary artist, not just for his incredibly diverse musical output, but for his impact on the music world. People my age first noticed him with Bang on a Can, the modern classical ensemble, in the 1980s. Along with composers like Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, he brought deeply imagined, composed, and improvisational music to an audience who would never go to a classical concert. But more than that, they provided a stage for other great musicians and composers who couldn’t get a fair shake or even a hearing in the mainstream classical world, people like John Zorn or Meredith Monk.
Since those days, David Lang’s vision and range as a composer have continued to expand. His latest work, “poor hymnal,” assembles and recomposes words from a wide range of sources, from the Torah to Mahatma Gandhi. The piece includes excerpts from speeches by President Barack Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
The record was nominated for a Grammy this year, and he performed excerpts live at Boston Symphony Hall. Lang joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss his latest work and its meaning. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: I’m so excited to talk to you about this record. It’s just so beautiful. I think that most people could probably tell from just hearing a few notes that it’s deeply devotional work. But beyond that, tell us the vision of “poor hymnal.” Where does this collection of texts take us?
David Lang: First of all, I’m super happy to be here. I really appreciate it, and I’m glad you like this piece, because it’s very personal to me. A lot of my ideas for pieces come from me imagining how I might be a better person, since for all of us, there are lots of opportunities to do that. This piece came out of realizing that there are a lot of problems in the world that have to do with the amount of compassion that we show to each other, and trying to figure out why that is. Why it is that we know we should be good to each other, we know that we should be kind, we know we should love our neighbors, but we have competing definitions of … what is our neighbor? Who is our neighbor? We’re going to love other people we know. How far does that love go? I think that discussion is sort of in the world right now. It’s kind of important to figure out what our answers are.
I’m a fairly religious person, and when I have a problem, I go to my religion to imagine how I might solve the problem. My religion is full of invocations of opportunities to welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and comfort the ill. It’s not for wont of being told that I should do these things, that I somehow don’t do enough of them. So, I just started wondering, maybe what my religion is telling me is not enough to get me to do it.
What if there were a religion in the world that got rid of all the other parts of religion, other than the part that tells us how to be good to each other, the part that tells us how to be kind to the poor, and to take care of the people who need our help? What if that religion actually existed? That religion would need its own prayers. It would need its own liturgy. It would need its own hymns. So, I just had this idea, well, should that religion ever exist, I’m going to write the hymn book for that religion.
Religion is just about what you do when you notice someone who needs your help, and how you give them your help. How do you think about it? How does a community organize itself around caring for each other? That’s the basic idea of the piece.
Rath: I want to play the opening song from this piece. It’s titled, “I saw a poor man.” We’ll hear a bit of that right now.
[Music: “Poor Hymnal, No. 1, I saw a poor man”]
I have to ask you about the text of this because, for most of these texts, there’s a reference. I don’t see one for “I saw a poor man.” Are those your words?
Lang: I began this piece with a problem for myself, which was, how do people react when they’re confronted with someone who needs their help? I don’t know what to do. I wanted to figure out how everyone might think of the answer to that problem. So, I just went to my internet search engine, and I typed in “I saw a poor man,” and I let it auto-complete the sentences. I picked and chose the ones that made the most sense to me.
What I wanted for this experience for this “poor hymnal” was to imagine we’re in a Quaker meeting house or some sort of religious environment where someone stands up in front of a congregation and says, “Here’s something that I just noticed. Here’s something that just happened to me.” Then the congregation joins in, and the congregation answers that and says, “Well, OK, we’re all together in this, and here’s what your responsibility is when you see this problem.” So, it begins with one person saying. “I saw a poor man,” and describing the places where people on the internet have answered this question about how they saw a poor man. Then the congregation does its job.
Rath: I was fascinated to read in your notes that you were inspired by Charles Ives. I have to mention my favorite American composer, who is as wild as his music gets. There are these quotes from the hymns that you said you might typically hear in a New England church.
Lang: Well, that’s how I found out about hymns altogether. You know, I’m from a mostly immigrant Jewish family from Los Angeles, and through my love of music, I came to Charles Ives. A teacher once told me that I wouldn’t be able to understand the music of Charles Ives if I didn’t understand the New England hymn culture that he came from. So, I started buying hymns. It’s really true if you listen to Charles Ives — any of the orchestra pieces — there’ll be a quote, and if you don’t know that it’s “Shall we gather by the river” or “There’s a fountain filled with blood,” you’re missing something that’s huge in Charles Ives’ personal vocabulary. So, I started buying these hymns, and I got totally into the hymn culture and totally into the idea. Even though it’s not my world that I grew up in, and not my religious practice. What I really loved about it was that the hymn was a kind of catalog of what all these people agree on, and people could sing it. They didn’t have to be the best singers, right? If you were in that congregation, if you shared that belief, you were invited to sing.
