Wisdom of the Crowd: David Lang on Finding Community in His Participatory Choral Works

The August 2022 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Wisdom of the Crowd: David Lang on Finding Community in His Participatory Choral Works” in conversation with Patrick Murray. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.
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Composer David Lang is no stranger to the choral world. In works such as again (after ecclesiastes) (2005), the little match girl passion (2007/2008), battle hymns (2009), statement to the court (2010), love fail (2012/2016), the national anthems (2014), and teach your children (2019), amongst many others, Lang has made numerous important contributions to the twenty-first-century choral and vocal ensemble repertoire, particularly through his emphasis on contemporary social issues through his choice of texts.

Outside of choral music, Lang is best known as one of the co-founders of the New York-based new music organization Bang on a Can, a composer of rhythmically intricate post-minimalist instrumental music, a professor at the Yale School of Music, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Yet there is another facet of Lang’s work that, although receiving considerable public attention, has not been considered comprehensively in print.

Over the past eight years in pieces such as crowd out (2014), the public domain (2016), memorial ground (2016), the mile long opera (2018), and harmony and understanding (2018), Lang has created a small but unique body of choral works that invite large-scale public participation, community engagement, and site-specific performance, often requiring new inter-organizational civic partnerships and recruiting one thousand or more participants in order to bring the performance into being…

In our conversation, Lang spoke about his inspiration for these works, the challenges of creating music that invites open participation from people with varied musical backgrounds, how that challenge has impacted his own compositional choices, and what embracing participation and community engagement as central to a compositional practice might mean for the training of choral and classical music composers today. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Read the rest of this article in the August 2022 issue of Choral Journal.