Before David Lang ’78 was a composer, before he had co-founded Bang on a Can and before he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for “The Little Match Girl Passion,” he was an almost pre-med, roaming through the campus’ music groups. He made the jump from chemistry from music while at Stanford, and has since never looked back.
Intermission spoke with Lang, who is returning to campus tonight for the first time since 1987, on his student life and following career. Always tied to the music scene, Lang, as a music critic for The Stanford Daily back in the 70s, covered a free concert by a then little-known string quartet, the Kronos Quartet (the Grammy Award-winning group that opened this year’s Stanford Lively Arts season) – with whom he later collaborated with in “Requiem for a Dream.” Through the years, Lang’s compositions have been performed by The New York Philharmonic, the Munich Chamber Orchestra and the Boston Symphony.
Bang on a Can All-Stars comes to Dinkelspiel Auditorium tonight at 8 p.m., playing works by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, Brian Eno and Lang himself. The concert is $10 for students and $44-50 for adults and tickets are available from Stanford Lively Arts.
What were you studying at Stanford?
I studied chemistry for the first two years I was there and then I switched to music. And I also took classes in medieval studies, which I loved a lot, and … let’s see what else did I do… and that’s pretty much it.
So how did you make the switch from chemistry to music, then?
Well all the chemistry classes were at 8 a.m., because you know I think they scheduled them so that weak people like me would get out, and eventually it works. I was doing music the whole time I was there – I had been writing music since I was nine – and so music was taking up all of my time anyway. I was playing in every ensemble on campus. I played in the marching band, the jazz band, the orchestra, the concert band and the new music ensemble, and I was just playing music all the time. And so I sort of realized I’m spending all my time in this because I actually want to do it. It was very different from my experience with chemistry <laughs> so I switched.
You mentioned various music groups. What were you playing and how were you involved in each one?
I played trombone, most of the ensembles, but in the new music ensemble I played guitar, I played tuba. I did lots of different kinds of things. I was not particularly good at anything, but I really just wanted to be involved in everything. I played percussion in the orchestra. So, whenever someone was doing something musical, I wanted to know what it was.
When you were growing up, did you start on trombone?
I did. When I was nine, I started on trombone.
Was that your parents putting you through lessons?
No, I had to fight for lessons. Because I had an older sister that also went to Stanford and my parents had given her music lessons and she wasn’t interested at all. So when I told my parents I wanted lessons, they said, “Why waste our money?” So that’s basically what happened. I really had to fight the whole time to get my parents to think that I was serious about music. And I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I got serious about it was because I had to fight for it.
And so when did you know you wanted to pursue music specifically?
As I said I had always done it. From the age of nine I had been writing music, I never really imagined I wouldn’t be doing it. And it was only gradually when I was at Stanford that I figured out, you know, it’s really the thing here that I’m passionate about. And the rest of my education is practical. If I did go to medical school like my parents wanted me to, I would have been able to have a more comfortable life. But the thing I’m spending my time doing is this other ridiculous thing which I’m really passionate about. That was sort of the whole thing that happened when I was a student.
About Bang on a Can. How has the mission of Bang on a Can evolved since you started over 20 years ago?
Well, the thing that’s interesting about it is that it’s really easy to imagine what the problems of music are, since they’re kind of obvious. There’s no money, you want people to get excited so you have to make really great performances and get the information out to people who could learn about it and love it but they don’t know about it yet. You have to curate concerts so that they’re spectacular and really enjoyable. You have to make sure that there is a range of depth so that people are able to experience the thing and get really excited about it. It’s really easy to figure out what the problems are, but you can’t really address them all at once.
So what happened with Bang on a Can all these years is we began by just saying, “We’re going to do one concert of music from all of these different genres, but all of it is really exciting and all of it is innovative in some way.” And then gradually over the years we have been adding more and more activities. So one of the things we added, as first we were just a festival – one 12-hour concert – and now over the years we have the ensemble that is playing at Stanford, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, which is our touring group. But we also have a record label, Cantaloupe, we added a school, which is the Bang on a Can Summer Institute where we have 35 composers and performers from around the world come to study with our players. We have a commissioning program to commission people who would not have the opportunity to write this music without our help.
Gradually we’ve tried to add as many of those things as we can, and figure that out.
Now let’s move to the concert of yours on Friday, entitled “Sunray.” What’s the concept behind “Sunday?”
The story was, I was trying to write a piece of music for my dad for his birthday. I was looking out the window and I couldn’t think of anything to write and I was sitting next to – my apartment was next to this dry cleaner that had this blinking neon sign and it was called “Sun Cleaners.” And there was this blinking neon sun ray, these rays of the sun, outside my window. So after I while I thought, you know, “I’m going to write about that, that’s really optimistic.” So I decided to make something that would be this kind of beautiful ray of sun.
It’s not one of my more thoughtful or more intellectually pulled-together pieces. It was really just sort of, “I need to have a gift for my dad that is not about death.” Since a lot of my music is really miserable and it was hard to figure out something that wouldn’t be too miserable for him, that was the idea.
It’s something that shows off the All-Stars and it’s something that really has one idea that begins in a very gentle place and then sort of, in the way that sunlight is intensified, it goes on this kind of journey of intensification over 10 minutes.
Was it written just for this performance?
It’s the first time it’s being performed at Stanford. But I wrote it, I guess four years ago.
The rest of your stuff, you mentioned, has a gloomier tone. Is that intentional?
It’s not necessarily gloomy, but I guess I feel that a lot of the music that I write is serious. It’s about real life things, and some of those things may be lighter than others. Basically I don’t like to have only one thing that I do, so I like to try to sift and find problems for myself to solve. It’s not like I feel like every one of my pieces has to be about this subject or every one of my pieces has to be about life and death; Or every one of my pieces has to be miserable, or every time a piece of mine is played everyone in the audience has to burst into tears at a particular moment. I don’t have that particular program.
But I definitely like the idea that I set up problems for myself to think about while I’m working. Some of those problems are technical, like how can two instruments relate in a particular way and how does that work out. And some of them are emotional problems, how you give people the feeling that it’s okay to have a serious emotion without telling them exactly what emotion it is.
So there are different kinds of problems that I set up. Because all my pieces begin in a thoughtful way, they have a tendency to have a thoughtful – to live in a certain kind of thoughtful resonance.