news

David Lang receives Duke Foundation grant

David Lang is among 20 of America’s most vital artists working in the fields of contemporary dance, jazz and theatre announced by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) as recipients of the 2013 Doris Duke Artist Awards.

The grantees include: • Anthony Braxton (Middletown, CT (New York, NY)• Billy Childs (Los Angeles, CA)• Ping Chong (New York, NY)• Kelly Copper (New York, NY)• Lisa D’Amour (New Orleans, LA and New York, NY)• DD Dorvillier (New York, NY and Paris, France)• Amir ElSaffar (New York, NY)• David Gordon (New York, NY)• Pat Graney (Seattle, WA)• Stacy Klein (Ashfield, MA)• David Lang (New York, NY)• Pavol Liska (New York, NY)• Rudresh Mahanthappa (Montclair, NJ)• John Malpede (Los Angeles, CA)• Miya Masaoka (Berkeley, CA and New York, NY)• Myra Melford (Berkeley, CA)• Tere O’Connor (Champaign, IL and New York, NY)• William Parker (New York, NY)• Elizabeth Streb (Brooklyn, NY)• Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Tallahassee, FL and Brooklyn, NY)

works
Julia Wolfe

Anthracite Fields (2014) 65'

SATB chorus, cl, egtr, perc, pno, vc, db

Anthracite Fields was commissioned through Meet the Composer's Commissioning Music/USA program, which is made possible by generous support from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Helen F. Whitaker Fund. Additional support was made possible through the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia Alan Harler New Ventures Fund; the Presser Foundation; The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through Philadelphia Music Project.

Program Note Libretto Video Recordings score preview More Info

works
David Lang • Julia Wolfe • Michael Gordon

The Carbon Copy Building (1999) 72'

music by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe; Text by Ben Katchor

Cast: Ms, T, Bar, Bar/Ct; cl(bcl, cbcl, ssx)/perc/syn/egtr [all instruments and voices amplified]

Settembre Musica Festival and the city council of Turin, Italy, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program Note Recordings rent music score preview More Info

interviews

Los Angeles Times

March 2, 2016

By David Ng

When you win a Pulitzer Prize for music, you hear about it just like everyone else — in the news perhaps, or from other people who read about it before you do.

You don’t know anything, said composer Julia Wolfe, who won the coveted award last year for her choral piece Anthracite Fields, an unconventional exploration into the history of coal mining in rural Pennsylvania.

Wolfe recalled that she was at home in her Tribeca loft, working with colleagues from the Bang on a Can ensemble, when a call came in from Washington, DC…

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interviews

Big risks and adventurous friends: How composer Julia Wolfe became a renegade

September 15, 2022
NPR Music
Editors’ Picks

Sometimes, all you need is a little push. In the fall of 1976, when Julia Wolfe arrived at the University of Michigan from Pennsylvania, she was just 17 and viewed herself as a “wild teenager” with her sights on social sciences and politics. Activism was a possible path. Music wasn’t on her radar.

But one day, a friend coaxed Wolfe into taking a peculiar music class, taught by a forward-thinking Quaker who didn’t care how much you knew about composing…

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news

Dana Jessen, bassoonist, on commissioning Rushes

Commissioning Rushes
by Dana Jessen

http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/commissioning-rushes/

As musicians, we frequently talk about the process of composing music. Most often we discuss the various methods a composer goes through to realize his or her work. Yet there is another facet of such an undertaking that often isn’t discussed—the performer’s side of commissioning a large-scale work. On September 15th, six colleagues and I gave the world premiere of Rushes, a new 60-minute composition for seven bassoons by Michael Gordon…

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Anthracite Fields feature:

As Trump Tries to Revive Coal, an Oratorio Confronts Mining’s Past

By MICHAEL COOPER APRIL 4, 2017

LEWISBURG, Pa. — Onstage, a choir intoned the names of coal miners whose deaths and injuries had landed them on the Pennsylvania Mining Accident index more than a century ago. In the lobby, members of the audience — some of whom came on free shuttle buses that picked them up from nearby coal towns — created an index of their own, writing about their mining ancestors in a small leather notebook held open with a coal paperweight…

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news

Seattle Symphony premieres new work

On February 8, in Benaryoa Hall, conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony premiere David Lang’s first symphony: symphony without a hero, commissioned for the Seattle Symphony by the Lynn and Brian Grant Family. The 27-minute work is in one movement, with two related parts — two separate musical movements that are performed simultaneously: one heavy and oppressive and one light and hopeful. Lang explains that one doesn’t “really hear the light and hopeful music until the oppressive movement ends.”

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