David Lang

The Little Match Girl Passion has been described as "a 21st century classic".

David Lang (born January 8, 1957) is an American composer living in New York City.

Together with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, Lang co-founded Bang on a Can in 1987.

Lang went on to earn a Doctorate of Musical Arts at Yale University in 1989.

In addition to Jenni, his teachers have included Henri Lazarof, Lou Harrison, Richard Hervig, Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Henze, and Martin Bresnick.

In 1999 he collaborated with composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon and librettist/illustrator Ben Katchor on the composition of the "comic strip opera" The Carbon Copy Building.

The production won an Obie Award for Best New American Production.

Also in 1999, Lang and playwright Mac Wellman based their opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field on a short story by Ambrose Bierce, about an Alabama planter named Williamson who purportedly vanished while walking across a field in 1854.

(Bierce's story reoccurs in urban-legend form, in which, coincidentally, the vanished man is often given the name David Lang.)

Lang, Wolfe and Gordon subsequently collaborated with librettist Deborah Artman on the 'oratorio' Lost Objects, the recording of which was released in summer 2001 (Teldec New Line).

Their next collaborative project was Shelter, a multi-media work also with librettist Deborah Artman, for the Scandinavian vocal group Trio Mediaeval and the German ensemble musikFabrik, which was performed in Germany and the U.S. in 2005.

The piece, based on Hans Christian Andersen's fable "The Little Match Girl" and inspired by Bach's St. Matthew Passion, was co-commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation and the Perth Theatre and Concert Hall and premiered on October 25, 2007, in Zankel Hall in New York City.

Tim Page of The Washington Post wrote that "I don't think that I've ever been so moved by a new...composition as I was by David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion, which is unlike any music I know."

Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices.

Lang was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.

Lang was born in Los Angeles, California.

Lang is of Jewish descent.

In his youth he played trombone.

After completing his undergraduate degree at Stanford University, he went to the University of Iowa; he says, "There was a teacher in composition at the University of Iowa named Martin Jenni, and he had come to Stanford as a leave replacement to teach for a semester. And I just thought he was amazing. He knew a lot of stuff that I'd never heard of before. So when I thought about grad school, I went to Iowa. I was happy I did. It was really a kind of golden age. I really loved it."

In 2008 he joined the Yale School of Music composition faculty.

Lang was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in music for his piece The Little Match Girl Passion, composed in 2007 for Paul Hillier and his Theatre of Voices.

A piece with multiple choruses and dance, battle hymns was first performed in Philadelphia in 2009 by the Mendelssohn Club and the Leah Stein Dance Company.

The recording by Theatre of Voices and Paul Hillier of The Little Match Girl Passion on Harmonia Mundi received a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Lang composed this song cycle – a commission from Carnegie Hall and Stanford Lively Arts, premiered at both in late January, 2012 – as a companion piece to the little match girl Passion.

In that work, death was an implied character; in this follow-up song cycle, death is personified.

For the texts sung by the character "Death," Lang turned to the songs of Franz Schubert, from which he made his own translations into English.

The part of Death was sung by Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond; the instrumentalists included Bryce Dessner of The National (band) on guitar, Nico Muhly on piano, and Owen Pallett on violin and voice.

Its U.S. west coast premiere was directed by Robert Geary and performed by the San Francisco Choral Society, Volti, the Piedmont Children's Choir, and the Leah Stein Dance Company in April 2013 at the Kezar Pavilion.

National Public Radio chose the commercial recording as one of its ten favorite classical albums of 2013.

Lang wrote the libretto by typing short, personal phrases into a search engine and writing down the results.

The opera includes these anonymous confessions, which are whispered by soprano Tony Arnold, while four instrumentalists from the International Contemporary Ensemble never play above a hush.

No audience member can hear the entire opera and it cannot be recorded, so it can only be experienced live.

Inspired by the powerful singing he heard from the crowd at an Arsenal F.C. football match, Lang came up with the idea of composing a song for over 1,000 people to sing.

In May 2014, the Collegiate Chorale and the Manhattan Girls Chorus performed battle hymns at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

The first performance was 9 June 2014 at Birmingham's Millennium Point.

In 2015, the Shenandoah Chorus (Shenandoah University) performed 'battle hymns' at an on-campus concert.

In 2016 he was welcomed to the Institute for Advanced Study as the Institute's Artist in Residence, a position he holds to this day.

In 2017 Chinese singer Gong Linna premiered Cloud River Mountain, written by the three Bang on a Can composers in addition to Lao Luo.

They also premiere Road Trip, a celebration of Bang on a Can's 30-year journey, together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2017.

For the 2017 Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual holiday concert, which has included the little match girl Passion for five years, Lang has written a new version called the little match girl (observed), in which the audience is the congregation and participates with interstitial hymns.