poor hymnal

David Lang was born January 8, 1957, in Los Angeles, California, and lives in New York City. He composed poor hymnal on a co-commission from The Crossing, David Nally, Artistic Director, and the Netherlands Chamber Chorus. The Crossing gave the world premiere on December 15, 2023, at the Iron Gate Theatre, Philadelphia, PA, as part of Penn Live Arts. 

The score for poor hymnal calls for a small mixed-voice chorus (sopranos, altos, tenors, basses).

David Lang’s poor hymnal is one in a growing series of works developing the composer’s unique and haunting compositional approach, in particular in vocal and choral music. The most celebrated and ambitious of these works is his little match girl passion, written in 2007 on commission from Carnegie Hall and Perth Theatre and Concert Hall for Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fable, that piece won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Music; its first recording won a Grammy Award. Another high-profile success was his score to Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed 2015 Youth, which included his Academy Award-nominated simple song #3.

Largely self-taught in his early musical experiences, Lang was drawn to the American maverick tradition even as he studied traditional repertoire. He was particularly interested in such composers as John Cage and La Monte Young, whose individualism bucked modernist tendencies toward hyperorganization and architectural complexity. His advanced formal training was more traditional: he attended Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and Yale University; his teachers included Jacob Druckman, Morton Subotnick, Roger Reynolds, and Martin Bresnick. (He now teaches at Yale as a Professor of Music Composition.) He received BMI Student Composer Awards in 1980 and 1981. In 1983, he was a Fellow of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Center; his music has been performed at Tanglewood on many occasions since, usually as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music. During his Tanglewood summer, Gunther Schuller conducted a performance of Lang’s large-ensemble work Wide Boy. He wrote a short note about the piece illuminating principles that seem to have stuck with him to the present day:

There are many wonderful musical ideas which have not yet been dreamed of. Some of these ideas are, in fact, undreamable, because they are counterintuitive, that is, they violate our trained sense of how things should be done. In order to discover just what these ideas are, a composer might occasionally write a piece with glaring errors in it—too much or too little going on, odd orchestrations, peculiar proportions—and thereby discover how best to do thing he has been taught not to do. (This is also the way a composer can have fun.)

For most of his artistic life, Lang has been associated with the “downtown” New York City arts scene. Having moved to New York City after his university years, in the mid-1980s, Lang founded Bang on a Can with two other composers, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, in part due to the frustration of established ensembles and venues tepid to their own music and the music they loved. This included such figures as John Cage, John Zorn, Glenn Branca, and Meredith Monk, as well as such European modernists as Pierre Boulez and György Ligeti. Its very name indicates the founders’ original do-it-yourself approach to concert-giving, inspired by performers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. A house ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, composed of top-notch musicians, was formed in 1992 and soon developed a formidable reputation for artistic integrity and technical prowess. Now approaching 40 years old, Bang on a Can has advocated for the music of hundreds of composers and advanced the careers of many a prominent musician.

The influence of American minimalism, including that of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, is evident in much of Lang’s work, but his own voice, refined over decades, is distinct and immediately identifiable. Other influences range from Bach to Shostakovich, as well as rock music and ubiquitous pop. It is, above all, directly communicative: often gorgeous, sometimes intense, always clear. He is one of the most-often-performed composers in the world, and his music is performed by an enormously diverse range of musicians, from high-schoolers and amateurs to many of the most prominent orchestras. In addition to the little match girl passion, his large-scale works include the operatic note to a friend, the difficulty of crossing a field, and modern painters, as well as pieces composed in collaboration with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, The Carbon Copy Building and Lost Objects. His prisoner of the state is a recomposing of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, composed on a commission from the New York Philharmonic with several European organizations and premiered in New York City in 2019. The New York Philharmonic also commissioned his most recent orchestral work, the wealth of nations, for bass-baritone, mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra, scheduled for premiere in March 2026 under Gustavo Dudamel’s direction. Other commissions have included those from the BBC, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony, and many others. The BSO commissioned and premiered his orchestra work International Business Machine on the occasion of the Tanglewood Music Center’s 50th anniversary.

Along with writing for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Lang also continues to experiment with projects outside traditional spheres. For the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, he composed a kind of “whisper opera,” true pearl, to be experienced via headphones by a visitor to the museum’s Tapestry Room. The wonderful text by Sybil Kempson creates a narrative imagined from these wall hangings based on the life of Cyrus the Great. In another example, learning of a trove of broken instruments salvaged from the Philadelphia public school system, he composed his symphony for broken instruments, thinking “that this project might be a good way to continue my interest in using music to build a better world.” The work became an exercise in community and education, its performers ranging from schoolchildren to members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Lang’s interest in the power of music to bring people together or to trigger deep thinking about society is present in virtually all of his work, which also informs his musical style. Especially in his choral works, his music reflects centuries-old hymnody and popular song, with (apparently) simple prosody (the rhythm of words) and harmony. The details, however—the calibrated lengths of phrases, the necessity of musicians committing to Lang’s unique vision and language. With this in mind, poor hymnal is a key work in his catalog. Although composed for a professional vocal ensemble, The Crossing, the piece gives the impression that it could be sung by anyone. The texts are equally “simple” and grounded, but, as with the music, they make a profound cumulative effect, simultaneously heartbreaking and hopeful.

The composer’s note on his piece appears below.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications