The New York Philharmonic has been on quite a roll with Gustavo Dudamel: after last week’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! variations-extravaganza comes another major commission this week: David Lang’s the wealth of nations – based on The Wealth of Nations – yes, that one, which turns out to be surprisingly fertile ground for a massive choral/orchestral piece.
My program essay for the piece can be found here:
David Lang approaches music as a tool for understanding how people are connected — emotionally and collectively — even in places where we don’t expect music to go. Across his career, he has returned repeatedly to large-scale, text-driven works that place individual voices within a wider civic frame, exploring moral, social, and political questions without prescribing answers. Rather than treat music as an abstract system, Lang has used it as a means of examining how societies organize themselves — and what gets smoothe
Filed under: American music, commissions, David Lang, New York Philharmonic
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 