Click below to hear a message from composer David Lang:

To the Audience—I wrote this piece for you.

These words were written by David Lang, Pulitzer Prize-winner and co-founder of musical maverick group Bang on A Can, about the U.S. premiere of his new commission harmony and understanding.

Here is why:

You may have noticed that we live in a world that is increasingly being divided into smaller and smaller groups. We are constantly being encouraged to divide ourselves—by nationality, by religion, by political opinion, by race, by the amount of money we have. My piece is designed so that, at least for a few minutes, we can un-divide ourselves a little.

One night only on December 8, be there and experience what he created for you – the audience – which is music so inclusive and interactive that it blurs the lines between performers and audience. Lang designed this unusual and exciting work to bring us together as human beings, to play and create and enjoy creating the music together. 

Also featured is a work by American contemporary music icon John Adams, who said he confronted who he was as a composer through Harmonielehre, resulting in a dynamic marriage of American minimalism and the expressive world of European greats like Mahler, Debussy and Sibelius.

Join us to be a part of history AND the performance in this exclusive evening at the New World Center, one night only, December 8.

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Program

David Lang

harmony and understanding (2018; U. S. premiere; NWS commission)
Approximate duration: 20 minutes

When he moved to New York City after completing his studies at the Yale School of Music, David Lang found a music community hopelessly divided and stuck in outdated orthodoxies. His antidote, co-created with fellow composers and Yale alumni Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, was Bang on a Can, a collective that paved the way for the current blossoming of “indie-classical” ventures. Lang’s style continues to transcend genres, moving seamlessly from a concert work like the little match girl passion (winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and a 2010 Grammy Award) to his Oscar-nominated music for the film Youth. Lang wrote the following introduction to harmony and understanding, which, like all his works, uses only lowercase letters in its title.

To the Audience—

I wrote this piece for you. What I mean is that I wrote this piece, not just for you to hear and to enjoy, but I wrote it for you to perform, so that you and the orchestra and everyone in the hall can work together to make something that sounds nice.

Here is why:

You may have noticed that we live in a world that is increasingly being divided into smaller and smaller groups. We are constantly being encouraged to divide ourselves—by nationality, by religion, by political opinion, by race, by the amount of money we have.  My piece is designed so that, at least for a few minutes, we can un-divide ourselves a little. Everyone is part of this piece, it needs everyone to make it, and everyone has to come together to perform it. When the audience is the chorus there is, in fact, no audience at all, but a community of people, all working together to make something, together.   

We are going to make this piece, together, right now. 

The text for the piece is a list of the things that all of us want. I know that it really is what all of us want because I crowd-sourced the text on the internet—I typed into a search engine the sentence “We all want to…” and the internet completed the sentence, in a million different ways. The text of my piece is made of the first 33 answers that the internet provided that day. (To be more honest, they are the first 33 answers that didn’t name a person or a product or a religion or a gender or said anything bad about anyone.) 

The title harmony and understanding comes, of course, from the song “Age of Aquarius” from the hippie musical Hair, which was made popular in 1967 by the band The 5th Dimension. I grew up in California in the 1960s so I guess there is still a little hippie left in me. 

Thanks so much for being here, and for helping to make this piece.   

Now let’s make it.

                              — David Lang

John Adams

Harmonielehre (1985)
Approximate duration: 43 minutes

Raised in New England and educated at Harvard, John Adams left the Eurocentric East Coast in 1971 for San Francisco. He found models for his earliest mature works in the large-scale minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, composers who themselves drew inspiration from Africa, Asia and other non-classical traditions. But Adams soon moved on from “pure” minimalism, and the Romantic streak that returned to his language fueled his most famous compositions, including the opera Nixon in China (1987) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning work for chorus and orchestra, On the Transmigration of Souls (2003).

Harmonielehre, composed for the San Francisco Symphony in 1985, represents a crucial juncture in Adams’ process of reconciling Minimalist and Romantic tendencies. The title, German for “Treatise on Harmony,” comes from a textbook published by Arnold Schoenberg in 1911, just as he was breaking with tonality in his own music. In Harmonielehre, Adams looks back to the massive compositions that emerged around the turn of the 20th century, including Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, Debussy’s La mer, Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony and Mahler’s epic symphonies. It would have been perfectly appropriate to label Harmonielehre a symphony (many commentators have), but Adams simply describes it as “a large, three-movement work for orchestra that marries the developmental techniques of minimalism with the harmonic and expressive world of fin de siècle late Romanticism.”

Describing the untitled first movement in a program note, Adams wrote, “The pounding E-minor chords at the beginning and end of the movement are the musical counterparts of a dream image... In the dream I’d watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket.”

Work on Harmonielehre coincided with Adams’ interest in the writings of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, “particularly his examination of Medieval mythology,” as Adams explained. “I was deeply affected by Jung’s discussion of the character of Anfortas, the king whose wounds could never be healed. As a critical archetype, Anfortas symbolized a condition of sickness of the soul that curses it with a feeling of impotence and depression.”

This myth inspired the slow movement, The Anfortas Wound. As Adams describes it, “A long, elegiac trumpet solo floats over a delicately shifting screen of minor triads that pass like spectral shapes from one family of instruments to the other. Two enormous climaxes rise up out of the otherwise melancholy landscape, the second one being an obvious homage to Mahler’s last, unfinished symphony.”

Adams labeled the third movement Meister Eckhardt and Quackie. “The Zappaesque title,” he wrote, “refers to a dream I had shortly after the birth of our daughter, Emily, who was briefly dubbed ‘Quackie’ during her infancy. In the dream, she rides perched on the shoulder of the Medieval mystic, Meister Eckhardt, as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted on the high ceilings of old cathedrals.” 

-- Copyright © 2018 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.

david lang

harmony and understanding
audience instructions

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1. like a forest
Whisper the following phrases, in any order, quietly, to yourself. Speed up and slow down at will.

to be the hero
to be resilient
to be liked, loved or needed
to go
to make
to be happy
to say
to ask
to make each other better

2.
In any order, in a quiet, calm, spoken voice, add to the phrases above the words “We all want....”

we all want to be the hero
we all want to be resilient
we all want to be liked, loved or needed
we all want to go
we all want to make
we all want to be happy
we all want to say
we all want to ask
we all want to make each other better

3.
Crescendo and decrescendo in small groups, when the conductor signals you.

4.
Crescendo and decrescendo together, when the conductor signals you.

5. like a carnival
Sing the following melody, in any octave, on the syllable ‘la.’ Breathe, phrase, speed up and slow down at will. Listen for the French horns and the tubular bells – your notes will always be shared with the horns and the tubular bells.

6. like heroes
Sing the following chords, picking the note that is easiest for you to sing. Listen for the chords in the orchestra that enter before you, and alternate with you. Your chords and rhythms will always be the same as the orchestra’s chords and rhythms.

7.
Recite the following phrases, in any order, quietly, to yourself. Speed up and slow down at will.

to change the world
to watch
to be free
to do something
to be extraordinary
to solve the problem
to be young
to be seen

8.
Crescendo and decrescendo in small groups, when the conductor signals you.

9. like walking across a field
Recite the following phrases, together, in a calm spoken voice, when the conductor signals you.

to change the world
to watch
to be free
to do something
to be extraordinary
to solve the problem
to be young
to be seen
to find happiness
to fly
to be famous
to play
to disappear
to live longer
to fit in
to love
to live
to be liked
to belong
to be strong
to be heard
to be understood
to accept
to never be forgotten

10.
Don’t move or make a sound! Stay still until the conductor signals you.