In the midst of Belém’s COP30 bedlam, environmentalists, economists, lobbyists and diplomats busily haggle at the global climate conference about what we can and cannot get away with in negotiations over Mother Nature.
Meanwhile, 5,000 miles away from northern Brazil at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Los Angeles Master Chorale presented a novel argument. Rather than encouraging the COP-ers to enforce the right thing, David Lang’s “before and after nature,” in its Los Angeles premiere Sunday night, took humanity out of the equation.
Earth was here before proto-humans ventured onto land from the seas. Earth will outlast us.
A founder in 1987 of Bang on a Can, which presents indispensable annual marathons of whatever composers come up with these days, Lang has an extensive range of works. He can be ultra-quiet (the barely audible “Whisper Opera”) and plenty loud (writing for 120 guitars or 1,000 singers at a British soccer match). He was once outrageous, channeling Jimi Hendrix to Charles Ives, Steve Reich to Hans Werner Henze. He titled an early orchestral piece for the Cleveland Orchestra “Eating Living Monkeys.” That didn’t go over well.
Yet through a remarkable process of musical transformation, Lang has become a purifier, his music increasingly having turned cool, clean, eloquent, elemental. It sings of essences. It questions everything. A recent hypnotic percussion piece of diced rhythms and pureed textures is called “the so-called laws of nature.” Obsessive gathering has led to Lang’s getting down to unadorned basics.
With “before and after nature,” Lang follows up on the idea of nature’s so-called laws, and with “poor hymnal” (Lang also cuts back on capital letters), a choral work unveiled two years ago, he describes texts he’s culled from old hymnals as “a catalog of things a community of worshipers can agree on, a catalog that can be sung.” The ask is for us to open our hands, hearts and ears to the poor, the hungry, the stranger. With vocal writing of sublime, deceptive simplicity, “poor hymnal” gifts an unforgettable hour of kindness while becoming a moving manual for unpossessing.
“What remains when I am gone?” begins the last section of “poor hymnal,” carrying that question on to “before and after nature,” which is written for 20 singers and Bang on a Can All-Stars. The nature he describes is no nature at all, the very concept of nature being, Lang notes, a human construct.
What was there before us? For that, Lang turned to 50 creation myths (Lang also likes round numbers). What he harvested in his text is 75 lines (most two or three words) of erasures. No height, no depth. No things that wax, no things that wane. No being or not being. And a final: “We cannot even know its name.” Samuel Beckett would be pleased.
The score goes on for the next hour to allude to a surreal emptiness. Things that never were include: air never breathed, “mountains never climbed” and John Muir’s sense of smallness in the presence of a mountain. “I thought all this would last forever,” is the only line of the fifth section. The world ends in the stasis of the seventh section, “soft rains.” And begins again without us.
Lang’s spare musical style of friendly persuasion obviously suits his beautiful text. The initial idea came from a commission by Stanford Live, the composer being a Stanford grad. Looking around the campus, he was drawn to the newly established Doerr School of Sustainability, and he has said that what he found was that scientists, writers and artists were already well equipped to present evidence, descriptions and visualization of environmental relevance. But music offered something less tangible, more attuned to what the world feels like.
A list of commissioners grew like plants after a rainstorm, the Master Chorale being one, along with several Southern California new music patrons. Lang has had a fruitful relationship with the chorus and its music director, Grant Gershon, that has led to new work and a wondrous recording of Lang’s best-known work, “Little Match Girl,” its sweepingly gorgeous score having won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
Grant Gershon conducts the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Bang on a Can All-Stars
(David Butow / For The Times)
Yet “before and after nature” is not what text and thought might anticipate. It is not consistantly spare and not specific. It is a collaboration with video artist Tal Rosner and performed in a darkened hall with two large vertical screens above the chorus. Rosner’s imagery is abstract and often looks like the computer graphics you might choose for a screen saver, but better, brilliantly colored and alive. Still, it’s just there, sort of like nature.
Lang also insists upon amplification, which can or cannot enhance the intelligibility of text. The choice in this instance was cannot. There were no titles. Lang’s ultimate suggestion of emptiness, in performance, entails erasing his own texts, his own purpose.
The All-Stars do their brash, spectacular thing, and a lot of that is wailing away, although they could also be mysterious. The Master Chorale sang with beauty in mind. Lang beguiled with common chords that no longer sounded common, with standard rhythms that intertwined, went on and off the beat, creating arrhythmia delight. There is a sparkle to just about everything Lang touches. He is especially winning when he barely skirts the sentimental or ill-mannered.
Lang, at least for now, requires all performances to use Rosner’s videos. Take it or leave it. Even so, Gershon and the Master Chorale went into the studio the day before the performance to make a recording. COP30 may not give us a lot to look forward to. A recording of “before nature and after nature,” taken on its own musical and textural terms, does.
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