{"id":2167048,"date":"2025-11-19T18:58:05","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T18:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2167048"},"modified":"2025-11-19T18:58:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T18:58:05","slug":"the-master-chorale-premieres-david-langs-before-and-after-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-master-chorale-premieres-david-langs-before-and-after-nature\/","title":{"rendered":"The Master Chorale premieres David Lang’s ‘before and after nature’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the midst of Bel\u00e9m\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cbefore and after nature,\u201d in its Los Angeles premiere Sunday night, took humanity out of the equation.<\/p>\n

Earth was here before proto-humans ventured onto land from the seas. Earth will outlast us.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cWhisper Opera\u201d) and plenty loud (writing for 120 guitars or 1,000 singers<\/a> 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 \u201cEating Living Monkeys.\u201d That didn\u2019t go over well.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. It questions everything. A recent hypnotic percussion piece of diced rhythms and pureed textures is called \u201cthe so-called laws of nature.\u201d Obsessive gathering has led to Lang\u2019s getting down to unadorned basics.<\/p>\n

With \u201cbefore and after nature,\u201d Lang follows up on the idea of nature\u2019s so-called laws, and with \u201cpoor hymnal\u201d (Lang also cuts back on capital letters), a choral work unveiled two years ago, he describes texts he\u2019s culled from old hymnals as \u201ca catalog of things a community of worshipers can agree on, a catalog that can be sung.\u201d 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, \u201cpoor hymnal\u201d gifts an unforgettable hour of kindness while becoming a moving manual for unpossessing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat remains when I am gone?\u201d begins the last section of \u201cpoor hymnal,\u201d carrying that question on to \u201cbefore and after nature,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cWe cannot even know its name.\u201d Samuel Beckett would be pleased.<\/p>\n

The score goes on for the next hour to allude to a surreal emptiness. Things that never were include: air never breathed, \u201cmountains never climbed\u201d and John Muir\u2019s sense of smallness in the presence of a mountain. \u201cI thought all this would last forever,\u201d is the only line of the fifth section. The world ends in the stasis of the seventh section, \u201csoft rains.\u201d And begins again without us.<\/p>\n

Lang\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s best-known work, \u201cLittle Match Girl,\u201d its sweepingly gorgeous score having won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.<\/p>\n

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Grant Gershon conducts the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Bang on a Can All-Stars<\/p>\n

(David Butow \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Yet \u201cbefore and after nature\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s just there, sort of like nature.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s ultimate suggestion of emptiness, in performance, entails erasing his own texts, his own purpose.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Lang, at least for now, requires all performances to use Rosner\u2019s 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 \u201cbefore nature and after nature,\u201d taken on its own musical and textural terms, does.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the midst of Bel\u00e9m\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2167049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2167048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/The-Master-Chorale-premieres-David-Langs-before-and-after-nature.com2Fbe2F3d2Fd21df63a4b77a28466cab277.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2167048"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2167050,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2167048\/revisions\/2167050"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2167049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2167048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2167048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2167048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}