David Lang

Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang is one of America’s most performed composers. Lang’s compositions have been performed by the Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Netherlands Chamber Choir, Boston Symphony, Munich Chamber Orchestra, and the Kronos Quartet; at Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, The Munich Biennale, Settembre Musica Festival, Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin and Strasbourg Festivals; in theatre productions in New York, San Francisco and London; alongside the choreography of Twyla Tharp, La La Human Steps, The Netherlands Dance Theater and the Paris Opera Ballet; and at Lincoln Center, the Southbank Centre, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican Centre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Rome Prize, the BMW Music-Theater Prize (Munich), and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, he received a Bessie Award for his music in choreographer Susan Marshall’s The Most Dangerous Room in the House, performed live by the Bang on a Can All-Stars at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Carbon Copy Building won the 2000 Village Voice OBIE Award for Best New American Work. The recording of The Passing Measures on Cantaloupe was named one of the best CDs of 2001 by The New Yorker. His CD Pierced was released in 2008 on Naxos. The Little Match Girl Passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Paul Hillier’s vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music. The CD of The Little Match Girl Passion was released in June 2009 on Harmonia Mundi. Other recent projects include Writing on Water for the London Sinfonietta, with libretto and visuals by English filmmaker Peter Greenway; The Difficulty of Crossing A Field, a fully staged opera for the Kronos Quartet; Loud Love Songs, a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie; and the oratorio Shelter, with co-composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, at the Next Wave Festival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, staged by Ridge Theater and featuring the Norwegian vocal ensemble Trio Mediaeval. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music festival Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca and Cantaloupe labels, among others.