Breathless
Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn
12 Minutes
About the Composer
Born in Los Angeles, CA in 1957, David Lang is one of America’s most prolific and innovative composers. Lang’s catalogue is extensive and includes works for opera, orchestra, small ensemble, film, and solo instruments. His works have been performed by landmark institutions such as the BBC Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, eighth blackbird, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Kronos Quartet, and Santa Fe Opera; and his music is used regularly for ballet and modern dance around the world by pioneering choreographers like Twyla Tharp. In 1987, while working on his DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts) at Yale University, Lang co-founded Bang on a Can, a New York based contemporary classical music collective, with fellow American composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. In 2008, the same year that he won the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion, Lang joined the music faculty at Yale University, where he currently teaches today. His work has been called, “hypnotic,” “unsettling,” and “very emotionally direct.” And it has been said that “even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.”
David LANG
About the Music
One such piece is without a doubt Lang’s 2003 wind quintet, Breathless. On Breathless Lang writes, “I was a horn player in high school and in college. Not a good horn player. I was mostly a trombonist but I switched to horn after breaking my arm playing sports and I stuck with it for a while after my arm healed. I remember being terrified playing in wind quintets - I would sit and wait for all the fluffy flute and oboe parts to build and then I would have to enter with something heroic, which I invariably wrecked. Mostly as a kind of rationalization I started thinking that there was a democracy problem in quintets, that my part was harder than the other parts, and that the musical responsibilities were not spread equally though the ensemble. When I got the commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society to write a piece for the excellent Galliard Ensemble all these memories and perceived injustices came back to me, and I vowed to make a more democratic quintet. I devised a plan for the piece that would require all the instruments to play all the time, and always play the same thing, each contributing a continuous flow of almost identical bits of information to a larger almost unison whole. For some strange, completely unmusical reason I am proud that each instrument plays just about the same number of notes. When I wrote it I was sure that my piece had a relationship to the amazing film of the same name by Jean-Luc Godard, but for the life of me I now don't remember what that was.”