Imagine Change

David Lang is one of the most important composers of contemporary music. In his latest work, before and after nature, presented at this year's Ruhrtriennale, he focuses on nature without placing humans at the centre of attention.  In conversation, he explains that we lack the language to describe this.

Anna Chernomordik: How can you as a human think about nature without taking your human worldview into account?

David Lang: That was the very question I began with: Is it possible to imagine our relationship to nature, from nature’s perspective? Very quickly I realized – we can’t. When I had that idea, I could keep my piece from being about climate change or about politics or about deciding who’s “evil” in the world or about how doomed we are. It could be an opportunity to explore how we don’t have a way of talking about the world around us without putting ourselves in it.

One of the things I love about composing is that my pieces become little laboratories. Alone in my studio, I can test the questions I’m curious about. Once I had this idea, I understood that the piece wasn’t going to be about climate change, politics, or moral judgment. It was going to be about how our worldview makes certain, important things in nature hard for us to see.

AC: So your piece is about the limits of our imagination?

DL: The piece became less about the world itself and more about my frustration in trying to comprehend it. I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent, and capable of understanding things, if I work hard enough. But here I hit a wall. That limitation is not just mine – it’s ours. It shows how difficult it is for humanity to truly see beyond ourselves.

AC: How did you put these complex thoughts into music?

DL: I was looking at examples of how our interpretation of nature is irreparably colored by the fact that we’re also in the picture. Every movement of the piece is an example of that kind of flaw or paradox. In the first movement, before us, I turned to more than fifty creation myths from around the world. They all try to describe the universe before humans, but it’s only possible for them to describe this time through negation: You know what light is? There’s no light! You know what darkness is? There’s no darkness! These cultural stories try to describe the creation of the universe by using language to make paradoxes, so that we can feel we are in a place of mystery. Because we can't know what's there. And some of those juxtapositions are really interesting. One of them talks about the smell of light. How can you possibly imagine what that is? But that puts you in a mindset to think that there's a world that exists that we can't really know. So almost every phrase in the first movement starts with the word “no”. The second movement is my attempt to write such a myth myself. For me it’s the clearest expression of the problem: I cannot imagine the world without imagining myself in it.

AC: Music itself is sensory. What happens when you try to negate that? 

DL: Music has a huge amount of power to get you to think and feel and do things you may not want to think or feel or do. It's very good for propaganda and it's very good for making you cry in the movies. I want to create experiences that talk to me the way I want to be talked to. I don't want to have anyone tell me what to think. And I don't want to have anyone make me cry against my will or to be put in a situation where I am told exactly what I am supposed to feel.  I always think the perfect reaction to a piece of mine is that someone wakes up in the middle of the night, weeks later, and goes: “That piece was fantastic, and now I understand it.” Or wakes up and says: “I get it now, and I totally disagree.” 

AC: In the third movement you refer to John Muir. Why did he inspire you? 

DL: I’m from California, and so one of the foundational people from California history is the naturalist John Muir, who was one of the first white European-descended explorers of California. He described many beautiful places for the first time, and he became a hugely important person in American history. There’s a very famous description of Yosemite National Park that I remember reading when I was 17 years old. And one thing that was interesting to me now, after rereading it, was that he has no way of describing how beautiful Yosemite is without putting Christianity in the middle of it. He goes to this totally unspoiled, magnificent, awe-inspiring place. And the only tool that he has to explain this to himself is Jesus. 

AC: I was wondering where this religious emphasis is coming from. 

DL: It’s like we can’t understand the nature for itself. That paradox fascinated me.  And religion and nature have always gone hand in hand – an example is the fourth movement, inspired by the religious meaning of the obelisk shape. An obelisk is a ray of sunlight made physical, as a way for ancient Egyptians to worship something that is intangible. We have to reduce something to our level, so we can see and touch and feel it, in order for us to worship it. To me this showed how humans reduce nature to our own scale, in order to comprehend it. We can’t experience it as it truly is. 

AC: Where does the idea of “last forever” come in?

DL: That was the first movement I wrote. I thought: why is it so difficult for us to imagine change, or a world without us? Partly because of the limitations I was already exploring, but also because we can be lazy and comfortable. The world premiere of this piece was in California, and we did the rehearsals in Los Angeles during the devastating fires. The fires were still actually blazing through neighborhoods and people who came to the dress rehearsal in Los Angeles were weeping because their houses had burned down. As people, we have an incredible sense of inertia. The way we have done things in the past is the way we will continue to do them in the future. It’s not just about imagining ourselves in nature, imagining nature changing, but it’s hard for us to imagine living differently, in any way, tomorrow.

AC: In the sixth movement you refer to John F. Kennedy.

DL: John F. Kennedy was the president when I was very small. I think one of the first things that I remember as a boy was his assassination and his funeral. It made a huge impact on me. I found a beautiful quote of his about the ocean. He spoke poetically about our oneness with it, how it flows through our blood. But he gave this speech to open a yacht race for the rich. And to me, this was like the John Muir moment: Here is the opportunity for us to have a meaningful, breakthrough insight about our lives, but we are too captured by money in the world we live in to see it. That’s a limitation too. 

The last movement reflects the most selfish perspective: “When I die, the world ends.” Every night when I go to sleep, the world ends for me; every morning when I wake up, it begins again. One night I won’t wake up, and the world will continue without me.  How should I care about what happens then?
That movement comes partly from my own experience as a cancer survivor. It asks: what is our responsibility to the world after we are gone? I didn’t want to end the piece in despair, and I didn’t want to claim I had an answer. So the music closes in a calm, peaceful, even hopeful way.

AC: Was there a moment when the present caught up with you after all?

DL: This piece came out of years of reading all sorts of books about how people are supposed to deal with climate change.  The Silent Spring, The End of Nature, etc. Ultimately, they are all political books, because they're all about how to see and organize our society or how to pull our society apart. One of the books that inspired me for this piece was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. It’s about climate disaster but ends with solutions and hope. That shocked me. I’m used to dystopian endings, so the idea of a positive resolution was challenging. It made me ask: why do I assume the worst? Why is it so hard to imagine optimism? Though I’m not trying to be political, the backdrop is unavoidable.

AC: Why did you decide to use the human voice, the most human of the instruments, to portray this piece?

DL: Using the voice was actually the core paradox of this piece, because if you’re imagining a world without people, there should not be people singing!  But if the limitation is that we, as people, are observing the world, then people need to be on stage, observing. One thing that’s really powerful about the voice is that the choir becomes our stand-in.  They speak for us.  Or rather, they sing for us.
I wrote the texts myself because I wanted the words to be meaningful themselves, not just sounds or syllables. Once text exists, it guides the instruments: it tells them how to support the meaning, how to underline the subject. In that sense, when I compose with words, I become the reader of the text, using music to illuminate it.

AC: What was it like to write for the Bang on a Can All-Stars?

DL: It felt like home. I co-founded Bang on a Can nearly forty years ago, and the All-Stars have been around for most of that time. I know their sound and trust their flexibility.

The band members all come from different musical worlds – classical, jazz, rock, improvisation – and that makes them incredibly free to work with. Writing for them is comfortable and inspiring, because they were chosen to be themselves, not to fit a traditional mold.

AC: You collaborated with Tal Rosner for the visuals. How did that work?

DL: My philosophy is to work with people I respect, explain my ideas, and then give them freedom. Tal responded with visuals that were sometimes narrative, sometimes abstract, sometimes mathematical. It was a dream collaboration and a genuine dialogue, rather than me dictating to another artist exactly what to do.

AC: After all this exploration, what’s your outlook?

DL: Change is really hard. But ultimately, I’m an optimist about everything, even if that’s stupid. I really believe we will solve our problems. Creative work itself is an act of optimism: adding something to the world that wasn’t there before, believing it might be useful to someone. Pessimism doesn’t solve problems.  Composing is always utopian – you imagine that the world could be a better place, if only it had this new music in it.