Published: October 10th, 2014
David Lang is an American composer who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2008. Lang graduated from Stanford University and in 2008 he became a faculty member of the Yale School of Music. He’s earned a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and was named Composer of the Year in 2013 by Musical America.
Howl: How can musical notes or particular instruments, without lyrics, tell a story to the listeners and how do you, the musician, “tell” it?
Lang: We use language to say things that are specific. Who did what to whom? When and how? Language is very good for facts. But if a story is worth hearing it is because it makes you feel something, it is about how an emotion is created, and how that emotion changes. Music is not so good with facts, but it is great for emotions. That is the part of storytelling that music is good at.
Howl: Considering music is both a shared and personal experience, how do you, as a musician, best influence the effect you want the song to have on the listener or is it an entirely subjective experience?
Lang: I think the best way to get a message across to someone else is to be really honest about telling that message to yourself. Everyone’s experiences are different so you can’t know what people want to hear or how they will hear it, but if you can make something that is truly meaningful to you, chances are it will be meaningful to someone else too.
Howl: Songs can essentially be poetry set to music. So how do you see people’s appreciation of (or ever-shifting generational tastes in) music affecting the poetry being written and read in the 21st century and do you think poetry can help promote music?
Lang: Really great poetry doesn’t need music. The great poets are already getting a huge amount of meaning by controlling their rhythm, their flow, their ability to use words to project something deeper than words – the great poems don’t need music to help add these things. It might be more interesting to think of the things that good music can add to bad poetry – you can check out the song cycle “Die Schone Mullerin” (“The Pretty Mad of the Mill”) by the great 19th century composer Franz Schubert. It is a story about an assistant miller who falls in love with the head miller’s daughter, and when she won’t go out with him, he kills himself. Yuck. It is really bad poetry that needs really great music to make it deep, and that is exactly what Schubert gives it.
Howl: Just as a writer has to decide on what stories are worth telling, what characters are worth telling them, and how the story should be told, a composer must likewise decide on the story to be told, what instruments to tell it, and what composition is ideal. However, we are used to simply "telling" stories through words, either listened to or read. How do you tell a story through music? What is that process?
Lang: As with the answer to question one, music deals more with the emotions behind the story than with the story itself. A story can tell us the facts of what happened, but for a story to be good we have to care about it, we have to have a feeling about what happened. Music can't tell you exactly what happened but it can tell you how to feel about it. So the most important thing for a composer telling a story is to find something he or she really feels something about, cares deeply about.
Howl: Some writers stand out for their use of diction, their tangential storytelling techniques, their development of character, or devising of unforeseeable twist endings. In music, what particular skills are best honed for effective storytelling?
Lang: There is a lot of impressive storytelling going on in the soundtracks to movies. Try paying attention the next time you watch a movie to how the music tells you when to get scared, when to be happy, when to believe someone. Or try watching a scary movie with the sound off, and you will see just what music's special power really is.
Howl: With a book, the story comes from the words on the page. With music, you can have the lyrics, voice, specific instruments...the layers seem infinite. How do you put together a finite story with such infinite possible dimensions at your disposal?
Lang: Emotions are infinite. I am on a never-ending rollercoaster of super subtle emotions – all yelling at me at once. Completely happy but slightly nervous about something I have to do next week! Scared of the conversation I am going to have in 5 minutes, but I already know in 10 minutes it will all be over! When you think about it, music is a lot less limited than words.
Howl: Of all possible creative mediums, what drove you to music?
Lang: It was an accident - when I was 9 I saw a movie of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic and I thought it looked cool.
Howl: One might say that there are particular adjectives or adverbs that are ideal for conveying specific emotions. The cliche example of "it was a dark and stormy night" conveying an ominous introduction to some impending tragedy comes to mind. Are there particular instruments that you find are ideal for certain emotion
Lang: We get those cliches in music too. Mostly from film, where you get used to a certain kind of scary situation with a certain kind of sound, or a love theme coming in when two characters meet, to let us know that these characters will be falling in love. These are shorthand things that make it easier to know where we are. I actually don't like those things – the paradox is that when we have too strong associations between music and what we all know it means then we aren't really listening very carefully to the music anymore. I try to make music that people have to listen to very carefully.
Howl: What inspires you to begin a composition and how do you know when it is finished?
Lang: I really love music and I like to think about it all the time, and my favorite thing to think about is all the things that music can do that maybe no one has asked it to do yet. And then I want to do those things.
Howl: Music's subjectivity is one of its most alluring and personal traits. What do you "see" when you hear a particular piece?
Lang: Everyone hears music differently, which is great. If everyone heard everything the same way and liked the same things then we wouldn't need very much music, and I would be out of a job. But because everyone hears music differently it is really important for people to concentrate on what they like or need or want in music for themselves. For me, I love to sit and think about how I feel, and about my life and the lives of the people I love around me, and there isn't time enough, or quiet enough, to do this during my normal day. When I listen to music my mind can wander, and I can take the time to pay attention to my life.