"I write a lot of choral music, but it’s not something I ever intended to do—it sort of happened by accident,” composer David Lang says, somewhat surprisingly. After all, Lang has already won a Pulitzer Prize in Music, in 2008, for his choral work the little match girl passion. And his unique, 1,000-voice choral piece, the public domain, had its world premiere outdoors on Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza during the 2016 Mostly Mozart Festival.
Then there’s Lang’s latest choral work, poor hymnal, which will be performed at Alice Tully Hall on December 21. It reunites him with the chamber choir The Crossing and its director, Donald Nally, for both of whom Lang wrote it; they also premiered it last December in Philadelphia, the ninth time Lang has worked with the choir and its director. “I knew when I wrote this piece that it’s the kind of subject that (Nally) and the choir are interested in,” he explains. “When they commissioned it from me, I knew they were the perfect group for it."
Despite his initial reluctance to compose it, choral music has always had its attractions. “One of the things I really love about it is the real strong sense of community among people who sing in choirs,” Lang admits. “Choral music is so useful in religious settings, political settings or sports settings, in communities where people come together.”
The genesis of poor hymnal came from Lang’s collection of old church hymnals, which he considers “a catalog of what the members of a religious community believes. The people band together and say they all believe in the same thing, and here (in the hymnal) are songs to remind us of what we share.” That led to his imagining a religion with a specific calling.
“I thought about a religion whose whole point would be for the people to pay attention to all of the charity aspects: kindness to the stranger; caring for the sick; and how, when someone needs you, you should be there,” Lang notes, explaining this “new” religion’s central tenet: “I want to believe that I’m capable of doing good deeds, so I wonder why am I not doing good deeds all day long. As a society, why aren’t we doing good deeds all the time?”
It follows that this religion “would also need its own hymns, and its own hymn books,” the composer says. “I based the hymns in poor hymnal on real hymns that I know from my own religion as well as others, along with famous statements from famous people.” One example is the third movement, titled ‘our hearts tell us.’ “There’s a line from psalm 27 and a quote from Gandhi that I smashed together,” Lang explains. “The psalm line is ‘God, show us your face.’ Then there’s my paraphrase of Gandhi’s quote: ‘some of us are hungry/so hungry that/some of us can’t see your face/unless we see it in a piece of bread.’ It becomes my obligation to make sure people have enough to eat so they see God’s face.”
Lang sees important links between poor hymnal and the little match girl passion, especially in how they prompt thoughts about how truly moral people should act toward others: “When I did little match girl, I was thinking, ‘I live in New York City, I see homeless people every day on my street—sometimes I’m helpful and sometimes I’m not. Why am I not helpful all the time? What does it mean to pay attention?’” He continues, “One point of religion is to build a structure in your life where you can notice others’ suffering, which then becomes important to you. But we live in a time where we are not paying enough attention to those around us.”
In the end, Lang hopes that his works deeply touch those who experience them. “The little match girl was a miserable and depressing story—people like it, but I always feel guilty that they’re crying at the end—yet poor hymnal is more positive,” he says. “It reinforces in us the sense that we have the power to be kinder to each other. I feel the strength from that at the end of the piece. If the little match girl is about seeing the suffering of someone else, poor hymnal is about actually doing something about others’ suffering.”
