Professor David Lang

The Williams College Department presents composer David Lang giving a lecture titled The Secret History of the little match girl passion on Tuesday, April 14, at 4:15 p.m. in Room 30 of Bernhard Music Center on the Williams College campus. This lecture is free and open to the public.

David Lang will discuss the genesis of “the little match girl passion,” a Pulitzer Prize winning work that he composed in Williamstown, and its connection to Williams College.

“the little match girl passion” was commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Paul Hillier’s vocal ensemble Theater of Voices and awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music. Of the piece, Pulitzer-juror and Washington Post columnist Tim Page said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so moved by a new, and largely unheralded, composition as I was by David Lang’s ‘the little match girl passion,’ which is unlike any music I know.”

About David Lang
Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is deeply versed in the classical tradition and at the same time committed to creating new forms that resist categorization. In the words of The New Yorker, “Lang, once a post-minimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, Musical America’s 2013 Composer of the Year, and recipient of Carnegie Hall’s Debs Composer’s Chair for 2013-2014. He is Professor of Composition at the Yale School of Music.

This event is sponsored by the Class of 1960 Scholars Fund, which was established to bring eminent researchers from other colleges and universities to campus to give colloquia and work with students in the classroom.