Composer David Lang on Our Peculiar View of “Classical” Music and Creating for the Present Moment

We sat down with Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning composer David Lang to discuss how he thinks about classical music today.
“Classical music is a really good model for looking at some of the other problems that we have in the world that are larger than musical problems.”
Lang is one of America's most performed composers, with an extensive catalog that includes opera, orchestra, chamber, and solo works. In 2017, he composed “Symphony for a Broken Orchestra” for 400 musicians using broken instruments gathered from Philadelphia public schools, a project of Temple Contemporary funded by the Pew Center. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can.
Filmed on November 30, 2017.
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The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (the Center) is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and we engage in an ongoing exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders.