David Lang / George Crumb

My piece daisy was commissioned specifically to be premiered on a programme with George Crumb’s Black Angels. I wasn’t asked to compose a new piece that would react to Black Angels but I couldn’t help but think about it. One thing that is almost always mentioned when people discuss Black Angels is that it was written during the Vietnam War, when the then US President, Lyndon Baines Johnson was responsible for the massive escalation of America’s presence in Vietnam. Which was a little ironic, since Johnson promised not to destroy the world in his political advertisement that featured an innocent young girl plucking the petals off a flower, who is then interrupted by the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. The name of the advertisement was Daisy.
daisy remembers this moment in American history, and it proposes two different futures for the innocent. The opening movement – first daisy – begins in a gentle openness that then becomes relentlessly overwhelmed. The concluding movement – second daisy – imagines what might happen if that gentle and open spirit could be believed, and valued, and supported, and preserved.

David Lang

Black Angels. Thirteen Images from the Dark Land was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The underlying structure is a huge arch-like design which is suspended from the three threnody pieces. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption). The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. An important pitch element in the work – ascending D-sharp, A, and E – also symbolises the fateful numbers 7-13. At certain points in the score there occurs a kind of ritualistic counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swahili. There are also several allusions to tonal music. The performers also play maracas, tam-tams, and water-tuned crystal glasses, the latter played with the bow for the glass-harmonica effect in God-music. The score is inscribed: “finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March, 1970 (in tempore belli)”.

George Crumb