From the Composer: David Lang

By David Lang

I am really happy that my piece Illumination Rounds is getting done with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.  It is a really important piece for me, and I still think about it a lot even now, thirty years after I wrote it.  (And not necessarily for the most complimentary of reasons.)

The piece was a commission from a friend of mine, the violinist Leslie Shank, who at the time was a graduate student at Juilliard and who is now assistant concertmaster at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.  Leslie had won a competition that gave her a debut recital at Weill Hall in the Carnegie Hall complex, and she wanted me to write a piece for her to premiere there, with her pianist friend Jon Kimura Parker.  I knew they were both amazing and could play anything, and my first impulse wasn't musical but more technological - I thought how great it would be to write a really hard piece for them, so that they could show off what they could do.  That I got so interested in going this direction scared me a little.  I was so quick to forget what music does and sounds like, in order to concentrate just on how music could be flashy and impressive.  I started looking around for other stories or experiences or instances around me that also required someone to pay so much attention to a technological situation that an artistic or moral situation might be overlooked.  What I came up with was how new weapons were designed for use in the war in Vietnam.  (I know this sounds so long ago - it is hard to remember that my piece was written only 5 years after the fall of Saigon.  That is how old it is!)

I remembered reading (in Scientific American?) about the problem of using helicopters to fight at night.  A helicopter would go out into the jungle darkness and the gunners wouldn't be able to see enough to aim their machine guns.  How could this problem be solved?  A team of brilliant designers invented a type of bullet that would leave a phosphorescent vapor trail hovering in the air behind it - the bullets themselves would still be invisible in the darkness but the trail of where they had gone would light up behind them, gravity pulling it down in a slow, incandescent arc.  They called these bullets "illumination rounds."  I loved that there were two entities married together in this image - the bullet and its shadow - and that I could use them as a model for how a violin could relate to a piano.  But most of all I loved that it was a story about smart, creative people coming together to solve a problem, shutting out of their minds that problem's potential moral or spiritual implications; somehow this reminded me of my original impulse to write the piece.

The piece was so hard and so flashy, and Leslie and Jackie played it so well, that it was a big hit, and I was immediately inundated with offers of work, much of it from successful musicians asking me to write pieces for them that were exactly the same as the one I had just written, but for their instruments.  And I have to say that this flipped me out.  Because the subject of the piece was about how focusing on the technological kept one from paying attention to the moral, I began to think that I had done something really wrong.  Had I done the same thing myself?  After a while I started questioning whether the piece was popular because I wanted to create a certain musical experience that people ended up liking, or because I wanted to make people like something and I didn't care what it was.  Was it flashy because the music I wanted to write required virtuosity or was it flashy because I wanted people to like me?  I couldn't tell any longer which was which and I began to doubt my own honesty in writing the piece.  After Illumination Rounds I put in place a whole range of mechanisms, so that I could protect myself from ever being able to question my own honesty again.  And I have spent my composition time living with and exploring those mechanisms ever since.

I have to say, though, I still like the piece!

--
Roy Malan and Julie Steinberg will perform
Illumination Rounds on November 14.
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