Maya Beiser and David Lang will release a new album, the day, on January 26, 2018 on Cantaloupe Music. The album features Lang's new work for Maya, the day, paired with a new recording of his previous work for her, world to come. the day (2016) was composed as prequel to world to come (2003). Where world to come chronicles the journey of the soul after life, the day chronicles an individual's time on earth preceding that journey. Lang's world to come was written for Maya in response to the events of September 11 at the World Trade Center (which shares the initials of the title of the piece, WTC). The two works are meditations on two journeys: the day on the mortal journey, and world to come on the eternal, post-mortal journey of the soul that follows.
Watch Maya Beiser perform David Lang's world to come: http://bit.ly/MayaBeiserWTCVideo
Beiser and Lang were in New York City, and had just begun working on their collaboration for a large multitrack cello piece, when the horrific events of
September 11, 2001 occurred. In world to come, Maya's cello and her voice become separated from each other, and they struggle to reunite in a post-apocalyptic spiritual environment. world to come is a kind of prayer - introspective and highly personal. It is a meditation on hope and hopelessness, asking fundamental questions about the death and life of the soul.
Fifteen years later, Beiser asked Lang to create a "prequel" to world to come. In the day, they wanted to start earlier in the journey, exploring the ways we might review our lives, as they are running away from us. Lang wondered what we might discover if we cataloged the moments in our lives that we remember best, that seem like highlights in our memory of them. He imagined asking 300 very different people the question, "What was the most important day in your life?"
Lang says, "I wanted the act of remembering to be as widespread as possible so I went to the Internet and searched the phrase 'I remember the day that I . . .' Every phrase that followed was a personal statement from someone, somewhere, about a moment that was so significant it felt worth holding onto. I hoped that assembling them together, into a single narrative, would help us feel the weight of a life, as it is being lived." In the day, the text is arranged like a prism, with many conflicting facets of each action described and recounted from different vantage points. Renowned actor and founding member of The
Wooster Group Kate Valk's recording of the text is incorporated with the music, creating a rhythm that becomes the heartbeat beneath Maya's emotionally charged performance.
Beiser says, "9/11 to me, with the images of the people falling from the burning towers forever frozen in my memory, invoked visions of the body falling down while the soul is floating up. David and I worked on world to come as a way to slowly weave the separating mortal and post-mortal existence. But the other journey, life, was missing as a prelude to the eternal journey of the soul. the day, written later but coming first, is the complement: David's beautiful meditation on life - the brief union of our soul and body on earth - moving inexorably toward the final valediction, one day at a time."
"The presence of [Beiser's] vocal sonorities, intermittent but judged with canny precision, adds a fully human flavor to the texture," reported the San Francisco Chronicle of the premiere of the day. "Beiser's robust string tone and edgy rhythmic command made the piece sound all the more dynamic in its effect."
About Maya Beiser: Cellist Maya Beiser defies categories. Passionately forging a career path through uncharted territories, she has captivated audiences worldwide with her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire, and relentless quest to redefine her instrument's boundaries. The Boston Globe declares, "With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello," while Rolling Stone calls her a "cello rock star."
Maya has dedicated her work to reinventing solo cello performance in the mainstream classical arena. A featured performer on the world's most prestigious stages including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall,
Kennedy Center, London's South Bank Centre, Sydney Opera House, Beijing Festival, Big Ears festival, and the Barbican's Sound Unbound, she has collaborated with a wide range of artists across many disciplines, including Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Shirin Neshat, Steve Reich, David Lang, Tan Dun, Robert Woodruff, Bill Morrison, Evan Ziporyn and Osvaldo Golijov, among many others. Recent highlights include featured solo performances as part of the Barbican's Sound Unbound and Kings Place's Cello Unwrapped festivals in London, the Cello Biennale in
Amsterdam and Strings for Autumn Festival in Prague; two new cello concerti premieres, Mohammed Fairouz's cello concerto with the Detroit
Symphony and Mark Anthony Turnage's cello concerto with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra; and premiere performances with the Boston Ambient Orchestra and the
Barcelona Symphony Orchestra of Blackstar, a collaboration with Evan Ziporyn, re-imagining David Bowie's complete final album as a cello concerto. Upcoming highlights include Spinning, a new production collaboration with composer Julia Wolfe and visual artist Laurie Olinder; the day, a music-dance collaboration with
Wendy Whelan and David Lang; and performances at 2018 BBC Proms and Edinburgh Festivals.
Maya's vast discography includes ten solo albums and many studio recordings and film music collaborations. Her last album, TranceClassical, released July 2016, debuted at No. 1 on the Apple Music classical chart. Her 2010 album Provenance topped the classical and world music charts on both Amazon and iTunes, and her album Time Loops was selected among NPR's top 10 recordings of 2012. Her album Uncovered, a collection of re-imagined and re-contextualized classic rock masterpieces, made the top 10 on the Billboard Classical Chart. Maya Beiser is a 2015 United States Artists (USA) Distinguished Fellow in Music and a 2017 Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. She was a featured performer at the inaugural CultureSummit 2017 in Abu Dhabi. Invited to present at the prestigious TED main stage in Long Beach, CA, Maya's 2011 TED Talk has been watched by over one million people and translated to 32 languages. In 2013, she was a featured guest alongside such luminaries as Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovi?, and Isabella Rossellini at ICASTICA, a festival celebrating women working in artistic fields in Arezzo, Italy. Maya is a graduate of Yale University and was a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
About David Lang: David Lang is one of the most highly esteemed and performed American composers writing today. His works have been performed around the world in most of the great concert halls. The New Yorker reports, "With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master."
Lang's simple song #3, written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino's acclaimed film Youth, received many honors in 2016, including Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Critics Choice nominations, among others. His the little match girl passion won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Commissioned by
Carnegie Hall and based on a fable by Hans Christian Andersen and Lang's own rewriting of the libretto to Bach's St.
Matthew Passion, the recording of the piece was awarded a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. Lang has also been the recipient of the Rome Prize, Le Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and Musical America's 2013 Composer of the Year. Lang's tenure as Carnegie Hall's 2013-2014 Richard and
Barbara Debs Composer's Chair saw his critically acclaimed festival collected stories showcase different modes of storytelling in music.
Recent premieres include his opera the loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and for which Lang served as composer, librettist and stage director, the public domain for 1000 singers at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, his chamber opera anatomy theater at Los
Angeles Opera and at the Prototype Festival in New York, and the concerto man made for the ensemble
So Percussion and a consortium of orchestras, including the BBC
Symphony and the Los
Angeles Philharmonic.
In addition to his work as a composer, Lang is Artist in Residence at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and is a Professor of Composition at the Yale School of Music. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His music is published by Red Poppy Music (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by G. Schirmer, Inc.
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