David Lang

You write something down and you look at it, you go, well, that's flutie or that's oboe or whatever.

And you imagine.

Come on, that can't be real.

No, that's exactly what it is.

I mean, look, you work with words all the time.

You type the word blue on a keyboard.

You don't have to imagine for yourself what are the amazing shades of blue and how much experience do I have with blue and what does blueness mean?

That's just a hopeless affectation that I started in graduate school.

The true story is this.

We only study the music of great composers from the past, right?

And it's very humbling to be 19 or 20 years old and to think here are pieces which are about human beings and life and death.

And it becomes very oppressive to think that you don't know how to write music yet, but your pieces are supposed to fit into this tradition.

So one day I just wrote a piece of mine in a lowercase title and it seemed like a joke and it seemed like all the pressure was off.

Like no one would think that my piece was about war and peace if the title was in lowercase, right?

And so then I felt like, okay, I'm not held to a higher standard and I can write the music.

How do you feel about the phrase classical music?

I don't really like it.

I don't really like it.

I really think it's just music.

And I think when you say that you write music and I say that I write music, I actually think we're doing the same thing, even though the commercial separation of those things puts them in different places or different radio stations or different parts of the internet.