David Lang

And it was sort of like the situation I'm in now where I'm waiting a week during rehearsals for the performance to happen.

And I was walking around through the neighborhood and it turned out that this is the neighborhood where the football team Arsenal plays.

I'm not much of a sports person.

I don't think I'd ever seen a soccer match before, but there was a guy selling tickets out in front, you know, scalping tickets.

So I just bought a ticket.

I had nothing to do.

And there's 50 or 60,000 people watching this football game and they're all singing and they're singing these incredibly lewd songs.

They're so funny and there's noise the entire game.

Everyone was cooperating through music.

And because I wasn't really watching the match very much, I spent a lot of time thinking about what that actually means.

Coming from classical music, everything is very stratified.

So there are people who can do it and people who watch really good people do it, do it.

And here I was in this place where everyone was welcome.

No one was auditioned.

Nobody asked anything about their neighbors other than, do you love this team?

There's no political litmus test.

There was a litmus test, and the litmus test was, do you believe that this team should be victorious?

That was the only litmus test.

It wasn't, let me compare myself to my neighbor.

What is the religion of the person who is sitting in front of me?