David Lang

I feel surreal.

I am nourished by the pure spring.

So there's a range of feelings, some of them positive, some of them negative.

One thing I really like about classical music is it has to get rehearsed.

That's when you build a community of people who work with each other, who depend on each other.

So I wanted this to be a project which was easy enough so that ordinary community members could do it, but hard enough so that they would have to rehearse a few times.

They would meet their neighbors.

They would end up learning how to depend on each other.

And I really felt like that was the democracy-building part of this piece.

I wanted to make people feel the emotional weight of international trade, if that's possible.

That, again, is the composer David Lang.

I mean, everybody deals with money and everyone has a totally messed up relationship with how money changes hands and how it lives in their lives.

It's an emotional issue, right?

How we deal with our neighbors is an emotional issue.

How we deal with our community and what we think of the people around us turns out to be hugely important to our ideas of the world we want to live in.

And that's kind of what the piece is about.

One of my favorite sections is where Adam Smith talks about all the labor issues

internationally, which is necessary in order to create the woolen coat of the poorest worker, which is really beautiful.

So I set this to music because imagine the poorest laborer and the wool coat that that laborer wears.

The sheep had to be sheared and the shears were smelted.