Chapter 1: What inspired David Lang to create an oratorio based on The Wealth of Nations?
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We recently made a three-part series about an almost 300-year-old oratorio that still has a grip on a lot of people today, Handel's Messiah. During our reporting, we spent some time with the New York Philharmonic as they rehearsed and performed Messiah. One day, our producer Zach Lipinski heard about a future Philharmonic oratorio called The Wealth of Nations.
You may recognize that title. It is a book published in 1776 by the Scotsman Adam Smith, who is widely seen as the father of modern economics. And some people consider The Wealth of Nations a sacred text of capitalism. This new Wealth of Nations oratorio was apparently inspired by Messiah, a musical story using artfully rearranged text from historical sources. Here is the weird thing.
We once made a three-part series about Adam Smith, too. So hearing about an Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Messiah mashup felt like one of those moments where your AI feeds you something a little too spot on. This would be a world premiere conducted by the Venezuelan-born superstar Gustavo Dudamel, and the composer was named David Lang. Maybe you have heard of David Lang, but I hadn't.
So I asked my home pod to play some David Lang.
Chapter 2: How does David Lang describe his experience with Adam Smith's text?
And here's what came out.
This is a piece called Just.
The lyrics are drawn from Song of Songs, a book of love poems in the Hebrew Bible. This music mesmerized me. I wanted to know more about the person who could write something like that. Turns out that David Lang in the small world of contemporary classical music is a big deal. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy. He teaches composition at Yale.
I found an online lecture where Lang was talking about his composing career. He was so interesting and disarming and well-read that I immediately wanted to hear this new Wealth of Nations, but it didn't exist yet. So I decided to follow the process as Lang finished writing the piece and as it made its way to the New York Philharmonic.
Today on Freakonomics Radio, David Lang explains why he felt compelled to set Wealth of Nations to music.
There's so much of literature that we love, and it all ends up being people and money problems. But it isn't only the problems he was interested in. I think The Wealth of Nations is Adam Smith's idea about how everyone in the world gets along. And we hear how all that becomes musical.
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Chapter 3: What unique connections does Lang draw between economics and music?
The real myself
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. By the time I first spoke with David Lang, he had finished writing Wealth of Nations, the score had been distributed, and rehearsals would start soon.
I really have nothing to do. It's really the shockingly most empty period of my life. I'm just sitting around nervous because I go up and down thinking that I did something that I'm really proud of. And I'm also unaware of all of the titanic errors that I may have made that I will only have five minutes to fix. Let's step back for a minute. How did this piece come to be commissioned?
This piece actually started with another piece. I did a project called Prisoner of the State for the New York Philharmonic, where I rewrote Beethoven's opera Fidelio. I took out the love story and all the comic elements, and I just left the prison story. It was really fun, and it was a really successful project, which they really liked. So, of course, I went in and I said...
I really am happy that you like this project. And you know, I have another project to make a piece out of The Wealth of Nations. Had you already read the book? I wasn't going to read the book unless I had a gig to read the book. It's a long book. It's a long book. And it's, you know, 18th century language. The language is very hard. And there's a lot of stuff that I
wouldn't have read if I wasn't reading it for purpose. So what was the experience reading it for you then, once you had a purpose?
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Chapter 4: Why does Lang believe music can express complex economic ideas?
Then it was really exciting because I started trying to figure out what the themes were that resonated with me. One of the original ideas was that I would compare this to Handel's Messiah because mine is an oratorio about a serious book as a popular entertainment for a general audience, which the Messiah is as well.
And so my first reading of The Wealth of Nations was reading for every incidence I could find of sheep because sheep play a prominent role in the Messiah. And I thought, okay, I'm going to make a joke out of the connection to sheep. And of course, being from Scotland, there are a lot of sheep used in examples in The Wealth of Nations. There's the woolen coat. The woolen coat.
Eventually, those sheep ideas fell by the wayside and the jokes ended up getting edited out of this piece. But that was the original idea. I was reading for, like, what's the thread that I'm going to be able to pull through this book?
And how would you identify the themes as they ultimately emerged?
At first, I thought I was going to be dealing with the factory images, the division of labor, creation of wealth. And then I just realized maybe that wasn't as interesting as the idea that trade connects us and that money itself doesn't really have any value, but money exists as a kind of token that goes from person to person as we are connected through trade.
Money doesn't really represent anything by itself, but it represents the amount of labor that we put into doing something. And to me, that was much more interesting and much more provocative.
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Chapter 5: How does Lang's background influence his approach to composition?
What is money?
OK, I'm going to cheat a little bit here. Like I said, this conversation happened before Lange's Wealth of Nations had even gone into rehearsals. So it was a bit like Schrodinger's cat. It existed and also didn't exist.
And that's why I'm going to cheat and play you some of the recording from later when it was performed by the New York Philharmonic, because it's fun to hear in the music the ideas that David Lange is talking about. This recording is from a movement called What Is Money?
Once you start with this idea that I'm connected to people, then the next question is, well, how far does that connection work? If I love my neighbor, well, who's my neighbor? How big is my neighborhood?
One thing that's always struck me as paradoxical is that so many people have come to see money and economics as leaning toward the inhumane. Whereas I think of money as an invention, as a social construct. I think of it as probably the greatest social lubricant that's ever been invented. If you compare it to the alternative, what would that be?
It's either physical goods or maybe just beating people up when you want something. I'm curious whether reading Wealth of Nations and then writing the Wealth of Nations oratorio changed the way you think about money and economics generally?
I'm not sure that I got changed by anything that I read because I read it with a particular eye from the beginning. I'm not that interested in money, to be honest. I mean, are you interested in having some? Well, that's an interesting question. I'm interested in having enough. And then that question of how much is enough is different for everybody else.
Everyone may have a different level of risk that they want to have in their lives, or everyone may want to have a different amount that they feel is necessary in order to show off or to feel that they're better than someone else or whatever. I don't really know what the right amount is.
I grew up in a family without money, and my mom had this old saying, I don't know where she got it from, which is, enough is as good as a feast. And that's always informed the way I think about money, but everybody's got their own relationship to it. As you noted, money is one of those things that people have very odd relationships to.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Lang face as a contemporary composer?
I had a performance when I was 27 or whatever with the Cleveland Orchestra and my mother in tears after the performance leaned down and I thought, I'm finally going to get the approval that I've always wanted. And instead she said, there's still time to go to medical school. How did you feel about that? I told my parents they probably shouldn't come to any of my concerts for a while.
And is that what happened? That's what happened, yeah. Did they ever come around? My mother, unfortunately, didn't live long enough to see me make a living, but my father lived quite a long time and ended up being totally fine with my being a musician. I'm glad to hear that. That's actually the best thing that the Pulitzer Prize is good for, is getting one's parents off one's back.
Lang won his Pulitzer in 2008 for a choral piece called The Little Match Girl Passion.
I wrote this piece because I had this idea about how to make a new kind of passion, which I could believe.
Maybe you could pull apart that title for me, The Little Match Girl Passion. It's a little bit Hans Christian Andersen, a little bit Bach.
So how does that work? I love Bach, but I'm not Christian. So there's a limit to how close I can get to the true emotion of what those pieces are really aiming for. And I went to the St. Matthew Passion, which I love, and I thought, you know, what gives the Passion format its power?
It's people looking at the suffering of Jesus and then saying to themselves, maybe noticing that suffering could make me a better person if noticing that suffering could change my life. I could be a better person. We could live in a better world.
So I took Hans Christian Andersen's story of the little match girl, the poor girl who is trying to sell matches on a cold street and dies freezing to death and goes to heaven. And I intercut that with the crowd scenes from the Bach St. Matthew Passion, where the crowd is responding to the suffering of Jesus Christ.
She invited another match, and then she found herself sitting under a beautiful Christmas tree.
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Chapter 7: How does the rehearsal process impact the final performance?
In the late 1980s, he co-founded, along with Julia Wolf and Michael Gordon, the Bang on a Can music festival, a 12-hour orgy of contemporary music, as the New York Times called it. Bang on a Can soon became a composer's collective, and it's still going strong.
One of the points was to expand who listens to the experimental music, which is being written now, and how we include more people than we exclude. And there was another more collegial motivation. Composers in certain times have been encouraged to be not nice to each other. So there are only a few opportunities, it is thought, and you should be selfish and suspicious of everyone else.
I don't believe in that world. Part of the Bang on a Can ethos has been to try to build a world which is as generous to as many people as it can imagine being. David Lang will sometimes take this democratizing instinct to extremes. I had a weird experience once. I was in England. I was staying at a friend's place in Islington in this section of London.
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?
Yes.
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? Everyone is cooperating in this. And it started me thinking about the relationship between performance and democracy. So I decided to make this piece for a thousand members of the community.
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Chapter 8: What reflections does Lang have on the significance of The Wealth of Nations?
And the piece we're talking about is Lange's new oratorio, The Wealth of Nations, which repurposes text from the Adam Smith book of the same name.
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.
The ore was smelted from, you know, places and the dye came on ships. And imagine who made the rope for those ships and who made the sails. Can I hear you sing some bits and pieces? Are you willing to sing some parts now or no? I mean, I'm a terrible singer. And this is going to be completely the wrong notes and it's going to be out of tune and the wrong rhythms. Perfect. The woolen coat
Which covers the labourer As coarse and rough as it may appear is the produce of the joint labor of a great multitude of workers, the shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the woolcomber or carder, The dyer, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, with many others must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production
Yeah, I hire real singers because I'm a really terrible singer.
We did a series on Adam Smith a few years ago. One big question we were trying to answer is what did Smith actually write and how has it been interpreted and perhaps misinterpreted or used and perhaps abused over the years? Do you feel that this new piece of yours is part of that conversation or separate?
I think it's part of that conversation. I don't want to get into too political situation here, but it's hard not to look at the world around us at this moment and think that one of the jobs which should be done is to call out hypocrisy where you see it. And I think this book is really, in a way, trying to say, how does a virtuous person build a moral structure for commerce?
We should say you use several other texts in this piece besides The Wealth of Nations. There are passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Frederick Douglass. There's a passage from an Edith Wharton novel. There's a courtroom speech from Eugene V. Debs, who socialists of a certain age will recall fondly. Tell me how you decided to bring in all these other voices.
I basically have one hobby, which is reading. My first thought was there's so much of literature that we love and we revere, and it all ends up being people and money problems. And so it seems like there would be a way to talk about the world that Adam Smith imagines and then use literature. So I thought that it would be Dickens' Hard Times and Trollope and Jane Eyre. And I'm a huge Zola fan.
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