Two campus events feature McCormack Visiting Artist-Scholar

The Office of Special Programs and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery are pleased to announce the first events of the the new academic year featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, Skidmore’s 2014-15 Don and Judy McCormack Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar.

At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 16, David Lang, co-curator of the Tang exhibition I was a double, will hold an informal and engaging talk with a music professional he has known for years—David Alan Miller, the Grammy-winning music director of the Albany Symphony Orchestra.

At noon Wednesday, Sept. 17, Lang will give a tour of I was a double with his co-curator, Ian Berry, the Tang Museum’s Dayton Director.

Both events are free and open to the public. "These events take place within a dynamic, eye-popping exhibition that features a new 23-part composition for five voices by David Lang," said Barry.

I was a double, on view at that Tang through Jan. 4, brings together work of visual artists who, like composers, make sets of rules for creating their pieces. While the use of a musical score as a set of performance instructions is familiar, the notion of an artist creating work with a set of rules is perhaps less so, especially as creator and performer are usually one and the same. All of the artists in this exhibition have invented rules, whether written or not, and followed them; each work has a score—a plan—that has been realized in the physical work.

 

About David Lang

David Lang (b. 1957) is a New York-based composer who is active in many genres and media. His piece The Little Match Girl Passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and a Grammy in 2010. Lang is Musical America's 2013 Composer of the Year and recipient of Carnegie Hall's Debs Composer's Chair for 2013-14. He has worked closely with a diverse group of artists including Peter Greenaway, Benjamin Millepied, Susan Marshall, Darren Aronofsky, Ann Hamilton, and Mark Dion. Lang is co-artistic director of New York's Bang on a Can, which he founded in 1987 with composers Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, and he is professor of music composition at the Yale School of Music.

 About David Alan Miller

David Alan Miller (b. 1961) has been the music director of the Albany Symphony Orchestra since 1992 and a guest conductor of  some of America's major orchestras, including those in New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. He won a Grammy in 2014 for his Naxos recording of John Corigliano's “Conjurer,” with the Albany Symphony and Dame Evelyn Glennie. He and the orchestra have twice appeared at Spring for Music, an annual festival of the nation's most creative orchestras at Carnegie Hall. His other accolades include Columbia University’s 2003 Ditson Conductor’s Award, the 2001 ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming, and, in 1999, ASCAP’s first-ever Leonard Bernstein Award for Outstanding Educational Programming.

For more information on I was a double and the Tang Museum, click here.