Andrew Zolinsky - David Lang: This was written by hand (2011)

As one-third of the composer-collective Bang on a Can, David Lang is something of a genial father figure of the indie-classical scene. Talk to any of the world's main players and you're likely to hear them tell you about their life-changing stint in Bang on a Can's summer festival, which has acted as a sort of feeder school and incubator for the group's try-anything mentality. Lang's music has undergone many stylistic shifts over the years: In the 80s, he wrote bristlier stuff, but in the last decade or so, he's shifted quietly into a more pensive register. The Little Match Girl Passion, his 2008 work that won him a Pulitzer, was written for only four voices and some hand bells. This Was Written By Hand, his most recent recording, is a collection of short solo piano works played by the British pianist Andrew Zolinsky.
The album holds the same, sustained melancholy mood: thoughtful, searching, elegiac, minimalist. Lang's way with repetitive phrasing doesn't feel like that of minimalists like Glass or Reich's, though. When his works linger over and repeat a figure, as on the title track, it feels uncannily like a puzzling notion being considered by an inquisitive, slightly neurotic mind. In that respect, Lang's music mimics the intellectual sensation of thinking and writing about music as much as it does the act of listening to music itself. To immerse yourself in this music is to hear a mind's churn. It can be perversely soothing.