David Lang’s before and after nature
Music and text by David Lang
Video design by Tal Rosner
Performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars
With Penn State Concert Choir under the direction of Dr. Christopher Kiver

When Stanford University alumnus David Lang set out to write a new composition for Bang on a Can All-Stars, the electrifying music ensemble he co-founded, he looked to his alma mater for inspiration.

Commissioned by Stanford Live specifically to bring Lang and the BOAC All-Stars back to its campus, before and after nature is a meditation on the natural world, both before human existence and after humans are gone.

Lang met closely with scholars, faculty, and students in Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and with the Doerr-affiliated Environmental Justice Working Group. He combined what he learned with his own readings from the past fifty years of environmental thinking, leading him to write his own texts that explore the different ways we define and understand nature.

Lang set these texts for voices and Bang on a Can All-Stars, and he enlisted video pioneer Tal Rosner to invent a way to visualize the meanings of the music in video and projection. The result is an immersive spectacle of sound and vision, both heartbreaking and miraculous, full of beauty, wonder, and awe.

Lang is a renowned Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer with an extensive body of work, including choral compositions and operas.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble is recognized worldwide for ultra-dynamic live performances and recordings of today’s most innovative music. Freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world, and experimental music, the six-member amplified group has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories.