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.

Review by Jayson Greene, Pitchfork

Composer David Lang returns with a new recording of two separate works for solo piano: the title piece and a cycle of memorial works written for his friends titled memory pieces, both performed by Andrew Zolinsky.

this was written by hand was a piece Lang had written after realizing he had not physically hand-written a piece since purchasing a home computer in 1993. Lang had said in his liner notes that he wondered if “the means of writing had any effect on the writing itself”, and to these ears, it did indeed. The piece’s stark but colorful passages sound as if they are created with a more ragged, handwritten craftsmanship than a piece that one would expect to be put through any level of a new technology. Very high-ended, mostly childlike phrases are continued until the 7-minute mark when they are intervened by low-end chords that bring the piece to a much darker place and leave it there.

The sequencing and contrasts of the movements of memory pieces invoke those of Carnival of the Animals (Very slow, followed by fast, followed by thudding, etc.), but in the presentation of something far more dramatic than that work, starting with “Cage” (written for John Cage).

The concept of the cycle, which was suggested by one of its dedicatees, pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, is a series of snapshots of each friend embodied in musical thoughts. The movements convey very brilliantly an aspect of each person’s character through Lang’s eyes.

From “Spartan Arcs” (Mikhashoff’s tribute that invokes Philip Glass) to “Grind” (Jacob Druckman’s tribute) to “Wed”, written for installation artist Kate Ericson, the pieces are all a segment of these people that Lang has always had with him and has now forever made them public with this cycle of works.

The combination of the stark but sonorous recording and Zolinsky’s brilliant technique and familiar identity with the pieces provides a very humble and beautiful set of music. Without compromising his contemporary style, Lang has definitely made a great gesture towards rekindling a classical sensibility with this recording, and has simultaneously made a fitting set of memorials for fellow artists that left some wonderful impressions on him.

Review by Chris McGovern, The Glass Blog