673. What Is Money?

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Introduction to Handel's Messiah

1:10Hey 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.

1:43You 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.

2:14So 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.

Gustavo Dudamel and David Lang

2:24This 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 HomePod to play some David Lang. And here's what came out. This is a piece called Just.

2:56The lyrics are drawn from Song of Songs, a book of love poems in the Hebrew Bible. And my beloved, just your garden. This music mesmerized me. I wanted to know more about the person who could write something like that. It 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. Well, I found an online lecture where Lang was talking about his composing career.

3:31He 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.

David Lang on Wealth of Nations

3:48Today, 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. The real price of everything.

4:24The real price of everything. The real price of everything. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. With your host, Stephen Dubner.

David Lang's Composing Process

4:50By 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.

5:24And I'm also unaware of all of the titanic errors that I may have made that I will only have five minutes to fix.

Commissioning the Piece

5:34Let'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.

6:08Had 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? 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 Hendel'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.

6:48And 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.

7:20But that was the original idea. And 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.

7:57Money 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.

8:14Okay, 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.

The Music of Wealth of Nations

8:23So 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?

9:00If I love my neighbor, well, who's my neighbor? How big is my neighborhood? You know, 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?

9:31It'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, you know. I mean, are you interested in having some?

10:02Well, 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. You know, 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.

10:37And 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. So I'm curious, the person that you are now, you're a composer living in New York City. It's not the cheapest place in the world to live. Got three grown kids now. I'm curious about your relationship to what you think is the sufficient or enough amount. You are reminding me of the part of David Copperfield where Mr. McCobber says, if you have 20 pounds of annual expense, and at the end of the year you have 20 pounds and one pence, you are a rich person.

11:16And if you have 19 pounds and 19 shillings or whatever the calculation is, one penny less, you're impoverished. And I sort of have tried to live by that definition. And I think when you're freelancing in the arts, as most people in the arts are, you have to get an attitude which is comfortable with having less. Unfortunately, we don't really take care of the people who are in the arts in this country very well.

11:48And I, after all, was in college to go to medical school. You studied chemistry at Stanford? Yeah, I was a chemistry undergraduate for the first two years. In fact, the whole music department at Stanford was all pre-med. And then graduate school was where and what? I went to the University of Iowa, which at the time had a fantastic music department, and I got my master's in Iowa, and I got my doctorate at Yale, and I've been teaching at Yale for a very long time.

12:18Your father was a doctor, yes? My father was a doctor, so it was very clear to me when I decided not to go on with that what the risks were going to be. I'm guessing it was even clearer to your parents. No, they never gave up. They never gave up. 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.

12:53How 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. Come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come. Lange won his Pulitzer in 2008 for a choral piece called The Little Match Girl Passion.

13:29I 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 anderson 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 saint matthew passion which i love and i thought you know what gives

14:04the passion format it's 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 anderson'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

14:39from the box saint matthew passion where the crowd is responding to the suffering of jesus so i took jesus out and i put the little match girl in and i didn't really know it was going to happen and i thought maybe this is an experiment which will be completely blasphemous and people will be throwing bricks through my windows and things like this and instead you won a pulitzer prize for

15:09it yeah i took it really seriously i was surprised and very happy that it meant something to people and that won the pulitzer prize and after that i had immediately a lot of requests to write other vocal music which i'd never really thought of before and when i started doing it i decided that i really loved it that it really was a huge part of something that i'd been missing is it something about the vocal instrument per se that lit you up once you started doing it or was it about the ability to

15:41add text to music which you're as a literate person i could imagine would feel like an incredibly powerful tool i guess the thing i'm really asking is what took you so long david to incorporate vocals into the music i don't really know what took me so long it feels so natural for me now to think of a text and then imagine how i might sing it but i think part of it is that it's very abstract to write for a violin or a cello or a flute and if i imagine what is important to me emotionally and then i have to channel

16:16that thing into this particular instrumental range and fingerings and practicalities it's one step removed from my own emotional life but if i sing something myself that i know is going to be sung by someone else i get to feel it and somehow for me that makes it a lot more powerful i conceptually understand but i specifically don't understand how it works that you a composer write down a bunch of things on paper or on a screen you plainly must hear it all but i don't know how you hear it and

16:53then i don't know how that hearing matches the expectation of hearing it with actual instruments and vocalists can you explain that one way i think about it is like the difference between watching a movie on your television in black and white and seeing it in technical or in a big theater with big sound you know the plot you know the characters you know how the shapes work you know how everything's going but it's not alive yet and it's not big and it's not powerful and doesn't have the huge reach

17:26it's not real yet and when you write what do you write on i'm from the generation before computers so i was taught how to write with a pencil on a piece of paper and i'm not a very good keyboard player so i'm not from the school of composers that sits down at the piano and plays a bunch of stuff and then goes oh that's beautiful i'm gonna write it down so i began as a composer who was supposed to sing things to himself and then write them down so i work on a computer on a software program that's

17:58the most like having a pencil on a piece of paper what's it called it's called encore and i can't ever upgrade any of my computers because the software hasn't been upgraded but the thing which is interesting about this software is it's so stone age that it lets you do all sorts of things that other programs will just auto correct other programs are sophisticated and they don't want you to make mistakes but in my writing i actually embrace all the mistakes and i don't want my software to correct

18:31them and then when you write a flute part or timpani part or whatever it is how do you hear that the other parts are just things that you approximate you write something down and you look at it you go well that's flutey or that's oboe or whatever and you imagine come on that can't be real no that's exactly what it is i mean look you work with words all the time you type the word blue on a keyboard you don't have to imagine for yourself what are the amazing shades of blue and how much experience

19:02do i have with blue and what does blueness mean the titles that you give your compositions are all lowercase no capital letters including wealth of nations lowercase w lowercase n what's that all about that's just a hopeless affectation that i started in graduate school the true story is this we only studied the music of great composers from the past right and it's very humbling to be 19 or 20 years old and to think here are pieces which are about you know human beings and life and death and it becomes

19:36very oppressive to think that you don't know how to write music yet but your pieces are supposed to fit into this tradition so one day i just wrote a piece of mine in a lowercase title and it seemed like a joke and it seemed like all the pressure was off like no one would think that my piece was about war and peace if the title was in lowercase right and so then i felt like okay i'm not held to a higher standard and i can write the music how do you feel about the phrase classical music i don't really like it i don't really like it i really think it's just music you know and i think when you say that you

20:10write music and i say that i write music i actually think we're doing the same thing even though the commercial separation of those things puts them in different places or different radio stations or different parts of the internet do you consider what you write now classical music maybe contemporary classical music i'm guessing you don't like labels generally the way most people who make anything don't like labels well i don't really like contemporary because it sort of implies that tomorrow it will be

20:41history i really just like to think that i'm making music i've tried really hard to do different kinds of things so that i wouldn't feel that i'm stuck in one particular way of expressing myself i've done film and television i've done public works and collaborations with artists i try to keep it as fresh as possible so i don't feel like i'm working in one highly regulated old-fashioned part of the business let me keep you in the little holding pen of classical music for just one more minute if you don't mind a lot of people consider it intimidating or difficult and plainly it's not mass media i'm curious what

21:22you're trying to do about that i think you have an obligation as any kind of a musician to pay attention to both sides of the equation you know you want to make the music and you want to make sure that people hear the music both of those are part of your job and so what i've tried to do in my life is make sure that there's a larger audience for who can hear this kind of music this democratizing instinct goes back to the beginning of lang's career in the late 1980s he

21:56co-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

22:29so 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

23:02now 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

23:38everyone 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

24:14there was a litmus test and the litmus test was do you believe that this team should be victorious 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 and i decided to call it crowd out because i wanted to pay attention to my

24:47experience which was what it was like to be an individual in this swirl of voices so i went to the internet and i auto-completed in my search engine the sentence when i am in a crowd and then i just set to music the answers which were not pornographic or not saying nasty things about people or advertising particular products or whatever you know i sort of filtered those answers here are the lyrics i draw deep breaths i feel more confident and calm i lost it all i do not waste my

25:27words i hate for all eyes to be on me i start to panic i feel so alone i could cry i start to sweat i can fully submerge myself i don't want people to know i push i shove i glare i mutter i am always alone i am alone i am most alone i feel like rushing into tears i feel anxiety i feel awful and i wish to be

26:00alone i feel energy i feel more confident and calm i feel no one understands i feel surreal i am nourished by the pure spring so there's a range of feelings some of them positive some of them negative you get something and you lose something for being in that crowd one thing i really like about classical music is it has to get rehearsed that's when you build a

26:39community of people who work with each other who depend on each other so i wanted this to be a project which was easy enough so that ordinary community members could do it but hard enough so that they would have to rehearse a few times they would meet their neighbors they would end up learning how to depend on each other and i really felt like that was the democracy building part of this piece coming up after the break david lang is a composer who likes to collaborate more than

27:12compete but the wealth of nations is basically a blueprint for competition so how's that going to work

David Lang on Competition and Cooperation

27:19out i'm stephen dubner this is freakonomics radio we'll be right back freakonomics radio is sponsored by mint mobile if you're tired of spending hundreds on crazy high wireless bills bogus fees and free perks that cost you more in the long run then a premium wireless plan from mint mobile for 15 bucks a month might be right for you all plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5g network ditch overpriced

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29:32trusted urology specialist can help diagnose pd and walk you through your options including non-surgical treatment visit talkaboutpd.com classical music is what you might call high prestige but low reach for anyone who would like the reach to be wider there's a lot of history in the way the most popular pieces in the classical canon tend to

30:03be at least a century old often two or three centuries the whole enterprise can feel like a shrine full of relics and incantations it doesn't seem to speak to the modern world but what if it did what if you could take a foundational text about economics and build a modern sonic framework around it what would that sound like i wanted to make people feel the emotional weight of international trade

30:35if that's possible that again is the composer david lang i mean everybody deals with money and everyone has a totally messed up relationship with how money changes hands and how it lives in their lives it's an emotional issue right how we deal with our neighbors is an emotional issue how we deal with our community and what we think of the people around us turns out to be hugely important to our ideas of the world we want to live in and that's kind of what the piece is about and the piece we're

31:06talking about is lang'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 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 you know 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

31:41smelted 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 laborer as coarse and rough as it may appear

32:16is 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

33:08even 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

33:38i think it's part of that conversation i don't want to get into too political situation here but i 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

34:10there are passages from ralph waldo emerson from frederick douglas 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

34:45and then use literature so i thought that it would be dickens hard times and trollop and jane air and i'm a huge zola fan i thought originally that that was what was going to be the counterweight to adam smith then when i realized that this was also the 250th anniversary of the american revolution i switched those literary voices for american voices they sort of footnote things that happen talk me through one example maybe movement 16 the true statesman which uses text from frederick douglas

35:19frederick douglas wrote a beautiful essay on wealth which talks about how the inequality of wealth is a necessary precursor to enslavement that people not being economically free is part of the world that we built

35:52and one thing that drew me to using this text is that he actually says the wealth and poverty of the nation and tell me about movement 17 statement to the court that's the one with text from eugene debbs this is a big crescendo of a statement it comes very near the end of your piece tell me a little bit more about debbs and why you used him eugene debbs was the head of the socialist party at the beginning of the 20th century he was a socialist candidate for president he was tirelessly standing up for a new social system

36:30and he went to jail as a conscientious objector to the entry of the united states to world war one when he was convicted he gave this speech which is very famous in lefty circles i set this text because it's a very powerful angry but ultimately very optimistic statement about where our country can go and how we should live with each other

37:02i took out all the things which are specifically about socialism because i don't think that's going to happen here i'm a pretty moderate political person so i'm not advocating for any particular kind of change i'm only advocating to see things more clearly in the world and what we do with that is up to us but i really love the emotion of this and i love the way his diagnosis of the situation didn't keep him from being optimistic about the future

37:35and i thought that that dovetailed very well with the message i was trying to get from adam smith which is the moral connection of labor and how we cannot solve inequality without a sense of justice can i ask you to read or maybe sing a bit of that deb's movement in this high noon of christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh

38:08and blood of childhood in very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men i love the power of this language it's really great and i tried to set it so that it would keep that power so most of what the chorus is singing they sing in unison and most of what the orchestra is doing the orchestra is doing in unison with the singers

38:40money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood deb's rights that was a little over a hundred years ago how well do you think that lesson has been learned and taught well i think the lesson that gold is god today has been learned very well that's not quite

39:11the lesson i was asking about yeah i gathered that right but the whole point of art is that the artist can see and express something that will lead other people to rethink it and change i'm just curious between adam smith and eugene v debs and the billions of others who've come before us how you feel we're doing as a civilization and thinking about taking care of each other and ourselves we could do better he said comma understatedly i think that that's the whole point right if we had actually paid

39:43attention to all the lessons we could have learned up to now you know all the music would be about love and dancing and the fact that we still have other things to write about means we have a little farther to go movement 13 is called enough for anyone who's ever been to a passover seder they'll find themselves maybe singing dayenu dayenu yeah if i could have a piece of bread you write when i need a piece of bread it would be enough if i could have a coat to wear when i need a coat to wear it would be enough if i could have a place to rest my head when i need a place to rest my head it would be

40:17enough there's no byline on that lyric is that from the mind of david lang then yeah i just wrote that one one thing that happens in this text and probably many economic texts is that we assume that everyone in the world participates equally and frictionlessly in any kind of formula of how systems interact one thing that adam smith takes for granted is that everyone in the world is going to be part of this system and everyone has to follow these rules so when he gives an example

40:48of the poorest person he can think of he talks about the labor who has a woolen coat and i just thought well there actually are people who don't have a coat those people don't show up in this book and so i was looking for a text in which i could find someone who was coatless and i decided finally that i would write it myself coming up after the break david lang's new composition finally moves into rehearsals

41:24i expect to be well i don't know i don't know what i expect i'm stephen dubner this is free economics radio we'll be right back

Rehearsals Begin

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43:18podcasts about data are boring but data explains why things are happening the way they are it's like banking with pnc bank it might seem boring to save plan and make calculated decisions with your bank but keeping your money boring is what helps you live a more happily fulfilled life pnc bank brilliantly boring since 1865 brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the pnc financial services group inc pnc bank national association member fdic we're speaking about five days before your first rehearsal correct

44:06that's right just describe what that's going to be like where is the rehearsal room who is there what's it feel like what's it sound like and how does that day go the first rehearsal is going to be with the chorus and with piano not with the orchestra and so i will walk into a rehearsal studio at lincoln center the chorus probably some of the people i will know probably most of them i won't there will be 40 singers and they won't know what kind of person i am or if they will be doing a good

44:37job and if i'm going to be fun to be around or not fun to be around and will you be fun to be around i'm always fun to be around i'm going to be totally excited and nervous and i'm going to be able to get to hear these things that in my head seem to be really good and interesting and successful and i'm really hoping that i'm correct what do you expect this piece will sound like i'm hoping that the big moments where the chorus gets to sing something gigantic that i really believe in

45:10that i imagine will be totally emotionally overpowering i'm imagining and hoping that i will be overpowered so what happens if you hear something that you don't like and the performance is just a week after that so you can't change it how do you feel about that do you feel like you've just got a piece of you that's slightly misshapen i have a weird way of dealing with that kind of pressure which is i tell myself rightly or wrongly that every one of my pieces is going to be played

45:41a thousand times and so the pressure is off any one performance so if there's something that i need to change which is larger than this or if i decide to drop a movement or add a movement or radically change something or add a soloist or i mean i can do anything i want to it it's my piece right so this is the first version of the piece it has another performance over the summer at the aspen music festival i can change it by then it will have other performances after that and maybe thousands

46:12i have no idea but i don't want to ever think that the piece becomes set in stone and i'm not allowed to fiddle with it or change it or perfect it i love that notion of writing everything in anticipation of the hope at least that it will be played maybe thousands of times i would say that is a pretty unusual thing for a human to do because most of us are concerned with the thing we're doing at the moment and it may reverberate for a little while like i make a weekly show and i know that there

46:45will be people who listen to this show years from now but mostly it's being consumed in the near term and you're essentially creating something for what smells a bit like eternity is that difficult i wouldn't say i'm making it for eternity but there is something of the way we think about classical music and my background i'm not completely nerdy classical musician i'm a college professor a lot of what i do is talk about music which is sometimes a thousand years old and so our idea of what we're

47:17talking about in music we are writing now is that it is somehow in connection with the discipline as it goes back to its origins so we talk about beethoven we talk about mozart we talk about haydn these people are still fresh to us right we're still getting lessons from them i think that makes us weird i know it makes you weird there's something kind of a little necrophilic about classical music but there's something also really relaxing about thinking that your time frame is larger than my thing has to be

47:52a dance hit this month and by next month i don't care if anyone will listen to it again it's got to make all of its sales and all of its impact and all of its airplay all the people who are going to make out to it have to make out to it this week we don't have that pressure you're saying that wealth of nations is make out music i don't want to meet the people who are going to make out to this piece i have to say how much have you communicated with this course to date they've all got the libretto have you sent them any notes any composers cheat guide anything like that everyone has the music

48:28so i'm hoping that everyone has looked at their music but i have not communicated with anyone not even the choral conductor and that's unusual for me usually i like to workshop my pieces but because of everyone's schedules and because everyone is in a million different places it's been really difficult to get people together so this actually will be the first time to hear it i don't mean this to sound the wrong way but i'm extremely nervous for all of you and i'm sure i shouldn't be

48:58because you guys are pros you're a pro the singers are pros the new york philharmonic are pros your conductor is gustavo dudamel who's the most pro of the pros the pro of pros right he's the rock star in this world i've worked with him before he commissioned a percussion concerto that we premiered in los angeles he is an unbelievably quick understander of the depth of the music in front of him he's kind of unparalleled at his ability to look at something figure out how to

49:34structure it figure out what's deep about it and then commandingly give that information to the orchestra have you spent any time with him leading up to this or communicated with him about the piece not at all it's one big sight reading extravaganza well he's looked at the score i know he's looked at the score because i've gotten little comments back and forth oh what kind of comments just you know rehearsal comments like we're gonna have to rehearse this and how many hours we're gonna need and i need a sectional for this whatever so he's looked at it enough to figure out how to take it apart

50:05and put it together were there any notes in there just like this is snazzy david love this i didn't get any of that those will come later i hope so yeah to me there's something about the notion that it's just been a thing on a page and then in a week and a half from now i and others will be sitting in david geffen hall lincoln center with another i don't know how many people that fits 1800 2000 it's a lot am i right to worry i think you're right to be excited yes i think you can leave the worrying to me it's very exciting actually it is very exciting you don't know what it is i know the basic outline

50:41of everything i know the shape of it i know how all the tunes work i know how all the chords work whether or not it becomes as three-dimensional as i think it's going to become that's a different question it's the hugely exciting part for a composer to make this thing that requires the cooperation of so many people it's a little like adam smith in the wealth of nations it's a little like the woolen coat yes that's right yeah it's a little like adam smith i can't do what i do without

51:14the cooperation of hundreds of other people a few days later i sat in on the first vocal rehearsal by

First Vocal Rehearsal

51:24the new york philharmonic chorus 49 singers the conductor malcolm j merriweather and a rehearsal pianist that's it no orchestra no gustavo dudamel david lang didn't show up until around midway through and he tried to stay out of the way he later told me that he doesn't like to be a distraction during rehearsals since most classical music was written by people who are long dead a living composer in the room can be jarring this was my first time hearing any of the music of wealth of nations other

51:58than what david lang had sung for me it was totally arresting lang's music i was starting to realize requires attention but it also seems to pay a lot of attention to how the listener receives it here's a short piece i recorded on my phone lang uses a lot of what's called plain song in his writing like a slightly modernized gregorian chant here the chorus is singing over and over a passage from one of the most famous lines in wealth of nations

52:32it is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner adam smith writes but from their regard to their own interest lang's music can be both lacerating and comforting in the same moment hypnotic and then cathartic i'm sure there were mistakes made in this first rehearsal how could there not be but

53:22i was astonished at how well the chorus sang this piece the first time around to someone like me their musicianship was otherworldly what would it sound like when the philharmonic was added and the soloists i found out very soon a couple days later i went to another rehearsal with all the performers and david lang i know we have eggs and i know we have cheese and i know we have onions today we're going to find out if we have an omelet but i don't know that yet i don't know it because

53:55we haven't heard the things together so i'm i know that every little individual bit i'm happy with but the whole thing together we'll see once again lang tries to keep a relatively low profile he moves around the auditorium listening taking a few notes he is a small man dressed in black with chunky glasses and a shaved head sometimes when his music moves him he starts pogoing up and down lang grew up in los angeles and he was part of the punk scene there you can still see that now

54:27on stage the conductor gustavo dudamel exhibits his own bouncy intensity you get the sense he's trying to solve a large puzzle in a small amount of time every now and then he consults david lang david do we have crescendo here before letter f because this is this is no crescendo for the strings crescendo for the choir but i don't know for the rest of the orchestra if they go forte subito forte subito is italian for suddenly loud versus a more gradual crescendo and lang says yes the

55:03orchestra should go forte subito one two and two wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful bravi everybody after rehearsal on the street i run into one of the soloists the mezzo soprano fleur baron she has become one of the world's most in-demand

55:34singers and she travels constantly she got her undergraduate degree in comparative literature at columbia just 50 blocks north of lincoln center i asked what she thought when she was first approached about singing the wealth of nations honestly i was surprised because i read the wealth of nations when i was at columbia because that's one of the core texts that all the students have to read and you know back then i remember it not being a very scintillating read it's very obviously dry sort of economic treatise like an important example of like philosophical and economic thought then and

56:05that still has a lot of ramifications for today but not like an obvious choice of text for like a composer of vocal music let's say i feel like composers would normally tend to be drawn towards something poetic but given that these concerts are a kind of birthday celebration i think the piece is fabulous is there a particular either challenge or maybe joy of working with a living composer i mean if you have a great composer which david lang is then it's just pure joy and he's very collaborative he's also a professor so he's really strong in communication we had our first in-person

56:38meeting just a few days ago when i got to new york because i live in london we talked about the piece over a drink and it was really nice to get to hear a little bit more about his personal connection and thoughts of when he was creating the work so those kind of conversations that dialogue back and forth has been just such a pleasure the next time i caught up with david lang i asked him to envision what happens on opening night i'd like to body surf across the audience

57:09before during or after the piece i think during the piece where do you sit or stand or i don't know curl up in a fetal position i think they put the composer now probably like 10 rows away from the stage where it's really quick to get up on stage to take a bow i'll be sitting there with my wife and kids how do your wife and kids look forward to an event like this with dread i think seriously i've dragged my my family to so many weird things over the years

57:40come on this isn't weird this is dad having a world premiere with the new york philharmonic at lincoln center with gustavo dudamel conducting on the 250th anniversary of one of the most important books in history i think my kids are way too cool to be into this david lang's kids may be too cool but i am not and i know you're not either so coming up next time on the show wealth of nations has its world premiere what does the audience make of it

58:16if he's trying to change people's minds about smith he's trying to change people's minds about capitalism and what does david lang think of it there's always this you know kind of post experience depression that's next week until then take care of yourself and if you can someone else too freakonomics radio is produced by renbud radio you can find our entire archive on any podcast app it's also at freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced

58:50by zach lapinski with help from augusta chapman and dalvin abuaji it was edited by ellen frankman and mixed by jake loomis with help from eleanor osborne and jeremy johnston thanks to everyone from the new york philharmonic who helped with production especially dinah lu and caitlyn hurst the freakonomics radio network staff also includes elsa hernandez gabriel roth alari montanacourt mandy gorenstein peter madden and tayo jacobs our theme song is mr fortune by the hitchhikers and our composer is luis guerra as always thanks for listening

59:23i think one of the secrets of bang on a can from the early days is we did these very intense experimental music concerts but we sold alcohol i think alcohol in that environment makes any musical experience a lot better the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything freakonomics radio is sponsored by e-trade from morgan stanley simplify your finances and discover

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