Peter Serling Photo
David Lang
Musical America, which has been covering and providing information about the performing arts since 1898, has named David Lang its 2013 Composer of the Year. Lang, whose 2008 chamber-choir piece The Little Match Girl Passion won the composer a Pulitzer Prize, is on the faculty and an alumnus of the Yale School of Music.
A Yale School of Music news release issued on Tuesday indicated that “Musical America, now in its third century as an indispensable resource for the performing arts, today announced the winners of the annual Musical America Awards, recognizing artistic excellence and achievement in the arts.”
Reached by telephone in New York on Tuesday, Sedgwick Clark, who is the editor of the annually published Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts, said his organization’s annual awards are “highly coveted and regarded.”
“This is really a genuinely major set of awards,” Clark said.
The cover of the 2013 edition of the Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts will feature Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel, whom Musical America named its Musician of the Year.
Other awardees include Wu Man (Instrumentalist of the Year), Joyce DiDonato (Vocalist of the Year), and José Antonio Abreu (Educator of the Year), the founder of Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Music Foundation, whose Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra Dudamel led under Abreu’s mentorship.
Lang, whose music has been recorded and performed by some of the world’s most acclaimed ensembles, is a co-founder of Bang on a Can, the influential and celebrated Brooklyn, New York-based contemporary music organization that is currently celebrating its 25th year.
Lang has been a member of the Yale School of Music faculty since 2008. He earned his doctorate from the school in 1989.
Explore Lang’s music at his website and his publisher’s (G. Schirmer) website.