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Program Note: David Lang’s Poor Hymnal

I have a small collection of old hymnals that I have picked up over the years – used and thumbed over and smudged by the generations of people who had turned their pages. What I love about hymnals is that they are a catalog of things a community of worshippers can agree on, a catalog that can be sung. And what the worshippers are singing about matters. The texts represent the beliefs and values that the worshippers all share, so hymnals have the power to highlight the hymns that make a particular community feel and act differently from all the others.

Many religions – mine included – profess that an important part of their belief is to care about how people who are comfortable should act towards people who are not.How we were strangers in a strange land, the least among us, the camel going through the eye of the needle, etc. Of course, it is hard for us to remind ourselves to keep caring, and it would be so much easier to forget. With this in mind, I wondered if the hymns of a community that did not want to forget our responsibilities to each other, and that wanted to make our responsibilities to each other the central tenet of our coming together, might be different from the hymns that we are singing now. I wrote poor hymnal to find out.

I should add that I first became interested in the idea of a hymnal from my college enthusiasm for the music of Charles Ives. Ives’s music is full of references to the hymns of old New England that were so important to his upbringing – his pieces are full of distorted and fragmentary references to the music of his youth. This, of course, was not the music of my youth. I bought my first hymnal because I needed to learn more about Ives’s world, if I was going to be able to go deeper into his music, and so if there is anything in poor hymnal that reminds the listener of a New England church experience that is most likely where it comes from.