Infinite playlist

Infinite Playlist New frontiers in digital sound. [excerpt] Review: the little match girl passion

by Alex Ross The New Yorker August 10, 2009

Despite the fact that I now have forty days and eighteen hours of music on my computer, enough to outlast the Flood, I keep returning to a stack of favorite disks that I keep next to my stereo. I’m listening to “Simple Lines of Enquiry,” an immense, glacial, hypnotic piano work by the Canadian composer Ann Southam, on Centrediscs; a survey of the starkly eloquent harpsichord music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, with Glen Wilson, on Naxos; and “The Little Match Girl Passion,” a compilation of choral music by the American composer David Lang, on Harmonia Mundi. Lang is a hard­driving minimalist who has lately taken an introspective turn. The principal work on the CD interweaves Hans Christian Andersen’s tale with the Gospel According to Matthew. In “For Love Is Strong,” pairs of voices slowly chant the title phrase while the rest of the chorus unfurls similes culled from the Song of Songs—“like the morning, like the moon, like the sun, like an army with banners,” and so on. This is the text that captivated Clemens non Papa half a millennium ago. Lang’s serene, limber music breathes much the same air, even if its angular repetitions are pure New York. The album ends with a hauntingly spare setting of lines adapted from Ecclesiastes: “People come and people go / the earth goes on and on.”