Bang on a Can

My piece Wed is from a larger series of piano works, called memory pieces. These eight pieces were all written between the years 1992 and 1997, and may be played separately or together. They were each written after the death of someone close to me, someone with whom I had a relationship that I wanted some way to hold on to. Kate Ericson, to whose memory Wed is dedicated, was a young conceptual artist and a close friend of my wife. In her hospital bed, just before she died, she was married to her boyfriend and longtime collaborator, Mel Ziegler. A wedding is usually a joyful event, full of hope and optimism, but this wedding of course had something much darker hovering around the joyfulness. In my piece the four independent lines of the piano part are made of small changes-a half step up, a whole step down, and each line by itself is not that interesting. Put together, however, they allow the music to rock oddly back and forth between major and minor, between consonance and dissonance, between hope and despair. -David Lang