Name: David Lang, How To Pray by Great Noise Ensemble
Duration: 8 min 46 s
Description: How to Pray, by David Lang. From our Freedom of Worship program (part of the Four Freedoms Project). Performed at Westmoreland United Congregational Church of Christ in Washington, DC in February, 2019. Conducted by Blair Skinner.

Armando Bayolo, Elegy Sandy Hook

How to Pray, by David Lang. From our Freedom of Worship program (part of the Four Freedoms Project). Performed at Westmoreland United Congregational Church of Christ in Washington, DC in February, 2019. Conducted by Blair Skinner.

GNE 2019 02 16

David Lang, How To Pray

“Among the most exciting and ambitious new music ensembles in Washington, D.C.” (Kyle Gullings, A Composer’s Notebook), and “perhaps the DC region’s most exciting professional group dedicated to performing new classical music” (Jason McCool, The Pinkline Project), Great Noise Ensemble is a working embodiment of its mission to fight for the performance of new works and promote emerging talent in contemporary music.

Born in 2005 when composer and conductor Armando Bayolo placed an ad on Craigslist.org seeking like-minded musicians passionate about contemporary music, Great Noise Ensemble has become one of the most important and adventurous ensembles in the District of Columbia’s new music scene. Since its first concert in January, 2006, Great Noise Ensemble has presented the world premieres of some 23 new compositions as well as regional premieres and rare performances of some of the major works of the last 25 years by composers like Steve Reich, John Luther Adams, Marc Mellits, Poul Ruders and Louis Andriessen. They have presented concerts in venues ranging from intimate community concert spaces like the Patricia M. Sitar Center and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring to prestigious locales such as the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Gallery and Sculpture Gallery and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

In 2008 Great Noise Ensemble became the Ensemble in Residence at The Catholic University of America’s Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, bringing at least two of its regular season programs to the university’s Ward Hall each year as well as fulfilling their educational mission by coaching student performers in rehearsals and performances of new works and through the reading and professional recording of new works by Catholic University student composers and headlining the graduate composition students’ annual New Voices Festival and competition. Great Noise Ensemble was also recently named the Ensemble in Residence at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, where they will headline a new music series beginning in the 2012-13 concert season.

Highlights of Great Noise Ensemble’s 2011-12 season include world premieres of works by Hannah Lash, David Smooke, Cornelius Dufallo, Sean Doyle and Randall Woolf and performances at the Catholic University of America, the Mansion at the Music Center at Strathmore, the Atlas Performing Arts Center as well as making its New York debut at the Cutting Edge New Music Series at Symphony Space. 


David Lang, How To Pray

Great Noise Ensemble

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