[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Welcome to the podcast. This week, a short little something that looks forward to a program we're gonna make for season four. We're doing a program about music, kind of about pop music. Not really sure what to call it just yet, but it was inspired by this idea that everywhere you go, there's music playing. You know, you go to a store, there's music playing. You go to a doctor's office, there's music playing. You are put on hold on the telephone, and there's music playing. I think someone actually counted how many times you hear music in the course of a day, and I think it was in the hundreds. I'm not sure, but this struck me as not a good thing while we were thinking about this show.

JAD: But then as we poked around, we bumped into mention of a project from David Lang, composer David Lang, who's part of the whole Bang On A Can ensemble here in New York City. He's kind of a big contemporary classical guy. He does a lot of really interesting music. And he was commissioned to create background music for the most unlikeliest of places: the morgue. He was asked to write background music for that moment when you see a loved one for the last time. Like, what kind of music do you write in that circumstance? Do you even do it? And if you do, like, what's the right mood? What, as a composer, do you want to accomplish in that situation? What's appropriate? Well, the project is called Salle Des Departs. I think it means—translates from French to "Chamber of Departure" maybe? I don't know. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. And producer Jocelyn Gonzalez spoke with David Lang about it.

DAVID LANG: When I was very young, I had a brother who died. I've had a lot of relatives who've died. And so in a lot of my work, I actually have many pieces which are about how to memorialize someone, how to use a piece of music as a way to capture a moment in a relationship between that person and me. Or how to freeze something so that I never forget it. Or how to express a feeling of rage at finding out that someone died that I knew was going to disappear as soon as time took the edge off.

DAVID LANG: Some doctors from a very major hospital outside of Paris, in a suburb of Paris called Garches, and the doctors got together and thought, you know, we have so many people who die in this hospital. And they die in this very strange way. They die not after being sick for years and years. They just die instantaneously. One moment they're alive on the road, the next moment they're dead. Their family hasn't had a chance to grieve.

DAVID LANG: So the doctors got together. They went to the Fondacion de France. And they commissioned an Italian artist, Ettore Spalletti, to make a little chapel. But it's really a morgue. This beautiful, blue, sensuous, relaxing room. The idea being that when your loved one would die in this hospital, then they would take the body and move it into this room. So that your last memory in the hospital wouldn't be, you know, in this bright white light, in this horribly compromised position, in this, you know, real message of eternal defeat. So they made this little space, and then they thought, now that we have the space, we should see if music can participate in this space.

DAVID LANG: So they commissioned a piece both from Scanner and from me.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Salle des Departes]

DAVID LANG: It's made for three cellos and women's voices, but I deliberately wanted to make a piece which could not be played live. Because I felt that the whole point of this was a piece about death, so the idea that this could have a live performance seemed really like cheating to me. So I made a piece that was supposed to have the unending vocal part that no human being could sing. There are singers who sing their part, and through the beauty of the recording studio, there's no breath. Basically, it's sort of one giant, long tune.

DAVID LANG: So the instruction of how to play it in the score is 'to play it like angels.' It's supposed to be something that's past the ability of human beings to play it. It's not as if it's, you know, piped in like muzak. People are given the opportunity to decide whether or not they want an intrusion at that moment. That was something that was very important to me at the beginning, was to not feel like I was dictating something. I don't want to intrude on these people. It's strange to do a project like this because your goal is you hope that no one ever hears this piece, actually. You know, I mean, your goal for life is that—is that no one should ever have to hear this music.

DAVID LANG: The other thing was the idea of how long it should last because the idea that the doctors had when they came in was that I should write music that was on a loop. And I was adamant with them that I felt like this music should last a certain amount of time until it accomplishes its musical task, and then it should be over. And then if you decide that you would like to stay there longer, that's between you and the silence. Here's, you know, the contribution that I can make, and when I've made that contribution, I should get out.

DAVID LANG: Music goes into you in the—you know, it sort of bypasses all of your normal protection mechanisms. So it goes to the place of you which is not dealing with language or rationality. And that's why it's so useful to sell cars and toothpaste, and why it's so useful in movies to get people to all burst into tears at exactly the same moment. I mean, it has this ability to go around all of your defenses.

DAVID LANG: So I imagined this music in this morgue as having this horrible power to make people feel cold or make people break down. And I wanted to actually do something which I thought was much more neutral, which was to say, "Here is an environment which does not tell you specifically how you are supposed to feel, but it's an environment which may loosen your resolve enough to give yourself permission to feel whatever you want to feel at that moment." You know, all of our training in our society is to avoid those horrible experiences and avoid those horrible emotions. I understand why you are being strong, but it's okay if you don't want to be strong. For this piece, I wanted to make something which gave people permission to examine which way they wanted to go with their emotions.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Salle des Departes]

DAVID LANG: Well, I felt as ridiculous as it sounds, when this commission came my way, I felt like I'd been waiting my whole life to get this. And I got really happy about the opportunity to make this environment for mourning. That getting, you know, this miserable, horrible commission, which was about people in their most vulnerable moments, would actually make me so excited. But what I really liked about this was I really felt like I was trying to make the environment that would have been the right environment for the experiences I have already had. I never imagined it in a frivolous way. I could imagine somebody taking it very frivolously. I could imagine somebody thinking, "Here's my opportunity to write the tune that's gonna make people cry." But I certainly didn't want to do that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Salle des Departes]

JAD: That piece was produced by Jocelyn Gonzalez using David Lang's music. That's the music you heard in the background. Salle Des Departs. The place is actually in existence today at the hospital Raymond-Poincaré in Garches. I don't know exactly how to pronounce that. Garchaise? Garchet? In any case, you can learn more about it on our website, Radiolab.org. You know, at one point, just to sort of forward promote, David Lang talks about music's ability to kind of bypass your rational defenses and just kind of get in there and make you feel. And that is something we're gonna look at in the upcoming season, music's ability to move us, get into our head and then to never leave. Anyhow, that's coming up real soon.

JAD: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science foundation. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thank you for listening.

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