This cineconcert is a collaboration between composer David Lang (1991 Fellow, 2017 Resident) and filmmaker Bill Morrison: a screening and live performance of darker. 

Lang and Morrison have collaborated on numerous projects over the years, including numerous live ensemble performances with film projections: Carbon Copy Building (2000), The New Yorkers (2003), Shelter (2005), and Anatomy Theater (2016), as well as standalone films to pray (2006), Back to the Soil (2014), let me come in (2021), and The Village Detective: a song cycle (2021). Their ninth collaboration, spanning twenty-four years, is darker.

The concert and screening will take place at Parco della Musica, conducted by Tonino Battista and performed by the PMCE.

“Darker is in many ways more like an object than a piece of music,” writes Lang. “An extreme exploration of emotional restraint, it is a long, slow passing from something mostly even and pleasant to something a little less pleasant. My piece, like life, expends a lot of effort to go a very short distance, from beautiful to a little less beautiful, from a little light to something a little darker. darker is both highly detailed and relentlessly restrained, and it requires an almost superhuman focus to keep it moving, inexorably, towards its end. I am especially grateful to Brad Lubman, Lauren Radnofsky, and everyone in Ensemble Signal. My piece couldn't possibly work without their commitment, dedication, and musicality.

Morrison comments, “With darker, I took inspiration from David’s minimal score to create a film that, like the music, can exist both before and under the viewer’s eyelids. A slowly, lilting depiction of the Sublime, where actors, dancers, and acrobats reappear and then disappear back into a bubbling morass of time.”