Independent Arts News Reporting 
Pictured Above: Donald Nally. Photo Credit: Charles Grove photography.
From the Conductor’s Perspective: In Conversation with Donald Nally of The Crossing
By: Lori Goldstein
In advance of The Crossing’s performance of David Lang’s poor hymnal, conductor Donald Nally speaks with Lori Goldstein about how the Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize winner’s new work was conceived and the impact it has made since its world premiere in 2023. On February 4, 2025, The McCarter Theatre brings The Crossing to Richardson Auditorium on the campus of Princeton University. The composer also offers several salient comments about his work
The Crossing–the three-time Grammy Award-winning chamber choir that Musical America has chosen as the 2024 Ensemble of the Year–has built its reputation on performing new works by contemporary composers. In its 20-year history, The Crossing has released 31 recordings of those new works, the latest being Grammy Award and Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang’s poor hymnal. It is one thing to listen to a recording of poor hymnal. It is quite another to witness a live performance, as I did on December 22 at The Crossing’s “home,” the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. If you manage to get a ticket to The Crossing’s February 4 concert sponsored by McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, prepare to be, as I was, in a state of awe.
poor hymnal is a 14-movement piece for unaccompanied choir, with moments of silence as mesmerizing as those of sound. Each movement is a hymn, a poem of piety and simplicity, which David Lang composed–inspired by his reading of texts drawn from the Old and New Testaments; the words of such thinkers as Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, and Barack Obama; and his personal collection of old church hymnals. When Donald Nally, conductor of The Crossing, commissioned* the work for its premiere in December 2023, he sat down with David to discuss what its topic would be. Donald recalls that he told David, “We want to make a big piece, a concert-length piece, and we want it to have real resonance in the world that we’re actually living in right this minute. And from there he [David] said, ‘I want to make a hymnal, I want to think about what practice would be like for a community that puts the most challenging among us at the center of their practice, and what their hymnal would sound like. And then I want to write that hymnal to find out what the answer to that question is.’”
Pictured Above: The poor hymnal album cover. Photo Credit: Contributed.
The songs center around themes of charity, helping those in poverty, showing love and kindness to even a stranger in dire need. For example, in movement 2, open your hands (after deuteronomy 15), we hear, “if among you/there is a poor man/one of your brothers/don’t harden your heart/don’t close your hand/open your heart/open your hand to him/open your hand.” Movement 3, our hearts tell us (after psalm 27 and mahatma gandhi) contains the only explicit mention of God: “some of us are hungry, my god, some of us are hungry/so hungry that/some of us can’t see your face/unless we see it in a piece of bread.” After hearing poor hymnal, I wrote in my journal that the singers represented a community devoted to aiding each other and especially those less fortunate–not to get closer to God, but to find their humanity.
“There are so many things in our world that are trying to separate us from each other now—social media, politics, etc.,” says the composer. “We are constantly being divided and conquered. Sometimes it is important just to stand up and affirm that we do owe something to each other, that we are capable of doing good, capable of building something beautiful, together. It sounds trite when I say it, but it’s true. We need all of us to care about each other, all the time.”
On January 6, 2025, I spoke with conductor Donald Nally via Zoom, while he was taking an inter-concert respite in Spoleto, Italy. He explained the history between composer and conductor: David Lang has written ten other scores commissioned for and performed by The Crossing. When Donald received the score for poor hymnal just a few weeks before its world premiere in Philadelphia, in December 2023, he recalled that “I just felt very moved by it, not just by the subject matter and the words, but also [by] what David was personally doing musically, knowing a lot of his works and having participated in many of them…I felt his commitment to this level of simplicity and the sparsity of it…he takes these texts and distills them down to what he feels is their essence. And I felt that every single movement was the essence of that affect, in a way like successful Baroque music.”
Pictured Above: The Crossing – poor hymnal. Photo Credit: Naomi Bennett.
How did The Crossing’s 24 singers react to poor hymnal? “I could tell that they were feeling the same way, that this was something that we wanted to live with for a long time,” Donald said. “And when I put it in front of audiences, they said to me afterward, more than any other piece that I’ve ever done, I want to hear it again right away.” In 2023, the world premiere performances were held in Philadelphia on December 15 at the Iron Gate Theatre at Penn Live Arts and on December 17 at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill.
After those concerts, Donald decided he wanted to reprise poor hymnal, “which we never do.” Each new season presents new music, that is the mission of The Crossing. “We never bring back a piece of music within a year or two or three, and I just said I want to bring this piece back right away and I want to do it at Christmas 2024, because I feel like everybody who said that is going to mean it. And to be honest, I feel like it turned out to be true, that it’s really, really poignant for the time.” And by ‘time,’ he told me he was thinking politically. “So that’s why I felt that it needed to be revisited and it needed to be revisited really right away.”
I asked Donald if he has a favorite movement, a spiritual touchstone, in poor hymnal. It is movement 11: what remains (after the sayings of the fathers and matthew 6). It’s one of the two movements that have distinct solos, this one in the voice of a baritone singer. It asks the question, ‘what remains when we are gone?’
“I’m almost halfway through my sixties, I just turned 64,” said Donald. “That question is very much on my mind. Not legacy, because I don’t really care. Death is death and everybody has it. But in terms of what am I doing now that will last, and the answer is in the piece, is, my good deeds will remain. Not my body, not my song, not my voice, not my gold, not my silver, all those things, none of that. My good deeds will remain.”
“Movement 11 demands that you shift in your seat a little bit, you find yourself asking this question. Because David has this way of writing music, that he creates these contexts in which you focus on the text, and you’re not all that aware sometimes of what’s going on musically. And that’s on purpose, because he really wants you to have the room to reflect on your own experience.”
Pictured Above: David Lang. Photo Credit: Peter Serling.
“Sometimes when you make a piece like this,” explains David Lang, “a moment jumps out while you are writing it that seems especially meaningful, and extremely personal, as if you are making the music just to have the opportunity to say that one important thing to yourself. That happened for me in movement 6: I know I should (after h.a. walter). In this movement I rewrote the words to a real hymn, I would be true, by H.A. Walter. It has a list of things ‘I would’ be—true, pure, strong, etc.—but I didn’t think that was strong enough. I rewrote them all as ‘I know I should be true,’ or pure, or strong, because that emphasizes more that we all already know how to be better to each other. And if we know that already, then why aren’t we? That is probably my favorite part.”
How different was it, returning to poor hymnal in 2024 and now 2025, from when The Crossing debuted it in 2023? “This sounds ridiculous but it’s true,” said Donald. “I’m older, and if you’re a thinking, curious person, which I hope I am, then your world view is constantly evolving, and I hear these words in a different way.” Donald reminisced about Election Day, November 5, 2024, when he worked the polls in a Republican section of Bucks County, PA. “I left at three in the afternoon, convinced that Harris was going to lose…it left me with an awakening that I am now in the minority, and the message, for example, that’s in poor hymnal is something that I have completely failed to share…I and my 50 million [Democrats] have failed in that…And so I hear these words differently because I hear them as an invitation for me to consider who I am in the world.”
Donald clarified that the music he makes is not meant to be judgmental of the morality of the people listening to it or singing it. “We need music to ask the questions about our own lives, to tell stories that we recognize ourselves in, and if we choose to ask questions about that, fine. And if we don’t, we go on that journey because there’s an emotional aspect of it we recognize in ourselves.” Donald told me that he notices he’s being quieter, and he concurred that poor hymnal is the ‘voice’ that he hopes will reach listeners.
Besides the two concerts in Philadelphia in December 2024, poor hymnal made its New York premiere on December, 21, 2024, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. Donald recalled that “all three performances ended with a rather remarkable silence. This was especially notable in New York, because it took quite some time for the audience to settle. There was a lot of shuffling and coughing, including late seating between movements 2 and 3. All that noise was particularly amplified on the Tully Hall stage. That was a bit disconcerting, with a piece as soft and intimate as poor hymnal. But about two-thirds of the way through, the hall seemed to breathe out and listen in a different way, and it was really quite lovely. David was there and was happy.”
“Hearing my piece at Lincoln Center was very exciting, and a kind of proof-of-concept for me,” David stated. “In a way, the piece is about how music participates in creating a spiritual environment. Up until that point, all the performances of poor hymnal had been in churches, where choirs often sing, and that we already associate with religion, so Lincoln Center was a test of whether the music would still feel spiritual in a decidedly secular space, which I think it did.”
The recording of poor hymnal was released on December 13, 2024, by Cantaloupe Music. In the liner notes, the composer explains: “This piece is trying to say: The reason we are coming together is to remember how important we are to each other, and to remember how important it is that we take care of each other.”
Recording a new piece of music is a very different process from performing it. “We’re literally making a record of the time. We have the composer in the room, and we want to try to get it as close to what [the composer] thought it should be like as possible,” said Donald. “A huge part of why I do what I do is because of storytelling, and the phrase that I’m always running after basically is, we are here, and this is what it feels like to be here, and maybe someday people will go, ‘we were here, and this is what it felt like when we were here.” Ironically the last lyric of poor hymnal is “here we are.”
As to David Lang’s participation in the recording process, Donald commented, “One of the things that’s really smart about him is that he has a very clear idea of what a composer can affect in a rehearsal or recording process, and what he cannot. And he stays in his lane in a really fantastically collaborative and supportive way. He also feels very much that when he writes a piece of music and gives it to someone else, it’s theirs to do with what they’re going to do with it, and he doesn’t get involved.” Donald recalled that they had some minor disagreements, but once Donald explained his rationale for particular elements of the piece, David yielded.
The December 2024 release date means that poor hymnal will be eligible for Grammy nomination in 2025, which is likely, as David’s The Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. In the meantime, the recording of Ochre, which features the music of Ayanna Woods, George E. Lewis, and Caroline Shaw, represents Donald Nally and The Crossing’s 10th nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance. The nomination puts them in a singular category, now holding the record for the most consecutive years of nominations, previously held by American choral legend Robert Shaw. The 67th Grammy Awards will be announced February 2, 2025. The Crossing has won three Grammys already: in 2018, for Gavin Bryar’s The Fifth Century; in 2019, for Lansing McLoskey’s Zealot Canticles; and in 2023, for Born, music of Edie Hill and Michael Gilbertson. Donald is mystified as to why they have had such success in this arena. “You can advertise amongst your colleagues and Grammy voters, for your consideration. We never do any of that.” Quite simply, the artistry speaks for itself.
Pictured Above: The Crossing at Lincoln Center Photo Credit: Brittany Saunders.
After the February 4 concert at Richardson Auditorium, on the campus of Princeton University, The Crossing will perform poor hymnal at the University of Iowa on February 13, at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on February 14, and at the First Plymouth Congregational Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, on February 16.
For tickets to the February 4 concert, visit the McCarter Theatre website at mccarter.org.
*poor hymnal was co-commissioned for The Crossing by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting, Jill and Loren Bough, and Peggy and Mark Curchack. Its premiere performances were made possible through a gift from Carol Westfall.
