Charlotte Master Chorale Delivers David Lang’s ‘poor hymnal’: A Reflection on Mercy and Measure

October 11, 2026

Lawrence Toppman

By Lawrence Toppman

Imagine you’re standing in front of one tower of a splendid cathedral. You admire the intricacy and beauty of the design. You note small details of the construction. You reflect, perhaps, on spiritual matters and your place in the universe.

You move on to the next tower and have the same experience. The third tower is like the second, the fourth tower like the third. After an hour of walking around the cathedral, you’ve been benumbed by 14 towers that blend vaguely in the mind into one monolith.

That’s how I felt at “poor hymnal,” a piece by David Lang that Charlotte Master Chorale – in this case, its Chamber Singers – delivered with the usual expressiveness, precision and authority in a season-opening performance at Christ Episcopal Church. I was reminded of the Chorale’s memorable rendition of Rachmaninov’s “Vespers” last February at another church, though the Russian composer has a greater gift for distinguishing among similar musical segments.

Both composers create masses of sound by layering voices while scarcely varying tempos. Both divide their works into about a dozen sections lasting a little over an hour with no break. Both utilize tenor and soprano/mezzo soloists sparingly. (I would praise Friday’s clear-voiced soloists, if the program had named them.) Both composers maintain a consistently serious, not to say somber, attitude toward the texts: Levity and even lightness have no place. Rachmaninov asks for God to show mercy toward man, Lang for man to show mercy toward his fellow man.

Lang titled his piece “poor hymnal” because he wrote a hymnal for “a community that did not want to forget our responsibilities to each other.” (He eschews capital letters in titles as a sign of his humility as a composer, though this attitude apparently doesn’t extend to his name.)

He wrote his own texts, inventing some and adapting some from the Bible, Gandhi and other writers. The humanitarian theme does not vary: We must heed the suffering, feed and clothe the poor, keep for ourselves only what we need and give away the surplus.

His words are often imprecatory and always optimistic:

“I know that no one is so high I have no path to them.”

“Whoever shuts his ears to the cry of the poor will also cry out and not be answered.”

This supposes a world where the mighty listen to the meek, where justice will be fairly apportioned, where want will be met with charity. We need this message now more than ever, when so much of civilization is hell-bent on proving these things untrue.

Lang frequently composes in short echoing or repeated phrases that build in intensity, sometimes through volume but just as often by stacking voices to give the sound extra weight. (He never accelerates to create tension, at least in this piece.) These repetitions may lull us into either a meditative state, if we keep focusing on the words, or inattention if we let the music take us out of ourselves. More than one of these repetitive texts began to sound like lullabies to me, until conductor Kenney Potter turned up the volume.

Potter’s singers are always a pleasure to hear, because they can do everything he asks, especially in this hand-picked smaller ensemble. I just wish Lang had asked more of them in the first place.