I had a truly powerful emotional and aesthetic experience while singing this past weekend, the kind I haven't had in a long time. I don't sing with a choir regularly right now, and I haven't for years, and I think the powerful moments I encountered this weekend reminded me how much I miss it. I still get those rare transcendent moments as a teacher/conductor with my students of course, but the ones you get as part of the choir, those moments the chase of which got me into the whole music education game in the first place? It's been a while. The experience in question was the co-premiere of a newly commissioned work, the wealth of nations by David Lang, at the Aspen Music Festival. I was invited to join Kantorei as an auxiliary singer and got to prepare and perform this work alongside my wife and a bunch of other talented musicians in a beautiful mountain town.
The work itself is fascinating, and important, with a text unlike anything I've come across as a choral musician. David Lang's intent was to write an oratorio using excerpts from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, considered by most to be the bible of capitalism and the urtext of modern economic thought. It is a dense work full of archaic language, but Lang was drawn to the concept of a using a serious, seminal text for an oratorio intended to serve as popular entertainment, in the fashion of Handel's Messiah. Lang said in an interview that his themes included how money connects people, and that his own politics were fairly moderate. I found this a really intriguing statement, because I feel that in the writing, performing, and reception of this work it has become something else entirely than what he claims he originally intended.
the wealth of nations, especially the second half, is incendiary. It incorporates texts from American voices such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass and Eugene Debs to make incredibly powerful statements against the hoarding of wealth and the domination of capital over labor. But I found some of its most damning indictments of capitalism occurred from Adam Smith's own words:
"Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. "
"Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary."
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
Two and a half centuries ago, Smith was saying the quiet part out loud. Capitalism by its very design needs a mass of poor at the bottom of the pyramid to hold up a few wealthy at the top-it cannot exist otherwise. And in a capitalist system, the government's purpose is not to protect the people, it is to protect property. It's all there in the philosophy that serves as the basis for our economic system. We are seeing it every day in the actions of federal, state, and local governments: the interests of the landlords, the billionaires, the AI data center builders, the corporations hoarding and consolidating wealth are protected, often through the use of force, at the expense of the fundamental rights and existence of all other human beings. Adam Smith believed that the freedom of all people to pursue self-interest would shape the best possible society, but even in his own writing he showed the understanding that this social system only works if the majority of people are left with less.
So needless to say, this work fired me up.
I was astonished at the powerful "Eat the Rich" sentiments that seemed to just be screaming at me from the page, and even more astonished when I listened to Lang's interview where he claimed to be more moderate when exploring these themes. Obviously my seething rage at our current political and economic climate affected my interpretation of the work, but again I feel that Lang's choice of texts made the messaging pretty clear. My opinion is that Lang probably did set out to make a more "moderate" work, exploring the themes of how money connects people and the relationship between capital, labor, and the government in a more intellectual fashion. However, the "tale changed in the telling" to paraphrase Tolkien, and I believe the texts he selected created a far more radical work than perhaps he originally intended to write. And certainly when that work fell into the hands of the actual musicians who would bring it to life, most of whom are not part of the wealthy ruling class, the work fully transformed into the forceful, even angry, treatise on inequality and exploitation that I believe it be.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the climax of the oratorio, a nine and a half minute movement where the chorus sings an almost unabridged statement to the court made by noted American Socialist Eugene Debs upon his sentencing of violating the Sedition Act in 1918. Lang removed all references to the word "socialism" from his version, but that only serves to make the statement more universally resonant (and hopefully will help reach some people who turn their brains off when they hear that word because they think it's bad and scary without knowing what it is). Some excerpts from this work that made me want to run through a damn brick wall in solidarity:
"I am thinking of...of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men."
"In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…"
And then of course there is this absolute banger (emphasis mine):
"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."
This was in 1918, folks. I cannot believe how all of this is relevant, and is hitting me right where I live here in 2026. It's all the same fight, only it has gotten so much worse. Good people who believe in justice and equity have been beating this drum and warning us for over a century of the logical end point of our social system. There was a social contract coming out of World War II that led to the creation of an incredibly prosperous middle class that delayed this inevitability for a while, but the people at the top have become so unfathomably greedy and heartless that they have systematically broken that social contract time and time again. Adam Smith's utopia does not account for individuals so robbed of empathy and social consciousness that they will literally burn the world to amass more wealth than they could ever need. We are at the bottom of the pyramid. I don't think there is anyone who might be reading this, anyone I know or who have ever met, who is closer to being part of the billionaire class than they are to being completely destitute. We have been lied to, all of us. We are nothing but expendable to the ruling class, because they are not afraid of us mobilizing and organizing.
So back to my musical experience. Saturday morning I was singing this movement, these very words which I have grown to love deep in my soul, with the composer in attendance. I could see him in the back of the hall, getting animated and emotional at our singing of this text. I let all of my pent up rage go as I was singing this part, and I felt completely overwhelmed by the beauty and power of singing this work with a community of other people all working together towards a common goal. I became a conduit and I felt the music and words moving through me in the desperate they would reach someone who needed to hear them.
But then came the transcendence.
You see, Eugene Debs didn't end his speech there. He had more to say:
"I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning."
Debs, and Lang, ends on a message of hope. That the tide will turn, that the darkest part of the night will pass. Maybe that's a naive statement considering those words were spoken over a century ago and the hoarding of wealth by those at the top has increased exponentially to an unfathomable level, but there in that dress rehearsal I felt the beauty and the weight of that optimism. I believed that tomorrow can be better. That perhaps tomorrow will be better. After I had let my anger and sense of justice carry me through singing the movement, I reached those words and found myself overcome in a different way. I couldn't even phonate. As I mouthed the words with no sound coming out I was awash in a profound awareness of the beauty around me: in the music, in the artistic process, in the story we were telling that is so very needed in our times. The experience quite literally left me breathless.
I am grateful for that experience, for the opportunity to dive deep into a work of such relevance and importance and to bring it to life with other musicians. That night, in performance, we got to deliver that message to an audience. Some folks walked out, though I might have had more to do with the concert running long and needing to make an 8pm dinner reservation for a lot of them than being offended by the work. But who knows? There were definitely rich folks in that crowd who could have felt very uncomfortable if they were paying attention. The people who stayed until the end, though, loved it. And I mean really loved it. I hope that many of them left inspired and changed, but at the very least, I know I did.
My soul needed this experience. Compared to how I felt earlier in my career, I have grown quite cynical about the power of music to "change the world." But I still believe that music can change people, and sometimes, people do change the world, even if it's only their little corner of it.
"The establishment of perfect justice, of perfect liberty, and of perfect equality is the very simple secret which most effectually secures the highest degree of prosperity to all"
-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
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