674. How Does a Composer Feel After the World Premiere? | Freakonomics Radio

Great. Then depressed. Then great again. Stephen Dubner gets the full story from David Lang; we also hear from some fans, and the New York Philharmonic’s president. The math and the aftermath of wealth of nations. (Part two of a series (https://freakonomics.com/david-langs-the-wealth-of-nations/).) You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-does-a-composer-feel-after-the-world-premiere/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: https://stephendubner.substack.com/subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  At the end of March, the composer David Lang debuted a modern piece of music set to a 250-year-old book, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

• 0:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  It had four sold-out performances by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Last week on the show, we heard from Lang about the origins of the piece, and we sat in on a few rehearsals. We also attended one of the performances.

• 0:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Afterward, we spoke with some audience members in the lobby.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  I'm here on a band trip, and this was one of the activities, so yeah. I really like all of the crescendos and how it was all building up to like a really big moment at the end.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I think it actually speaks to what is most beautiful about humans, that we feel better when we help others. I think that's a beautiful emotional and pragmatic loop.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  This is the kind of piece that Philharmonic should be doing. It was also interesting watching Gustavo Dudamel up close. He was really into it. I mean, he was really inside the piece.

• 1:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  The published reviews were also positive. Stacy Vanek Smith, writing for Bloomberg, said that David Lang had shown that economics, often reduced to stock tickers and earnings reports, can in fact be profoundly human. And what about Lang himself? How did he feel about the first performances of his new composition? Well, he was pleased and proud, at least for a little while.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Last week, I was a superstar. This week, I'm nothing.

• 2:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, the global economy has changed a great deal since Adam Smith, but the underlying lessons may be more pertinent than ever.

• 2:12Speaker 05

  There is a human dimension and a human cost to everything we do, and we need to wake up to that.

• 2:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  The math and aftermath of Wealth of Nations, starting now.

• 2:38Speaker 06

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 2:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  I caught up with David Lang about a week after the last of the four performances of The Wealth of Nations, and I asked what it felt like to work on a big, new piece like this for years and then hear it come to life and then go away.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  There's always this post-experience depression, and the bigger the piece and the bigger the triumph, the deeper the hole.

• 3:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  But, I mean, you have to feel it was a great success, no?

• 3:23Speaker 04

  I always go into these things thinking that the definition of success would be to come out and not have everyone think that I'm incompetent.

• 3:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a way to set the bar low.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  I want to set the bar low because there's so many things that can go wrong, you know? And my music repeats a lot, so if you make a mistake, it could be like, there's 10 minutes of this mistake.

• 3:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when you say a mistake, what would that actually be or sound like? And would we know?

• 3:46Speaker 04

  I'm not sure you would know, but I would know. If I orchestrated a chord wrong or if I asked someone to do something that I ended up not liking. And it's really easy to make those mistakes. They're, you know, like 1,000 little tiny detail things, and they really can affect how the piece feels to me. Maybe not to anybody else, because the piece didn't exist before. Nobody knows what it could have been. But I have a little checklist in my head of all the things that I might have done wrong.

• 4:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was on that checklist?

• 4:17Speaker 04

  There was that movement that we talked about last time, the woolen coat, which I really wanted to make sure that it sounded as emotional and as full to everybody else as it did to me, singing it at home in my studio. And I was really happy that that worked out really well. The solo things, like I didn't know if having Fleur singing these arias with no accompaniment, if they would be so emotional.

• 4:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lang is talking about the mezzo soprano Fleur Baron. She was one of the two vocal soloists in Wealth of Nations, along with the bass baritone Devon Tynes. Here is one of the arias that Lang was thinking of.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  But in my heart, what I hoped would happen would be that all those changes of scale would end up kind of focusing what happened to our attention as we listen. But you should tell me what you thought. I mean, I've been living with this piece for years. You just heard it the first time, so I'd be very curious to know what you thought.

• 5:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  I thought it was wonderful. I thought it was thought provoking, but also totally engaging. It was deep, but accessible. There's a lot of different movements, obviously, and a lot of different emotions and a lot of different colors in the music. And you'll forgive me if I speak about music in a language that isn't quite the language of, you know, musicians or composers, but I found the music spiky and kind of punky at times, but also very delicate. I found the piece celebratory, but also mournful. I found it confident, but also seeking. And I found I walked out of there with a new appreciation for Adam Smith,

• 6:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  which is not nothing, because I had quite a bit of an appreciation for him and a pretty big appreciation for David Lang.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  What's weird, you know, being a young composer, you try to learn things and figure things out, and you're always aware of what you're trying that you've never done before. When you become an old composer, and I can say that as a senior citizen, you know things instinctively that you're not really paying attention to any longer. So these issues of pacing and depth, there are all sorts of really important things that I don't. Think about as intensely as I used to think about them. I just trust that I will know how they work. And so for me, one of the really fun things was thinking that I was going to have an experience that had a particular shape, like this giant enthusiastic Adam Smith stuff with a full orchestra at the beginning.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  And that gradually, as the piece went on, it would taper down to these more personal American thoughts. And we would get someplace that would be, as you said, optimistic, but also kind of really trying to pay attention to what's going on around us. And I wasn't really sure that that was going to work. But for me, that's the thing that I was really satisfied with. The shape of the intellectual argument I was really happy with.

• 7:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  I had a lot of fun being at rehearsals and there were many things that really impressed me. First of all, I'm just blown away by how good the New York Philharmonic is and their singers. When I heard the first choral rehearsal and then the first orchestra rehearsal, it sounded so good, I thought, oh, well, everybody must have rehearsed a bunch before already together. But in fact, they haven't. It does seem like an absolute miracle that a person like you could sit in your studio in Soho for a bunch of years and write dots on the paper. And then one afternoon in March of 2026, you know, 48 vocalists and then a whole

• 8:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  bunch of musicians and a couple soloists get together and they turn this two dimensional thing into not even three, like six. Part of my thrill of watching you get enmeshed in this and watching you get happier and happier during the course of rehearsals. Part of it was about the mystery and the magic of that, honestly. And so when I say it was inspiring and moving, the piece itself was, but I guess I also see the creation of a thing like this representing something really good about humankind that we're able to do this.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  I love that you say that because. I really think that that's what you heard during the rehearsal was you heard what's good in people. Everyone has their individual part. One of the things you do as a composer is you're actually writing a series of instructions for 100 different people in this piece. And everybody has their own instruction and they sit at home before the first rehearsal and they practice their own instruction. So they have an idea of what they're responsible for, but they have no idea if they're going to be able to make something good with someone else when they get together. And so the process of rehearsal isn't about them learning the

• 9:21Speaker 04

  notes. The process of rehearsal is them learning how to be a community that comes together to build this thing.

• 9:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you, the composer, were there in the room for all the rehearsals. I'm guessing that for all the performers, the chorus, the soloists, the musicians, the conductor, that they're accustomed to playing music by dead composers at least 90% of the time, right?

• 9:46Speaker 04

  That's absolutely right.

• 9:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you're, you know, unless something had gone really wrong during rehearsals, you were going to be alive at the end of it. And I was very curious to see how undiva-like you were. Both the conductor of the vocal chorus and then the conductor of the orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel, they would often turn to you and ask a question or defer to, how do you like that? How's that sounding? Should we try this? What surprised me, I'll be honest, was how I'd say 99% of the time, you'd give them a big thumbs up and say, beautiful, it's beautiful. And I wondered, did you really feel that way or was it somewhat strategic? Do you feel like your work is done and now if you start nitpicking, you're just going

• 10:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  to make yourself a pain in the neck? And therefore you're just going to be positive and encouraging like that? Or were you really feeling that?

• 10:35Speaker 04

  I think it's a little bit of everything. You know, I'd never heard the piece before either. If I had rehearsed with them for a month, I might actually be able to say, oh, this one note, can you bring it out a little more? I might have more specific comments. But I'm only able at that moment to take in the overall shape. But I also think they are really great and they are musical and their job is to take those notes that look like nothing on a piece of paper and they know how to breathe a certain kind of life into it. So even if they are not breathing the kind of life into it that I imagined, it already starts at a very enlivened space. And so I

• 11:18Speaker 04

  just got super happy from the whole thing. There was one moment on one day of rehearsal though where Gustavo was asking for detailed notes about every movement. And this sent me into a little bit of a terror because I realized he was going to go, movement one, what are your comments? Then movement two, what are your comments? Then I realized I better have comments for movement three and movement six and whatever. So as he's fixing the things that I just pointed out, I quickly ran to my score and thumb through and I went, okay, I gotta say something for movement five, right? I felt like then the pressure was on.

• 11:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounds as though you attended every performance, correct?

• 11:54Speaker 04

  I went to every rehearsal and every performance, yes.

• 11:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was the experience like for you over the course of those four performances? Were you listening in the same way for the same things?

• 12:04Speaker 04

  I got very relaxed. I don't usually enjoy myself this much. The first night, the piece really felt like it was long, not like it was too long, but I felt the massive quality of the piece. And every night, it really felt like it got faster, even though it didn't get faster. It's just I got used to the trajectory of the piece. And by the end, I couldn't believe that we were at the end already. The quality of the performance, not the musical quality, but what the players, the singers and the soloists found in the piece changed a little bit every night. Some of the nights were much more emotional and I thought that was really interesting. It's like they got to the point very quickly where

• 12:46Speaker 04

  everyone could make a great sound and could make the argument for the piece. But I think what happened those four nights of performances is that Gustavo is finding something different. He's bringing something out. He's looking at a different bunch of players in a particular moment to give them confidence and make them emerge.

• 13:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  As I was watching rehearsals, I got to thinking and recognizing really how phenomenally expensive it is to produce something like this. A lot of people, a lot of real estate, probably not enough rehearsal for your taste, but still a lot of performances where there's no ticket sales and so on. And you know, music like this today, as it was a couple hundred years ago, is really only possible because of patronage, because of wealthy individuals and institutions. And this piece has some harsh words for wealthy individuals and institutions. Did you ever feel that the piece was a little bit biting the hand that feeds it and pieces like it?

• 13:46Speaker 04

  First of all, I think it costs a lot of money in our society to do bad things, too.

• 13:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's on your list of bad things?

• 13:54Speaker 04

  I think that list is very long. The idea that you might actually be able to take a bunch of money and do something for good, that doesn't sound like a bad thing. I really would hate to live in a world where all of the good and virtuous things have to be done very cheaply. I was sort of worried that maybe some of the board members would get mad at me, but actually several of the board members came up and thanked me. We're at a time right now where maybe there's such a division and a distance between the people who have billions and billions of dollars and actually control the world and the people who only have $400 million. I actually think the billionaires are trying to make the people who have $400 million feel really bad about themselves. So it could be that it is a

• 14:39Speaker 04

  time when there are actually things that we can say together for a large group of people about how money can be better spent.

• 14:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  This got me to wondering how the New York Philharmonic spends its money. The Philharmonic, like the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, and all the other arts organizations at Lincoln Center, all the arts organizations everywhere, really, are struggling with rising costs, falling ticket revenues, and let's call it unpredictable philanthropy. The Metropolitan Opera, whose annual budget is around $330 million, had been working on a partnership with the Saudi Arabian government that would bring in $200 million, but the Saudis just pulled out.

• 15:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Philharmonic with a budget of around $90 million is in better shape, in part because they have just landed Gustavo Dudamel, who is a superstar, as its music and artistic director. The Philharmonic also has a new president and CEO, Matias Tarnipolski, who has a longstanding friendship with Dudamel.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  The New York Philharmonic is on the cusp of a transformative new era.

• 15:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Tarnipolski to explain how the Philharmonic decides to invest in a big, new piece like David Lang's Wealth of Nations.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  It makes sense as we are approaching the 250th birthday of America as an organization that is approaching itself almost 200 years to think, how are we going to recognize this moment in not just American history, but global history through what we do, which is music? So that began a conversation with David, with Gustavo Dudamel, with my colleagues at the orchestra. And that led to David's pitch to us about something inspired by a great moment in musical history, cultural history, Handel's Messiah, and a great moment in economic, and let's not forget literary, history in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

• 16:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you, for a moment, maybe, just think that was a crazy idea instead of a great idea?

• 16:48Speaker 05

  Are you kidding? I thought it was a crazy idea until I sat down and started hearing the rehearsals. I mean, really, I walked in here, and I say this with great love for David and my colleagues, like, what are we doing? The Wealth of Nations? Handel's Messiah? But, you know, there's a lesson there, which we should remind ourselves, trust the artists, because they know. David knows, and the musicians of the orchestra know, and Gustavo, and, you know, de Vontines, and Flair Baran, and the fantastic chorus, they know. You were there, and you were struck by the awesome power of that piece of music.

• 17:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  How many times did you see or hear part or all of Wealth of Nations?

• 17:30Speaker 05

  I heard four performances all the way through, and I loved every minute of every one. I thought it's a magnificent piece of music. And I was surprised by my response because I really did think, how is this going to work? The music, beautiful. The choral writing, beautiful. The narration, the text, the approach to the text was really clear. I kept discovering new things. And in retrospect, I realized that the first half was the narration of Adam Smith's treatise through music. And then the second half was the effects. I want some bread. I need shelter. Oh, my goodness. I mean, it's so powerful, the second half in light of the first. I mean, like devastating.

• 18:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  What it made me wonder is, especially since so much of the Philharmonic's revenues come from philanthropy and philanthropists, and those are often the kind of people who have the concentrated wealth that is being decried in a piece like this. How do you think about how some of your most generous patrons are hearing that?

• 18:38Speaker 05

  It was a searing indictment to our society today, that piece. But the people who give money to the New York Philharmonic in philanthropy, and for that matter, in tickets as well, care deeply about this enormous public and civic good that is this beautiful orchestra. They care deeply about their city.

• 19:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I mean, were you concerned at all? Did any patrons come up to you after any of the four nights and say, you know, wonderful piece, Matthias. I'm always thrilled to be here. But boy, oh, boy, did he lay into us?

• 19:17Speaker 05

  Nobody. Nobody. I was kind of ready for it. Look, people have their eyes open to what's happening in the world.

• 19:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you look back at history, and you look at particularly turbulent times in history, and you look at the art from those times, you see that the artists were very often not just describing the turmoil of the moment, but seeing, you know, holding the mirror up to society in a way that just nobody else does.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  It is the writers and the poets and the musicians who get silenced when authoritarian regimes take hold. David Lang is a fearless, fearless artist, but he's not laboring under the conditions Shostakovich labored under of great suffering or Prokofiev.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  He's not fearing for his life, and I can't imagine how that impacts an artist, though I have a sense, listening to the Shostakovich symphonies and string quartets.

• 20:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you had to summarize the theme or the message of David Lang's Wealth of Nations, all in, the music, the text from Adam Smith and others, the intensity of the writing and the performance, what is this piece saying to you?

• 20:25Speaker 05

  Things are not what they seem. Every word and act matters. There is a human dimension and a human cost to everything we do, and we need to wake up to that.

• 20:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Once awakened, do what then?

• 20:44Speaker 05

  Once awakened, don't accept the suffering of others as okay.

• 20:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  We will be right back after the break. This is Freakonomics Radio, and I'm Stephen Dubner.

• 21:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  David Lang told me he was going through some post-premiere depression after the New York run of his Wealth of Nations oratorio, although, I'll be honest, he didn't seem depressed to me.

• 21:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's talk about the audience's response. Tell me how it felt for you.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  I really didn't know what people would think. I thought I might get polite applause because I did spend a lot of time thinking about the libretto, and I thought there was something of a kind of essay-type narrative structure.

• 21:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

• 21:39Speaker 04

  That's a good thing, I think. It's kind of vaguely and indirectly making an argument that leads someplace. And it could be that people could appreciate it and like it and enjoy it and have a good time with the music and not feel roused by it. And people got very enthusiastic about it. I was really, really, really excited that people enjoyed it that much.

• 21:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm curious if you had any conversations with either people you knew or didn't know about Adam Smith's writings themselves, whether anyone said something like, wow, no idea that he circumscribed this idea this way, or anything like that?

• 22:12Speaker 04

  I think the more people knew about Adam Smith, the more they came up and told me about things I missed, or like, how come you didn't put in the pin factory? I never got anyone who came up and said, you know nothing about economics. Which I was expecting. So I was really happy about that. Maybe those people just stayed away from me.

• 22:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  When we published a Freakonomics Radio series on Adam Smith a few years ago, we interviewed Glory Liu, a political scientist at Georgetown and author of a book called Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism. When Liu heard that there was a new oratorio based on Wealth of Nations, she came to New York to see it. We caught up with her afterwards and asked if she thought that Lang had omitted any important parts of the book.

• 23:01Speaker 07

  Why wasn't there a piece on the digression on silver? Just kidding, just kidding.

• 23:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  This silver digression in Wealth of Nations is a long and data-heavy section of the book that even Smith fans find tedious. Glory Liu loved David Lang's Wealth of Nations.

• 23:19Speaker 07

  It exceeded all of my expectations. It was urgent and curious and dark and heroic and hopeful. I really did not expect to feel such a range of emotions.

• 23:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  In her book, Liu argues that Adam Smith is often used selectively by the right, by the left, by free-market evangelists, and by their critics. Everyone wants a piece of Smith, but not everyone wants the whole Smith. She thought David Lang's piece avoided the usual traps.

• 23:52Speaker 07

  It's so easy to get a one-sided version of Smith, the one that most people are familiar with, and I bet the one that most people walking in these doors had the expectation they were going to hear. The triumphant story of the invisible hand of the market over the heavy hand of government, that self-interest is the universal force of human coordination. And yes, there are elements, right? But the fact that Lang was able to make that so much more complex, it wasn't a simple message. It challenged your preconceptions of...

• 24:24Speaker 07

  Who Smith is, what he stands for, what the concepts mean, and how these conversations evolve over time. Like, I was so blown away by it. What I really hope will happen is that people are going to have these really frank conversations about what they saw and what they encountered, and an interpretation of Adam Smith that they didn't know was possible. And I hope that that changes the conversation. I think that that's how change happens. You change the way people talk about an idea. You change the way people talk about the history of an idea. And you change the people who are included in that conversation.

• 24:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here's another audience member. Her name is Tracy Fenton.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  I actually work in the finance industry. I thought it was incredibly moving, really moving.

• 25:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fenton did object to a passage that was drawn from a courtroom speech by the socialist leader Eugene Debs.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  The big line about people who do absolutely nothing becoming millionaires. I can't say that's true. Being behind the scenes and knowing what the intelligent movement of money does for so many people. I'm a lot less black and white than I used to be.

• 25:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fenton was also thinking about how a piece of music like this gets paid for.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I can only assume how this was financed by benefactors who made their money in the finance world, or from their grandfathers who made their money in the finance world.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  I knew I wanted, from the beginning, I wanted to end with the Debs, because I felt like that's a strong pull.

• 26:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that, again, is David Lang.

• 26:10Speaker 04

  It actually really helped me writing the piece.

• 26:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is Movement 17's statement to the court.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 26:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which, we should say, and I didn't know this, I was surprised to learn this, this was a piece you'd written about 15 years ago.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wrote that piece a long time ago. And it's slightly cheating to stick old pieces into new pieces.

• 26:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  I did have this debate after with family and friends.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Oh, really? Whether it was cheating?

• 26:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, I brought it up. And I said, you know, I felt this movement was incredibly... Strong, powerful, interesting, dark. It was a lot of things. And I was saying to my friends and family, you know, I don't know how I feel about this, that one of the main components of this larger piece was a piece that David had written and had been performed years earlier. So does that feel lazy, like cheating? Or is it more? Then we started to talk about your piece in relation to Messiah. And of course, Handel was a great re-user of pieces, as I'm guessing many other composers of that era were. And the consensus, I'll have you know, among my group of people was that, no, no, no, no, not lazy. This is what a writer does. You'll be happy to know I was the only naysayer there.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  I definitely was worried that people who knew that piece might think that it was a little bit of cheating. But I'm in my studio, thinking my own thoughts. And this piece really is about me trying to figure out what I think and what I believe. And so it automatically is on some level in dialogue with everything else I've ever thought, and all the other music that I've already written. So it didn't seem that out of place to me. The idea of a finished piece is a more recent idea in music history, that something is done and we treasure it. You know, composers were very practical.

• 27:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how do you feel? Because you have Eugene V. Debs saying, I am opposed to the social system in which we live. I believe in a fundamental change, but if possible, by peaceable and orderly means. Does that fit David Lang as well?

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, basically. I would like to have change happen peaceably. That would be really great.

• 28:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  What kind of change?

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Oh, I don't know. I'm not a politician. So I don't want to even go there. What I tried to do in this piece was to make a piece where I wouldn't be telling you that there's one right way to answer that question. You almost got me to do it. You almost tricked me into saying what the right answer is.

• 28:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  The reason I ask is that I believe, and I'm hardly the first person to believe, that especially in a time of chaos and partisanship and so on, it is often the artist who, from a very different vantage point, will say something, write something, paint something.

• 28:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  That will make us all stand back and say, oh, I see. You really are holding a mirror up in a way that I wasn't able to. I suspect that, deep down, you feel that way about yourself with this piece.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  I guess I feel like this is a kind of mirror, but music is not really about specific things. You know, music is about how we feel about things. When we talk about the community, which is created by people who pass money from one person to the next, how do we feel about that? There isn't necessarily a way to change how that system operates until we deal with how we react emotionally to how that system makes us feel. And we try not to pay attention to it. We try not to pay attention to the life of the people who sell us things or the life of the people that we sell to. We think that everything is frictionless.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  We're trying to live more and more in a world where we never meet the people who take care of us. We never meet the people that we employ.

• 29:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  The invisible hand is just taking care of it all.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. And maybe that's not such a good thing. You know, maybe we need to pay attention to what all of those hands are contributing to each other. And if you do pay attention to all those hands, maybe you care about how those people live. Maybe you care about whether those people have enough money. Maybe you care about, are their children being educated? Are they able to go to the hospital when they need to? Maybe there's a whole network of things that we are trying to keep ourselves from seeing.

• 30:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, what happens to Wealth of Nations next? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. You can follow us in all the places that you follow things. We will be right back.

• 30:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  To what degree is your new Oratoria Wealth of Nations a "religious peace"? When I think of Messiah, plainly, it is a religious peace in that it's a religious tale and religious figures and so on. On the other hand, it was first performed in a music hall, not in a church. And the fact that it has lived on so long and in such a beloved way, to me, goes well beyond what we think of as "religious music."

• 31:20Speaker 04

  I think any situation where you can imagine a better world is kind of like a religious or a substitute religious peace. That idea that we could have a better life than the life we are living, that's a very beautiful and, I think, necessary idea in order to live. I do think that that's something that religion has, but it's not the only place where you can find that message. But I do think that that's the message that's behind this piece. And I do think it's the message behind that book. I think The Wealth of Nations is Adam Smith's idea, not just a description of how things work and not just charting how things evolved, but it's his imagination about how everyone in the world gets along. I try to, in my studies,

• 32:05Speaker 04

  think of how what I learn can make me a better contemporary American. A lot of these ideas that I have about looking around and seeing hypocrisy and looking around and imagining a utopian world, you know, they're all things that come from reading the Bible and seeing how far away we are from a world we might possibly be in or imagining how living up to the standards that I think my religion and probably all religions hold for us might actually be useful. And why is it we don't live up to those standards that we profess for ourselves?

• 32:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  On the other hand, you've read enough fiction and nonfiction and history to know that most utopian visions end very poorly in reality.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Absolutely. This is where I think religion comes in and faith comes in, at least for me. Is when you are exhorted as many times as we are to welcome the stranger and to be kind to the poor and to help people who need our help. We're exhorted so many times because the texts know that we are not actually doing this as much as we could be doing it.

• 33:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  The first piece of yours that I heard was this piece called Just, which is, I was just taken aback by it. I found it unbelievably beautiful and sublime and mysterious. And it was a case of religious text set to music. So I wonder if you could talk about that. You mentioned that you are a religious person. What does that mean? And how does that shape your relationship to religious texts that you set to music?

• 33:51Speaker 04

  I was raised in a moderately religious environment, to moderately religious parents.

• 33:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  These are Jewish immigrants to LA, is that right?

• 34:01Speaker 04

  That's right. And I am myself, you know, intermittently religious, I would say. I go through periods where I get closer and farther away.

• 34:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  What does a close period feel like?

• 34:12Speaker 04

  Well, I've gone through periods where I've, you know, kept completely kosher and I've gone through periods where I've gotten farther away.

• 34:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  And do you study and go to shul, things like that?

• 34:21Speaker 04

  I have studied and I have gone to shul. I've never had a lobster. I've never had a pork chop. You know, there's certain things that are important to me. And I think that trying to understand my background is where my religious interest comes in, not in the practice of being Jewish, but in trying to uncover what being Jewish could mean.

• 34:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you had to describe the essence of Judaism as you've lived it, and the way that it works its way into your work, and let's say you had to describe that essence while standing on one foot.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Which is a very Jewish thing.

• 34:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which is a very Jewish thing. What would you say?

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. I think the thing that I've gotten out of all of my study and my religious background, such as it is, is that there are rules that you can imagine living by. That you can aim for and with some work and effort and discipline and commitment, you might be able to achieve some of those. And some of those things may lead us into a better way of dealing with each other. So for me, I think my moral compass comes from things that I learned, or at least I think I learned from my religion.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  I would like to think that Judaism has prescriptions for how everyone in the world should live, not just Jews. It has prescriptions for how Jews are supposed to live with everyone else in the world. And I would think that those prescriptions that I have inherited are universal. And when I see them not universal, it creates a great rift inside of me.

• 36:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  This piece of yours, Wealth of Nations, has 18 movements and 18 happens to be a pretty significant number in Judaism. It represents the word chay or life, alive, living. Is that a coincidence? Do a lot of your pieces have 18 movements, maybe?

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Not a lot of my pieces have 18 movements, but I definitely felt like when I got to around 16 or 17, 18 began looking pretty good.

• 36:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so for movement 18, the final section, you go back to the text of Adam Smith. This is after we've been hearing texts from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass and Maria W. Stewart and FDR. Walk me through this final movement, which is called "The Very Simple Secret."

• 36:54Speaker 04

  I was so happy when I found this in the Wealth of Nations because it really seemed like an essential statement of what you want out of your government and what you want out of your society. Here's the whole text to that movement. "The secret." The secret. "The very simple secret."

• 37:19Speaker 04

  No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor. 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. And to me, it was so powerful to see that because I had assumed that because of the

• 38:01Speaker 04

  way Adam Smith has talked about in our society now, when he comes up, that there would be an acceptance of winners and losers, that there would be an acceptance that society has inequality built in. And this seemed the opposite of that. It seemed like the acknowledgement that the people who do the work need to be treated fairly. I also liked that it had the word equity in it. I thought it was really important to say this word was important 250 years ago, and it was seen by someone who we revere, so it should still be of value for us.

• 38:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how do you think about that still being of value today? On the one hand, the world is immeasurably more prosperous than it was 250 years ago. On the other hand, there's all kinds of inequity and other problems. So do you think we've demonstrably improved and we should be grateful for that and keep trying to do better? Or do you feel that we've somehow missed the lessons of history?

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Well, why shouldn't we always try to do better? I think the minute you imagine we have found the perfect system, when you imagine our constitution is frozen, when you imagine that we are living in some way that means we don't ever have to adjust or balance. Or negotiate, those systems become stalled and become misbalanced over time. So my piece doesn't end, you know, loud or grand or, you know, oppressively. It doesn't say money is good, let's all have more of it. It doesn't say money is bad, let's take it all away.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  It just ends with this very kind of humble thing that Adam Smith wrote about justice.

• 39:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So David, what happens to this piece now? It's had its world debut. It was a success. The reviews are good. Even I gave it a really good review.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 39:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  This piece will now live on for, you know, maybe a very, very long time. Maybe performed in many places and many circumstances, maybe interpreted, reinterpreted, will be received differently by people around the world. What does that feel like as the composer?

• 40:13Speaker 04

  It's just another layer of curiosity to see how people in another country will be interested or not interested in anything that happened in American history. It's going to be played this summer at the Aspen Music Festival, which is one of the co-commissioners, so that's very exciting. I'm hoping that it will have a nice life. One of the really weird things about these projects, to be honest, is all these people assemble and they work really hard and they put all their attention and love and care into these things. The relationships are really tight and powerful. And then the second the concert is over, everyone goes their separate ways.

• 40:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you feel you're world famous now?

• 40:52Speaker 04

  I wouldn't say that anyone in my field is famous. I've seen Philip Glass shopping in a grocery store with nobody seeming to notice him. And if he can get away with that, there's no one going to notice me. I feel like I'm at a level where I can tell people interesting and strange things that I might want to do and they might want to let me do them. I still have projects on my list that I've wanted to do for 30 or 40 years.

• 41:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you name one?

• 41:18Speaker 04

  I don't want to tell you because they're all just silly ideas and someone's going to hear a silly idea and go, well, I'm gonna do that tomorrow.

• 41:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  When it comes to silly ideas, I'm guessing that some listeners may think these past two episodes were a silly idea for a show that's supposed to be about economics, to which I would say, and I think Adam Smith would also say, everything is about economics, including how a composer like David Lang thinks about opportunity cost and sunk costs, even the price of attention. My big impression, from speaking with Lang over these past couple of episodes, is how Adam Smith reached across the centuries and worked his magic on David Lang. You may remember him describing how he first approached adapting Wealth of Nations. He was looking for jokey themes like sheep and wondering how he would

• 42:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  deal with the boring descriptions of factory work and currency exchange. But Lang was won over by a bigger and deeper idea, that any given economy is a gigantic community that can only thrive with a fair amount of both cooperation and compassion. Smith criticized the concentration of power, whether in private firms or government. Lang also received this message. In one movement, he adapted text from a 1938 address by FDR called "Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies." As David Lang's lyric goes, "If there ever are in this country people who are rich enough to own this country, then they will own it."

• 42:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked David Lang if or when a recording of Wealth of Nations would be made available to the public. He wrote back, "I'm not sure if the New York Phil is planning to release a commercial recording of it. I have a meeting with them next week, and I am going to beg them to." My thanks to David Lang for all the conversation and music. I'd love to know what you thought of these episodes. Our email is [email protected]. Also, we recently put out an episode with Judy Faulkner, the founder and CEO of Epic Systems, the biggest player in electronic health records. And we asked you to name other founders or firms that have followed the road less traveled, like Epic has. Here are some of

• 43:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  the many names you sent in: Basecamp, Bob's Red Mill, Costco, DigiKey, Extreme Engineering Solutions, Marvin Windows, Promega, REI, Ramsey Solutions, SAS Institute, and Schweitzer Engineering Labs.

• 43:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next time on the show, we will make the argument that playing games can be very, very good for you and for society. That's next time. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski with help from Augusta Chapman and Dalvin Abawaji. It was edited by Ellen Frankman and mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Joseph Webster. Thanks again to everyone at the New York Philharmonic, who helped with production, especially Dinah Lu, Caitlin Hurst, and Adam Crane. The Freakonomics

• 44:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Radio Network staff also includes Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ilaria Montenacort, Jake Loomis, Jeremy Johnston, Mandy Gorstein, Peter Madden, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  I have to say, I was very nervous when we started all of this, because I thought you knew so much more about Adam Smith than I did. And you would point out all of the things I got wrong.

• 45:16Speaker 06

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.