CD: David Lang, 'the sense of senses'

Artists: David Lang, composer / the crossing / Donald nally, conductor

Released on Cantaloupe Records, 2025

David Lang’s ‘the sense of senses’ explores the biblical text ‘Song of Songs’. The text uses heightened language to tell a story by constantly triggering our senses – details are described to us in ways that we, ourselves, can imagine seeing, and smelling, and tasting.

David catalogued all the senses in the text, filtering out everything except that which is seen, heard, smelled, felt and tasted and then rearranged the order, so that all of the seen things would be together, all the heard things, all the felt things, etc. Then he ordered the senses from far to near – from sight to sound to smell to feeling to taste – so that we might feel the power of the senses grow and intensify, as they come closer to us.

The album artwork brings us up close to our sensory organs – skin, eyes, ears – where we see the body intimately and where it becomes a strange landscape: the boundary where we experience the difference between inside and outside.