composers in addition to Lao Luo. They also premiere Road Trip, a celebration of Bang on a Can's 30-year journey, together at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2017. The Difficulty of Crossing a Field Also in 1999, Lang and playwright Mac Wellman based their opera The Difficulty of Crossing a Field on a short story by Ambrose Bierce, about an Alabama planter named Williamson who purportedly vanished while walking across a field in 1854. (Bierce's story reoccurs in urban-legend form, in which, coincidentally, the vanished man is often given the name David Lang.) Battle Hymns A piece with multiple choruses and dance, battle hymns was first performed in Philadelphia in 2009 by the Mendelssohn Club and the Leah Stein Dance Company. Its U.S. west coast premiere was directed by Robert Geary and performed by the San Francisco Choral Society, Volti, the Piedmont Children's Choir, and the Leah Stein Dance Company in April 2013 at the Kezar Pavilion. In May 2014, the Collegiate Chorale and the Manhattan Girls Chorus performed battle hymns at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. In 2015, the Shenandoah Chorus (Shenandoah University) performed 'battle hymns' at an on-campus concert. The Little Match Girl Passion Lang was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in music for his piece The Little Match Girl Passion, composed in 2007 for Paul Hillier and his Theatre of Voices. The piece, based on Hans Christian Andersen's fable "The Little Match Girl" and inspired by Bach's St. Matthew Passion, was co-commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation and the Perth Theatre and Concert Hall and premiered on October 25, 2007, in Zankel Hall in New York City. Tim Page of The Washington Post wrote that "I don't think that I've ever been so moved by a new...composition as I was by David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion, which is unlike any music I know." For the 2017 Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual holiday concert, which has included the little match girl passion for five years, Lang has written a new version called the little match girl (observed), in which the audience is the congregation and participates with interstitial hymns. The recording by Theatre of Voices and Paul Hillier of The Little Match Girl Passion on Harmonia Mundi received a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. The Little Match Girl Passion has been described as "a 21st century classic". Death Speaks