Like his Pulitzer-winning work the little match girl passion, David Lang's 'poor hymnal' tries to get to the core of what a religious experience can be. "What I love about hymnals," the composer writes in his liner notes to the CD, "is that they're a catalog of things a community of worshippers can agree on - a catalog that can be sung. And what the worshippers are singing about matters."

'poor hymnal' is a concert-length work written for the multiple GRAMMY Award-winning chamber choir The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. Lang constructed the text by stitching together lines, phrases and poignant utterances from sources as varied as the Old Testament, Mahatma Gandhi and Tolstoy - to name just a few. As Lang explains: "This piece is trying to say: The reason we are coming together is to remember how important we are to each other, and to remember how important it is that we take care of each other."