Nico
Muhly,

I’ve been totally delinquent these last few weeks with updating this space, but I have an excuse! For the first time in forever, I’ve been in my new apartment in New York for longer than two weeks, and I’ve taken the time to properly set up my workspace, organize my technology, buy air conditioners, etc., and mainly, finish writing this opera that has been on my desk since 2008. It’s all wickedly exciting.

As a result of my maniacal cleaning, I have uncovered some problems in my iTunes library; namely: sometimes my cover art does not match the song/artist. This is one among many complicated issues…these are some recent things, though, that have come up on my iPhone shuffling through:

Buxtehude:

Múm into dude I don’t know:

A very special padded blazer edition of Piano Phase, by Steve Reich:

And my favorite, because I adore both albums equally:

I love Remy Ma. I also love, more than anything, this video, which I will not embed here, but offer as a link to those interested. I recall, when it came out, my girl Nick doing an unspeakably brilliant IPA of how she pronounces the word “Remy” and “fuck” but I can’t render it here for technological reasons. It’s a girl who claims that she used to “fux” Remy, but you really have to watch it to get the full breadth/depth of the Situation.

Media organization is really intense though. If you listen to a lot of classical music, you know what I’m talking about: whole CD’s, with each track assigned to a different artist. It’s like, Lorraine Hunt with the orchestra of the age of whatever. Lorraine Hunt + Random Tenor + That orchestra + That Lutenist whose name I forgot. Lorraine Hunt + That Lutenist + That Oboe d’Amore-ist whose name I forgot. And you have to go through it the entire way and make exxxtra sure that everything is organized as you, your own self, would search for it, which is to say, That Beautiful Lorraine Hunt album. Or whatever it is that you would say to your friends is what you need to be able to type into the search field.

Does anybody else suffer/celebrate (from) this problem, with the wrong cover art? Ur girl has refresht, rebuilt, reorganized and still the Books come up as Ngwemy.

The other amazing thing about doing a deep media organization is that you come across totally random things you never knew you had. I found an album by a Finnish singer-songwriter I didn’t even know:

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Sami Kukka, Sisältäni varjon löysin
If the audio doesn’t turn up for you, check out this YouTube.

And it’s like, where has this gorgeous thing been all my life? I didn’t buy it from iTunes. A search in my email reveals no mention of this name, “Sami Kukka“. The iTunes store has it, but not enough people have rated it to display an average, and, mine are untagged mp3′s. So where did it come from? I emailed all my Finns and nobody is taking responsibility. It’s totally weird and delightful. I’m happy to have found it, and have listened to it all day.

In other news, some of my upcoming projects have been announced. I’m very excited about everything, but in the short term, I’m particularly excited about the Los Angeles Master Chorale releasing a disc of my choral music on Decca. Choral music has been a focal point of my emotional landscape for years and years, and it’s great to see it collected all in one place. The disc sounds amazing, and it’s the first commercially available disc of works that I haven’t written for the studio, and I’m thrilled about the whole situation.

I am doing a few shows in Europe in August, with Bedroom Community, and we are all super psyched, so check the sidebar on this site for more information and tickets and all that.

PS Many of you have kindly written to me about my website possibly being hacked by some kind of Erectile Dysfunction Drug. This is something like True; my lovely webmistress and I are working on fixing this, but for now, be nice; your girl has been very busy as has her webmistress, and now it seems as if the audio is not working, but everybody is going to get through this, and remember that the web is a Process. You should see the batshit spam comments I get on this site:

I mean, really, what did I do 2 deserve this!?

Did everybody read Danny’s good take on the recent Guardian article about John Adams? It’s an interesting situation. John Adams wrote this piece called I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky, which is, I would hazard a guess, his least “popular” piece, and I use the word popular in all senses of the word, inasmuch as I have never met anybody who really knows what to do with it, aside from Peter Sellars, who would probably know what to do with a turnip dressed up as Miss Havisham singing arias from Turandot. In any event, it’s happening in London this summer, like, a million times, and so the Guardian sent a dude to New York to be loosely dismissive, and he ended up writing springloaded sentences like:

Alice Goodman, who wrote the text for of [sic] Nixon in China, is now an ordained minister of the Church of England, dispensing piety to her flock in the shires; holy orders did not restrain her from denouncing Adams as a “dickhead” when their opera was performed in Brussels.

It’s a cute two sentences, right? Descriptive, and sassy, and shit? Except that it’s totally not based in reality; AG wasn’t ordained at that time and was, as Danny points out, still a Jewish Librettist Lady. And also, the opera in question was not Nixon, but rather Klinghoffer, so the springloaded sentence which would have been so delicious is just…bitchy? Anyway, that’s fine, everybody’s gonna go see this thing anyway and they can judge for themselves. I hope the formula is that “word dickhead in preview article = butts in seats” and that’s what the writer was aiming for.

I mean, surely, it’s the hope of music reviewers that they’re reviewing to a full house, right? If you review a restaurant, you want to review it at its top form, with the kitchen at full capacity, and the waiters in that ecstatic, sweaty bliss of business. In that spirit, I read with a certain degree of joy and a certain degree of anxiety Anne Midgett’s article about Moby-Dick + its relationship to other new opera, including my own, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Short story: Jake Heggie, a composer, wrote an opera version of Moby-Dick. Everybody was eskeptical. A zillion people went, four opera companies are doing productions, it was a big success. Cool. She goes on to describe other new productions around the country: Seattle, Santa Fe, Fort Worth. And then she asks the question: How many people are really listening? That’s a good question! But then she puts my name in her mouth, and solicits an anonymous quote thus:

(“I can’t fundraise for underage sex,” one opera director said about Nico Muhly’s forthcoming Met opus.)

Oh hell no. First of all, miss thing, you have to call me before you solicit an anonymous quote from “an opera director,” I mean please, what is this, Opera Deep Throat? But that’s fine, whatever, my topic is risqué, if you weren’t a sexual creature until your twenties, like all the heroines and heroes of Britten, Mozart, Wagner…oh, wait. Well, I mean…can you fundraise for Incest? Rape? Is there another codeword you meant to say?

She quotes David Gockley, who has commissioned more new opera than anybody ever in the history of ever:

“You don’t have enough real opportunity to edit,” says David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, who both there and in Houston has been responsible for the creation of more new American opera than most of his colleagues combined. “There are no such things as previews and out-of-town tryouts.” For a long time, therefore, commissioning an opera meant giving a large amount of money to a composer, waiting a few years, getting a score back from the composer and putting it on as written. This resulted in more than a few turkeys – not least because few composers are trained during their studies in how to write opera.

This is totally true. Even though I studied a million operas in school, and I studied with John Corigliano, who wrote one of the great American operas (“The Ghosts of Versailles“), it’s a totally new medium for me, and studying it and doing it are totally different, just as reading cookbooks and cooking are two different things. The solution, of course, is to workshop: you perform the piece with a piano and some voices in front of people who know better than I do, and you ask their opinion, and take it or don’t, but at least you’ve begged for their honest criticism. Composers, it should be said, do not always know best, especially in the very important matters of pacing, length, and dramatic timing. For this, I can approximate, but I rely on Craig Lucas, the librettist, and Bart Sher, the director, and basically anybody else who works in the opera world, to tell me what they think can be improved and what isn’t working. But then, back to the article:

All this collaboration tends to yield the operatic equivalent of Hollywood studio films: big, slick, audience-friendly fare aiming for blockbuster status, rather than indie-style creativity.

You just don’t get to have it both ways. You can’t set up this dichotomy between “Indie-style creativity” (what does that even mean?) and “Hollywood.” This is a really old-fashioned, terrible binary to harp on, and it just perpetuates idiocy. It shines a really ugly light on what is (or can be), in reality, a wonderfully collaborative process. If the other option is me getting a commission, having an idea, and sitting in a cave and writing an “opus” about it without anybody helping me edit, nobody would be happy except my own ass, clapping my hands together like Flipper at the ninety minutes of continuous celeste, organ, countertenor and trombone music I would inevitably produce, on the subject of that one time Bach walked to hear Buxtehude improvise.

The offense I’m taking here has more to do with the idea that asking for editing help is a kind of Rom-Com Formulaic Groupthink. I’ve always advocated for editors in classical music; I’ve blogged about this a million times before and I wish I had somebody to whom I could send my music before it gets performed who would look it over and say, you know what, this is brilliant, but you need to cut, like, forty-five seconds here, and this entire middle section here. I’m getting better at doing this myself, because in concert music no such person exists, but in opera, we are very lucky because there are people whom you can ask if something is too long, too short, too racist, too sexy, not sexy enough, too much crotale, not enough crotale. It’s just the composer’s responsibility “” not chore or forced groupthink agenda “” to ask. I trust the genre to provide me with the people to help me participate in the wonderful history of opera, and, with any luck, to innovate cleverly, venerate respectfully, and make something that everybody will enjoy.

I should add here that since she wrote it, I had a very polite email exchange with this journalist, and she posted a very good Q + A with Peter Gelb here, and the whole thing feels slightly calmer. I guess all those liberal arts just get my knickers in a twist when I read about binaries in the way people think about Art. Gelb says it best:

At the end of the day it doesn’t mean it’s going to be more successful than something else. But we’re trying to provide the support system to help pieces have the potential of being more successful.

Precisely so. And the truth of the matter is that wouldn’t it be worse to put something terrible on stage than to be politely told that what you’ve written isn’t working? I’ve never had any problem at all with throwing music out or back-tracking; there is space in my life “” in most composers’ lives, I would hope “” for experimental, composer-driven projects: spun-sugar, fragile, collaborations, half-improvised Finnish folk music jam-sessions, allegorical evenings with sculpture and hair everywhere where 100 people come, 97 enjoy it, and that’s a beautiful thing. I know that I am incredibly lucky to be working with people who want to put a good opera on stage; having scored something like a Hollywood movie recently and having done all that other crazystuff recently I can tell you that this process is very much outside of that binary A.M. outlines above.

I got tweeted at by somebody who asked the other day, “Is opera a better vehicle for your work than, say, a musical?” It’s a funny question, the idea of a the work needing a vehicle. I’ve never thought of my Work as this beast that needs to be transported around town, with one’s entire life being spent in pursuit of the ultimate vehicle? Like, an Eddie Bauer-branded Ford Explorer or something? I always thought of work as being a continuous reaction, a process, a set of techniques, rather than something so Giant that it requires a continuous Expression.

I am spending the 4th of July in Vermont for the first time in a few years; my town has this fabulous fireworks display on the 3rd, and then a completely traditional and wonderful parade on the morning of the 4th.

I’m sitting alone in a hotel in Salisbury, drinking unspeakable wine and listening to Palestrina and emailing friends. Is there a greater pleasure? I’m in London! Two Boys opens up in here in exactly One Year, which is thrilling and terrifying. I’ve been here doing workshops, which is a pleasure and a penance, as it begins the gradual process of releasing this opera into the world and into the hands of the production team.

The workshops were great, and, as always, a chance to meet young singers, which is always a welcome bonus of these things. These young singers had an especial anxiety about getting the notes and rhythms right, which is one of these interesting things. Some notes and rhythms I really really care about, but I’m most interested in what happens when they relax into them and make them their own. Almost universally, if you tell a singer, just don’t sing the rhythms, sing whatever you want, they end up doing a perfect, relaxed, precise, Ninja-like interpretation of what the score says. Go know. With singers I feel like you need to be some combination of the Dog Whisperer and Mary Poppins to get the desired result (which, as with all things, is a Relaxed and Elegant Precision).

Some thoughts:

St. Paul’s Cathedral is Elegantly Precise.

This pudding (from St John Bread + Wijn) is Precisely Elegant.

Butter chicken is Iconic.

Are these mixed messages? Are we being elegantly precise here? Why don’t I own an automatic label machine again?

I’m super excited because Decca are releasing a recording by the Los Angeles Master Chorale of a big pile of my choral music! It’s very exciting for me because this material has had a very strange life and it’s great to see it all collected together. I like thinking on the guardian angels of the music, too: two pieces written for George Steel, one when I was like, 19, and another last year, and two written for Judith Clurman in various guises, one from about six years ago and another from four years ago. Tim Brown, John Scott, my old choirmaster Mark Johnson are also peeking down from the gallery.

I am here in Salisbury for a friend’s straight wedding; I’m hoping it’s really fun.

As I write this, I am flying from Reykjavík to New York, reclining in my seat, eating a completely serviceable tandoori chicken breast with a bean salad so undercooked it defies the imagination, drinking a glass of Chilean wine, and watching Rear Window on the computer. Hitchcock really had it all figured out, didn’t he? Every one of these shots is heaven, both in frame, content, and narrative placement. My god, this jewelry! This hair! It’s all I can think about. The sound design is unspeakably perfect; the use of the music, weird exposèd midsections…I’m in rapture.

I’ve had a very productive two weeks in Iceland: I worked with Valgeir making an album for our friend Terry, whose stage name is Puzzle Muteson (I don’t know what it means either). I discovered Puzzle’s music on MySpace by accident “” I was in a rented apartment in Paris with glacially slow internet, and had been chatting with my friend Caroline online, who said that she wanted to get a basset hound and name him Puzzle, and somehow, some frantic mid-afternoon googling led me to Puzzle’s MySpace and a song of his called Tightrope Dance, which I immediately fell in love with. Fast forward three years and he is, after a variety of complicated maneuvers (he’s from the Isle of Wight), in Reykjavík, recording with Valgeir! As an added bonus, Dan Bora, who has worked with me for about seven years, is onboard as Valgeir’s engineer for the summer; there is no greater pleasure than when friends work together. Puzzle’s record will be, with any luck, the tenth release on Bedroom Community, the label whose first release was my own Speaks Volumes in 2007.

Bedroom Community presented a show in Iceland at the National Theater as part of Listahátið Reykjavíkur (Reykjavík Arts Festival), and we managed to include all four artists on the label on the shô. Daníel Bjarnason presented three pieces for mixed ensemble, and then Sam, Ben, Valgeir and I performed an expanded version of the show we’ve been doing on the road for the past month. It was great to play for what felt like a hometown crowd “” when you play in a venue and hear a recognizable laugh (what’s up, Ingveldur!?) and a distinctive cackle (what it do, Hrafnhildur!?), it’s an especial joy. This is one thing I love about playing in non-classical situations: you can directly interact with the audience. Sam did a flawless Only Tune, Una completely owned Honest Music, Helgi was a superstar, Nadia played one of the best Keeps in Touch I’ve heard her do; I played a brand-new piano piece, Valgeir was in octopus-like control of his electronics, and Ben made the bones of the house shudder with his ever-satisfying low d.

Daníel is, first of all, so impossibly handsome, it drives me crazy; have you seen this man? But the other thing that I love about playing with him and working with him is that he is slowly figuring out the complicated but ultimately satisfying process of turning what starts as concert music into music that works in more flexible, informal settings. He wrote a piano concerto whose third movement, Red-Handed, is, in its original setting, a complete triumph of orchestration for large ensemble: it’s scored for maybe seventy players, with a lot of ingenious doublings and fabulous harmonics and col legno and alternate fingerings and so on; Daníel has been working on ways to make it happen for eight players, and you know what? It totally works. We played it as the first piece in the show with: violin, viola, contrabass, two percussionists, me hitting a rasp against a piece of wood, Daníel playing Rhodes, and Víkingur Ólafsson playing the solo piano part written for him. This reductive process is one that I’ve been struggling with: if you write a piece that makes sense in Carnegie Hall, how do you make sure that it works if you find yourself playing a show in a smoke-filled boîte in Switzerland? The answer, as it turns out, is to take very little, but very controlled, action. If the notes and rhythms are poppin’, and your sense of orchestration is flexible, you can easily swap out the clever gongs with a prepared piano, the complicated string divisi with some judiciously placed double-stops. It’s like cooking; the other day, in Reykjavík, I craved so desperately a carbonara. It wasn’t as much about having some kind of authentic Roman experience, but more about the idea of the egg with the bacon and the cracked pepper and the cheese. In Iceland, you can’t really get guanciale or any other cured pig product besides just “beicon“, (they have yet to receive the hipster charcuterie DIY revolution) and lord knows it’s no peccorino (although Dan Bora brought some excellent Parmesan). But it’s about taking the knowledge of the quote-unquote original, and shamelessly applying it to the situation at hand: a suburban fridge in Breiðholt and thirty minutes’ time. The result, barring a slight mishap with the cooking liquid, was exactly what I craved: that sense of egg yolk sticking to esophagus, the umami of the parmesan, the outrageous salt content and stupid amount of pepper, the smoky Icelandic bacon. In any event, I have great respect for Daníel’s ability to MacGyver his giant concerto into something easily rendered by an octet.

The other thing I managed to do in Iceland was to finish a large batch of revisions on my opera, Two Boys, which is opening in just over a year at the English National Opera. I’m so excited about it that I’ve assumed a certain catatonia about the whole affair; there is so much to do, and so little time, and so many ð-factors, and so much culling, discarding, revising, adding. It’s funny how there are some issues that are so tiny (“does the word how sit better in this range or this range,” or “exactly how many syllables are in the word extraordinary“) and others are so large (“does the beginning work at all as theater? is the plot clear at the end? is the tessitura completely wrong for the random surgeon we introduce at the beginning? would a surgeon even be a baritone, or what?”). I also have a vaguely crippling fear that the piano reduction that I’m workshopping (I hate that verb, I know, I hate it, shh) with is going to be so stupid compared to the orchestration that everybody is going to think I’m stupid and the project is stupid; I have this urge to write little notes all over the piano part saying things like, “this will eventually be really cool strings doing this plainchant thing, sul tasto, and one solo viola doing this trilling thing but in the back of the section, see, so it’ll be there but not there, and then the oboe will be a halo behind ur voice, right, so it’s really not just like this dumb f-natural sitting there” but I’m resisting the urge.

In between now and when the workshops for the opera start, I have two other matters to attend to: a concert in Washington, D.C., and a new piece for Signal ensemble: a Stabat Mater re-transliterated from the Latin by Craig Lucas, who, by no coincidence, is also the librettist for Two Boys. This is being performed alongside a US premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s; I love his music so much; I turned pages for a Juilliard pianist who was playing Harrison’s Clocks and was entranced from that moment on. I went to see his opera Minotaur and am so delighted to share a program with him. I also have no greater pleasure in life than writing liturgical music. I have always dreamed of being able to focus maybe half the year on writing sacred music, but specifically sacred music for use in sacred contexts. My sense of what a composer should be is rather more like a fonctionnaire than an artist; almost all of my favorite music was written by church composers or state employees. My happiest moment as a composer, literally, was when I walked into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to have some ashes imposed, only to hear my music being played as an Ash Wednesday prelude. I had no idea it was going to be happening, nobody knew I was there, the organist played it as if I were dead, which is exactly as it should be. It’s no rating, it’s no over-exposure, it’s no comment thread. It’s the smell of candles, a handful of reverent Japanese tourists, a curate quickly walking through a metal gate. In any event, it’s all very exciting and I’m looking forward to the summer in a major way; I’ve moved house in New York, and the new space has in-wall air conditioning!

As always, my ability to speak Icelandic peaked the day before I left; there must be a name for this syndrome. Just this morning, I woke up, and finally managed to figure out what’s up with the declensions for numbers one, two, three & four, which has been a seriously emotionally crippling hang-up for years; I’m perpetually rolling into the club either solo or five deep, to avoid having to decline the number of people in my party. It’s one of those vibes where you have to get involved with the neutral if there’s so much as one girl anywhere in sight, or babies, or who even knows what, and it’s much easier to just travel with the undeclinables.

One totally weird thing about touring “” and working in the studio, to a lesser extent “” is the Mount Fujiesque access to news. I’m so used to my normal routine of waking up, making coffee, clicking three tabs on my computer, and having about forty news websites pop up, which I can slowly read while refilling the mug. On tour, you wake up in…Winterthur? Leipzig? and groggily wander out of the bus to find the nearest place to brush the teeth. On the way, a glimpse of a German headline: North Korea sunk a South Korean submarine? Bristol Palin has a…outspeaking…engagement…oh! a public speaking deal…okay, something about an Austrian political scandal, okay, something here about shanty towns in Australia? And then by the time you get to the internet, the connection is so slow and sound check is in ten minutes and really a shower and shave is more pertinent, so you just read some completely random article in the New York Times about fructose and learn nothing about the Koreas, the Palins, and Antipodean housing crises.

Maybe I’ve just been gone for too long, but I think that the New York Times has some of the best writing these days. I’m thinking in particular of the new restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, and Cintra Wilson, who has been writing Critical Shopper articles for a few years. In particular, though, she wrote an article last week whose last two paragraphs I found to be heart-meltingly beautifully written, as well as containing a fabulous meditation on the point of fashion and style. She’s approaching a sort of cargo panted Diana Vreeland level of maxims and bons mots; look at this conclusion:

But even in a potentially meaningless universe where civilizations crumble, institutions collapse and creatures fade into extinction, there are still a few mathematical certainties: things of genuine quality tend to eternally recur, especially if they’re made of heavy cotton duck or decent leather. Nobody ever looks like an idiot in a good peacoat, and (a trick I learned from movie wardrobe girls) people tend to notice how comfortably you rock your silhouette far more than they notice the safety pin holding your hem together or the fact that your buttons don’t quite match. (In fact, these charming delicacies of distress are mimicked by top designers, to create the illusion of character and provenance.)

“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” said William Blake. On Church Street I stood underneath a tree that was having a riotous outburst of pink flowers, and I may be far from wise, but eventually I noticed that no matter how much money I threw at it, it didn’t get any prettier. It wouldn’t have been prettier if I had replanted it on 86th and Madison, either. The point is to recognize a meritocracy in things of value, regardless of their low points of origin, current trendiness or future invisibility. Quality is quality, period. All else is corporate fear, hype, vanity and vexation of the spirit. Foolish is as foolish does.

Also, Sam Sifton is one of these writers where I wonder if anybody is actually editing his column. Look at this paragraph:

An immodest little pizza of black truffles and fontina is an elegant and delicious take on the sort of puff-crusted pies Mathieu Palombino makes at Motorino, and worth a run through the excellent and deep wine list to find a pinot noir from Au Bon Climat to drink with it. Pizza at a Vongerichten restaurant? This one is exactly the sort to thrill a couple who hasn’t had a pizza since that time they needed to get takeout because there was a wreck on the Saw Mill up near where Hawthorne Circle used to be, and they didn’t get home from Tanglewood until nearly 9.

It’s amazing, right? It’s such a specific reference, and his subject position is so deliciously compromised by the mockery of it, because of course, he has to have been in that situation his own self in order to understand what it’s like! It’s great to have one’s hometown paper be an awesome paper. “¨

How many Bach cantata recordings do you guys own? Because I own a TON, and I’ve finally gotten it all together digitally to figure out what’s going on. I have a lot of Ton Koopman, another ton of Masaaki Suzuki, Gardiner, it’s really nuts. I’ve been listening to them all day, and there are some that always kill me how beautiful they are. Check out Robin Blaze singing this weirdo chromatic one (Wie Jammern Mich Doch Die Verkehrten Herzen)

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Bach Vergnugte Ruh! Beliebte Seelenlust
Masaaki Suzuki, conductor
Bach Collegium Japan

Right? So good. What I would really love, though, is for somebody knowledgeable about Bach to take me through a year or two with the cantatas, presenting them in liturgically appropriate order, etc., and digging out the best recordings. My natural instinct is to hoard recordings but I’m scared that something like this aria would fall through the cracks. Any recommendations for a book?

One thing about touring that always happens is that we all get obsessed with a song and are perpetually running around singing it. Unfortunately, this trip this was the winner:

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…which as far as I can tell is the infamous “Smell Yo Dick” song but subjected to the Junior Boys treatment; the whole thing is so good, and I had forgotten how beautiful the vocal inflection is “” landing on an appoggiatura is a time-tested trick for plaintive content; what works even better here is that it leans into a suspended note, sort of, so the whole thing becomes quite melancholic.

The phrase iterations:

It reminds me, weirdly, of one of my favorite phrases in opera, which is Adams’s setting of “Sea-Level” about a minute into this aria from The Death of Klinghoffer.

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John Adams
Aria of the Falling Body (Gymnopédie) from The Death of Klinghoffer
Kent Nagano / Lyon

Deelish, right? Dropping a ninth, too, is a really awesome thing and it sits really well in this voice.

I am happily stuck in Iceland. I had to cancel a show in Valencia, which was hideously agonizing “” the airports were intermittently shutting down in Iceland, and I was scared that if I left, I would never get back! There is a certain glamor to having one’s motions restricted by something as unpredictable as a Volcano; the charts and graphs of the predicted plume are deliciously old-fashioned and can be found here. I’ve been hitting refresh constantly.