Nico
Muhly,

I just made a trip of the sort I’ve not had the luxury to make in many years: a trip to London with only a few things to do. Normally I arrive in London and have to basically stack the day with appointments and usually performances or equally taxing things in the evening. London is decidedly not a place where it’s terribly easy to do, say, six or seven things in a day as everything is wildly spread out and the whole thing ends kind of sweatily and flustered. I’m so interested in the nature of a city being perfect for certain activities: isn’t it the case that New York imposes its energy on visitors, and sort of insists on certain ways of doing things? You realize that little things — when school lets out, for instance, or, in hotter climes, the necessity for an afternoon siesta — all add up and start imposing patterns on our days. Perhaps a good use for poor Jonah Lehrer is to be air-lifted into the world’s capitals and do some research on this.

I’ve spent a little bit too much time in cabs recently, and as a result have been listening to a lot more top-40 radio than usual. As ever, it’s bubbly and inviting, like a pink champagne. The thing I’m sort of interested in with the advent of these heavily processed vocals is what’s going to become of regional accents? I’m trying to think about accent markers in vocal music from the past. Joni Mitchell could only be Canadian with them vowels, right? And there was always something specifically Raleigh about Ben Folds; you got the sense from his songs of the way he was spoken to as a child, the accents of his first romances. One gets the same sense from the siblings Wainwright with their polyglot slurs, from Antony with his stylised mid-atlantic roundness, from, indeed, most of the folk-influenced musicians I know, both Anglo-Irish and, like, Arabian. What then do we do about a singer like Adam Levine, whose voice is practically inescapable in this world in which we all live? English lyrics have a particular problem across genres, namely that the words “I” and “you” are ugly words, with a few too many possible syllables in both. There’s also, of course, the southern-but-mainly-AAVE possibilities of monosylabising I into basically ah; this strategy seems to be the chosen shortcut of singers like Justin Timberlake and really anybody who wants to have a toe in the R&B universe; I don’t necessarily think it’s a congruous look with Timberlake’s new suit and tie; accent markers and clothes should usually be coordinated, shouldn’t they? But then a friend of mine — a tall sandy blond Jewish boy from Billerica or similar, sent me a recording of his band in which he very actively uses the “ah” shortcut, so, who knows what’s going on. Can anybody in the +44 enlighten me, too, about how that works with the tiny little isoglosses there?

This last week I was in Chicago with eighth blackbird, the wonderful chamber ensemble. They’ve apparently been playing together for seventeen years and it’s always a pleasure to interfere in their patterns. We performed, among other things, David Lang’s unforgiving 2002 how to pray, Philip Glass’s equally severe 1968 (?) Two Pages, a bratty but successful and exuberant Tristan Perich three toy pianos and one-bit electronics, two of David’s songs from death speaks, and a new piece for piano four hands written by Lisa Kaplan, the pianist in the group. I haven’t played four hands piano seriously since that time in Paris in 1999 when Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum and I bashed through the Jupiter Symphony, so it was a thrill, but also, I realize how out of practice I am in playing music that isn’t by Philip Glass or my own self. I’ve become a specialized little machine, only capable of one sort of technical fluency. I have to fix this.

I’m about to head back to London for a weekend of music I’ve loosely curated at the Barbican. It’s always a little anxious-making to curate concerts: you can never please everybody, everything’s ever so slightly too long, I’m positive I’m going to fuck something up and end up at the wrong venue with the wrong music at the wrong time. But I’ve tried to invent a sort of social security blanket which is that there is going to be a team of us droning on a few of the concerts, and it’ll be casual and relaxed, and everybody will remain calm. I’m playing a bunch of Philip’s new piano études, hooray, and Richy is coming with his <3 and Breath music, and the Sixteen are singing, and if you are anywhere near the 0207 you should come say hi or come to the bar at the St John for a bracing and necessary campari.

In other news, everybody should buy David Lang's new disc, on which I join Bryce, Owen, and Shara in death speaks. My opera Two Boys is 250% happening this October. Unless you already subscribe unto the Met, you can’t buy tickets until later, but here is the little page. I had my intrepid assistant upload ALL the press about it — both good and bad — from last time so everybody can prepare emotionally for it. I think having an archive of all the appalling things people say about one is a nice thing; I’ve not read any of it, good or bad, for years, but I know it’s there if I need to ever self-flagellate. Also everybody should buy The National’s new record Trouble Will Find Me, on which I have a small pile of arrangements.

okay good

okay bye

I’m just returning home from a week in Indianapolis, a midwestern city I’d not been to before. The midwest fascinates me, because it really does feel like a place as culturally different from New York as, say, Australia, or the +44. There are different rules that govern standard greetings, the way one wears one’s hair in public, the appropriateness of different forms of dress, the relationship of the afternoon to the evening, et cetera. One thing I’m obsessed with is cities revitalizing their downtowns. I love this so much. Cincinnati is doing it, Detroit is kind of doing it, and Indianapolis is doing it in a major way. There is an exquisitely retro steakhouse (retro in the sense of it having been around for 100 years) and a funny wine bar and a hipster cocktail boîte and all that, and then there are the cancerous and ubiquitous chains. There is something grotesque to me about there being this wonderful steakhouse St Elmó, and then just up the street the linguistically repellant chain steakhouse “Ruth’s Chris,” whatever that means, opens up shop. I feel like the people should take to the streets with pitchforks to protest that shit. Similarly, we need to shut down the TGI Fridays in Union Square; let’s take a tactic from the anti-abortion protestors and make people need an escort to get a mudslide fifteen paces from the greenmarket. Ugh.

Anyway, one thing that I am always acutely aware of in the midwest is the use of space in restaurants. There is so. much. space. The distance between the tables is loosely the size of apartments I’ve lived in in New York. There is room for empty space, for decorative follies, for an ambitious plywood and taxidermy design budget. What they have not, it seems, in any way figured out is how to handle an entryway. Despite all the space, there seems to be a confluence of cultural and spatial problems that means that you have five hundred women with overdone hair and makeup and wildly underdressed tops and boots (a white hoodie and UGG boots on a Friday night out!?) and the men who love them all trying to disrobe in a tiny tiny amount of space. I’d love to see if somebody has ever videotaped their entryways to design the flow; I’ve never really experienced this kind of problem in New York, even in crowded, cramped spaces there seems to be a designed and impromptu choreographic itinerary that basically everybody follows.

All of this got me thinking about regionalism and food-pride and ways to highlight, rather than average together, all the fun specific things that make specific places great. I like the idea that only in Cincinnati can you get that bizarre chili that has to be ordered a certain way; I like saving certain eatings for the one time every 18 months I go to Chicago, or Montréal. I feel like it’s key to establish a tradition that’s distinct (and that indeed resists) these restaurant chains and drugstores insisting that there is no season without a “special” aisle with wildly inappropriate Easter colors blasting in my face when I’m still observing lent. It’s grotesque in the same way, to me, that there was a line of Diù-Xí men outside of the Ruth’s Chris (again, what is going on with that; are they lesbians? Is it possessive or…?)

I’ve just had a somewhat epic trip. First London, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the wonderful orchestra Britten Sinfonia. Then to Iceland, for Airwaves, then to Amsterdam for two days “off” (more on this in a moment), and then to Eindhoven & Rotterdam for a percussion competition for which I wrote a concerto. While all this was happening, Hurricane Sandy tore up New York, and Obama was reëlected; it’s always a little unnerving to be away from America when things of major import are happening. There was a maybe 36 hour period during which I couldn’t get in touch with my boyfriend or, for that matter, anybody who lived in my neighborhood who was still there; eventually, downtown people crawled towards Koreatown, desperately searching for a cellphone charger and, one presumes, bibimbap, and contact was restored. We were luckier than a lot of people, and it feels inappropriate to complain, but we lost many months’ work of chicken stock and trotter gear! Everybody should donate and help out New Amsterdam Records, by the way, who suffered a really cataclysmic loss.

Right before I left, I received an alarming document. I’m going to talk about my own self for a minute here so fast forward if it’s boring. My publishers are slightly changing up the way in which my music is physically distributed, and as a result, I got handed, without any great ceremony, a six-page document on which is noted the titles, instrumentation, and length of basically everything I’ve ever written. It was shocking: I have written a lot of music, much of it long pieces for large ensembles. It gave me pause, because I haven’t really had a moment in maybe eighteen months to really survey what’s going on, and this list was a kind of zoomed out, powers-of-ten jolt to my system. My first feeling was one of total exhaustion; the closest analogy I can draw is to having just run for a long time — the actual tiredness arrives a little bit later, delayed, and sometimes is triggered by the sight of a mangled toenail or sweaty, dirty smudge on the forearm. The second wave of thoughts about this document was more alarming: is any of this music any good? I’d just been to see Tom Adès The Tempest at the Met, which I think is an extraordinarily wonderful and beautiful piece of work by a composer whom I admire greatly. You should all go. He has not written an enormous pile of music, and there’s a restraint and a focus to his music (by which I mean as a body of work rather than piece by piece, which, while focused, are wildly and deliciously unrestrained) that I have yet to discover in myself. I’ve basically been constantly writing something, if not two or three things, since 2001, with short, cheated pauses. The good news is that I went through everything, methodically, to make sure it was all actually okay, and it all actually is, I think. There is a piece for the New York Phil called Detailed Instructions which I somehow simultaneously under- and over-orchestrated which I need to revise before I let it out of the house again, and a triple concerto thing which has a really dumb and obvious structural problem I didn’t correct at the time because my passport was stolen and I missed two days of rehearsal and was generally stressed out and didn’t want to arrive two days late and be like, can we cut a hundred bars, thanks.

What’s kind of fun about this huge list of pieces is that I realized something I’ve done without actively realizing it: understanding that a piece of music does not need to contain the whole world in its embrace. I had a funny, tossed-aside conversation with Valgeir the other day when we were trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. I mentioned a loose desire to go to xy or ð kinda fancy place in Reykjavík, and he grimaced and said that he didn’t want to do anything so… and then he made a gesture with his hands, a sort of delineation of a sphere. What he was saying is that some restaurants feel the need to hit every taste bud from every dimension, to take the diner on a journey around the world and back, with snacks and dessert and pre-dessert and wine pairing and house-made compound butters. I think a lot of my music used to have this same obsession: even in an 8 minute piece I tried to make it hot, cold, slow, fast, bitter, sweet, sour & also provide a gluten-free option. This instinct was particularly strong in orchestra pieces, because one says to oneself, “when’s the next time you’re gonna get to play in a huge sandbox like this! You gotta write everything plus sizzle cymbals plus antiphonal flutes plus throw in that weird idea you had for brass even though it has nothing to do with anything!” Recently, though, with orchestra pieces like So Far So Good and particularly with the smaller pieces I’ve been writing for friends for specific functions (the Études for viola, or the various organ pieces for Jamie), I’ve completely abandoned these tasting menus in favor of a more focused, slightly obsessive, single-item vendor kind of situation, more like those women in Singapore who make only one dish but extremely well. No contrasting middle section! All of this kind of connected to my anxieties about these two operas I wrote in the last 3 years, both of which are much more specific than perhaps Really Ambitious First Operas should be. Two Boys, in particular, uses, deliberately, a limited toolbox to try to describe the banalities of suburban life, as well as the hyperkinetic world of the early internet. Similarly, Dark Sisters doesn’t use every trick in the book, and tries to keep the music very tightly connected to the six women and two men who occupy its universe.

Iceland Airwaves was next level busy this year. We all played two shows, and some of us more, and we were all playing with each other, so there was a real sense of communal chaos. Sunday night was the Sigur Rós show, which is very video intensive and expensive-looking. Beautiful music, beautiful video content, and a great performance, and I was kind of pleased to see that they had a mortifying video error, of the sort where like, the windows logo shows up on the screen and you see frantic mouse-gestures and bizarre ghost windows, and I thought, “if this happens to them, at the top of their game and using the best people they can take on the road, we are all equally doomed.” So that was refreshing. Then Monday I flew to Amsterdam, and awkwardly navigated my way to a hotel, and went to see the Grizzly Bear show at the Paradiso. They, too, are enjoying a certain stride; they’ve graduated from Spaces of a Certain Size to Spaces of a Larger Size, and their show, accordingly, has taken on a sort of professionally zhooshed art-direction that doesn’t — as it so often can — seem forced but rather arrives out of the tunnel of the music. It’s gorgeous and everybody should go see it when it comes to a town near u; Edward & Daniel are singing in a kind of full-throated way that gives the songs a sensuality that is precisely why a live show should complement an album. Then the next day, the Bon Iver show, at what seemed like a twelve thousand person venue with twelve thousand enthusiastic dutch teenagers there? You guys, have you seen this show? They’re doing a thing with amps that I think is kind of genius and which I haven’t, in my limited experience, encountered before: all the amps for guitars and violins and their attendant effects pedals are in isolation in flight cases behind the stage, which means that they can be more subtly mic’d, and therefore, the aggregate of the sound is a lot more under control of the mixer. It is a triumphant thing, I think, just on a technical level, but it also makes the songs seem more housed than exploded, which I think is quite the right note to strike in a show in a room that large. You could park a 747 in there. Also I thought I was changing money into smaller bills but accidentally bought €50 of drinks tokens and in benevolent confusion (or perhaps confused benevolence) left them behind a trash can stage right in an envelope, so if you’re passing through the Heineken Music Hall soon, see if they’re still there and buy yourselves a wijn on me.

Okay right, so then after that I went to Eindhoven and the next night saw Efterklang with their funny and gorgeous orchestra show, a version of which I had seen in a state of deep jetlag in Australia last year; it was much nicer to hear it (and Missy’s delicious arrangements) in a neo-gothic church at a normal time of night. Then! The next night in the same church, Teitur & Tróndur’s Everyday Songs project for the Nederlands Blazers Ensemble, a consortium of woodwinds, which consists of an orchestral prelude, five short songs about going through the motions of the day, and a postlude. One hour, perfection! So happy, and did you know how good bass clarinets sound in churches? I want David Lang to write a piece for bass clarinet and pipe organ.

The moral of the story is that I had a very long week of listening to live music every night which was before I began the process of supervising this double concerto I wrote for Colin Currie and the finalists of the Tromp percussion competition. Basically, all these people had to learn my piece, and then the finalists, of which there were three, played it in a concert with Colin, and then the winner played it one more time the same night in a different Dutch city? It sounds weird, I know, but that’s literally what just happened. This means that I heard three different people play this thing like nine times in two days, which is, while not unpleasant, a kind of insane thing to have happen.

Percussionists are so great, by the way. My first instrumental obsession was percussion music, before I fell into the Viola-Cloaca, and I befriended (and even lived with, for a time) as many percussionists as would listen to my ranting. What’s great about percussionists as a breed of creature is that they have to be patient musicians, waiting hours to play one triangle note, but also craftspeople, choosing precisely the right mallet for that one note, and precisely the right instrument, held at precisely the right angle; it reminds me of some obscure trade or specialty: the leatherworker with his awl, the farrier with his rasp, the glockenspieler with his featherweight Dragonfly mallets for use in La Mer only. In writing this double concerto, I tried to provide opportunities for this specialist’s sensibility as well as a more MacGyver thing wherein the players have to construct a nine-layered instrument out of scrap metal and broken cymbals: the choices of hardware are like musical decisions made in extremely slow motion. There’s another passage where I knew each player would have to figure out some kind of trick to simultaneously play the vibraphone and a triangle; it’s physically possible but it requires a little bit of Sheep-Wolf-Cabbage logic to figure out precisely where each stick needs to go, and unlike that old parable, there are many correct solutions to avoid getting eaten.

So basically all I need to do now is write a few more small things in December, and get ready for Advent. I’ma go hard this year, deeply wailing etc., which I think is always the right move in the solemn seasons.

I’ve spent the last week in Cincinnati doing a combination of concerts and educational things, if that’s what they’re called. One of the scariest things in the world, I think, is talking to other composers, and I just did it four times, twice at a high school, once at Northern Kentucky university (which is functionally in Cincinnati) and then again at Cincinnati College of Music, at the University. This came directly on the heels of doing it twice at Brown University, in Providence. The general procedure is that you turn up, play, perhaps, a piece of your own music, and then look at music the students have written, and make vaguely helpful &/or encouraging comments. The stressful thing for me is being “on” for that long — the first half, when talking about my own work is okay, I guess, but then to make what are essentially observed comments about somebody else’s music is a tricky business. I remember those moments in my own education where a visiting composer came and said something we all remembered for ages for better or for worse. I remember George Crumb being so awesome and Southern and endearing and I remember Charles Wuorinen being the opposite of those things. It’s a hard note to strike, and doing it four times in two days is intense. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more exhausted. The fear is saying something inadvertently mean, but also not just giving compliments, because otherwise what’s the point? Also in a few of these cases I’m only a few years older than the people presenting, so it seems somewhat perverse for me to be in a position to give anything other than collegial advice.

You guys! Northern Kentucky Univeristy is no joke. It’s a beautiful brutalist series of structures with very little ornamentation: a little grass here, a little potted plant there. It’s very very satsfying, especially at dusk, and they have all this random Donald Judd kicking around including Box and I was so happy.

I visited an incredible public school: the School for Creative and Performing Arts. They have an outrageously nice new facility with three theaters and a composition studio that should be the envy of any institution: rows upon rows of iMacs with MIDI keyboards and everything networked to be able to see things on a giant screen. And this is a public K-12 school!

Does everybody remember this genius article about Richard Stallman’s tour rider? I saw it before and was like, that dude’s crazy, but I realize that he and I share one essential requirement which is:

“I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do for breakfast. Please just do not bring it up.”

I couldn’t agree more. I find that one of the main reasons to avoid staying in people’s homes is this moment surrounding breakfast; it’s particularly vexing in my own parents’ homes because obviously I stay there and not in some hotel, and they are people with overstocked fridges. I think breakfast is a time when I need to reëstablish autonomy over the day, which usually, in my case, is a litany of stressful things over which I enjoy little control: mean emails, needy emails, staring in your face emails, shoes be talking emails, dry skin, iCloud synchronization issues, people late for appointments in their own hometown, loud noises, spatial chaos and generalized anxiety. If I can start the day on my own terms — which usually just means being able to make my own cup of coffee and sit quietly and read the newspaper – it makes a huge difference in being able to face down the rest of the day which is lived on the needy-ass terms of others. Anyway, there you go. Please just do not bring it up. He might well have added, “please do not bring up not bringing it up as I will then turn into an homicidal beast and lurch across the breakfast nook,” but I like his wording for now. And it’s less, I suppose, about the actual eating of the breakfast — there is nothing better than a spicy bowl of noodles just after arising! — than it is about starting the day feeling the indolent caprice of choosing one thing over another in whatever order one chooses.

I went, when I was in Providence with my parents, to visit The John Stevens shop, which is apparently one of the oldest continuously-run businesses in America (although I would love for there to be a Great Culling of all the superlatives; I feel like I’ve had a beer in four Oldests Pubs in Britain), which is a stone-carving shop in Newport, RI. It was a fabulous thing: a level of obsessive and specific detail unique to a particular craft, but with resonances with what musicians do, too. Look at this beautiful carving reading “Proportion is Difficult” (true story):

So satisfying. They shewed me an example of carved letters versus sandblasted (which is the cheaper and I imagine much faster option) and wow. Carving a letter is extraordinarily more beautiful. Check out this documentary my dad made about them in the distant past and a slightly more recent New Yorker article.

Total aside: I’m flying today on Alaska Airlines and it was one of those situations at the airport where one has to get a bag tag in location A and then “leave” the bag at location B down the way, and there was a lot of confusion with some giant family with way too many bags and a shouty dad and a mortified daughter and it ended with a helpful airport employee explaining that the bag drop for “Alaxka” airlines was actually at location C, anyway, I had never heard that particular s-cluster metathesis done in that way inside a word so elegantly with the exception of perhaps “excalator” but this is, in a way, more delicious, as it seems quite complicated to say; try it out…I suppose it might be better rendered Alakska.

Have y’all ever stayed in an hotel in which there was a convention? It is really really weird; a few years ago I was in LA and the convention there was Christian children’s book illustrators! At the (historic!) Hilton in Cincinnati, I shared the space with a rubber convention, whatever that means. Has anybody done an anthropological study about these guys who see one another only once a year, and the linguistic registers they access? It’s an artificial, drunken familiarity, with various nuances — the snapping while trying to remember somebody’s wife’s name (“…Right, Karen! How is Karen?); the man who vaguely disgraced himself last year and is drinking only seltzer but trying, perhaps too hard, to have not only a good time but a boisterously good time; the various tactics to dispel conversational silence including nodding so vigorously it looks like davening; the various ways in which a final drink is acceded to, and the stagey grimaces of the final standing-up, as if to imply an indulgence greater than having had three glasses of chardonnay in a hotel lobby in Ohio.

I want to recommend that everybody read A.M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven. Readers of this space will know that I have a serious love for her writing, which is always disturbing and urgent and just on the edge of pressing the knife uncomfortably close. This new novel does all that, but with a wickedly funny grin; it’s a winning, if exhausting, combination. Go get involved!

Does anybody else ever have that romantic tingle when you see where you can fly to from places that aren’t where you live? The idea that there is a direct flight from Alaska to Hawai’i is unspeakably touching to me.

Okay, ça fait longtime since I’ve blogged, and I feel kind of okay about it. I’ve been in a monthlong recovery and catch-up mode since this summer’s adventures; I knew, instinctively, that I wasn’t going to be able to write as much as I wanted while dealing with Gait in Birmingham, and when I finally arrived home to New York on August 6, I found myself with a fistful of sketches for pieces without any actual pieces, and several looming deadlines. I entered a sort of manic period of writing a series of pieces for chamber ensembles & solo instruments. I put the final touches on a piece for my hometown, Randolph, VT, and wrote a piece for Jeffrey Kahane & Daniel Hope to play at the Library of Congress, of all places. I wrote a song cycle for the lovely and wonderful Jennifer Zetlan, and finished a piano explosion for Simone Dinnerstein, and organized a few more drone moments, and finished a long-standing project, this new ballet, Moving Parts, for Benjamin Millepied’s new company in Los Angeles.

And now I am exhausted. I’ve just spent the last week in Los Angeles with Benjamin putting together Moving Parts at Disney Hall. The program was great: a piece of William Forsythe from the 90’s called Quintett, a Cunningham piece from the 60’s with an antagonistically bleak drone from LaMonte Young, and then our new work. The Forsythe piece was astonishing. I’d seen his work before, but never up close, and never this particular work, which uses most of Gavin Bryars’ delicious Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet as its music. The piece is simultaneously melancholy and playful, with some gasp-inducing coups wherein a dancer’s body will somehow curl around another like a tentacle, and whip outwards: cartoonish, science-fiction stuff, but with a sense of ritual and mystery.

The new piece I wrote for Benjamin required me to play the magnificent and large-fries-looking pipe organ in Disney Hall, which was so fun. It’s been years since I’ve properly played the organ; I am spoiled by my friend Jamie McVinnie, who is a proper and great organist. In his absence, I took it upon myself to register this thing, figuring out the nuances of the room and of the instrument itself, to try to make the piece sing. One forgets that the organ is essentially the first synthesizer; the process of figuring out which stops to use when is rather like the process of orchestrating a piece. The thrill, of course, is changing tack in the middle of the show. There was one moment that called for a full effect, and on opening night I second-guessed myself and chose a politely loud stop. The second day, I was more confident, and basically took the thing to eleven. I wish there were a way to reorchestrate pieces on the fly! Add back the trombones “good taste” said might be a bit de trop here; add glock to this line because the room feels like it could take it…

I had a flare-up of a terrible thing which is stress-induced dry skin on the hands; I haven’t had it in years, actually, but this week it came back. Having to play anything — or conduct, for that matter — for dance is always scary. The normal tempering devices of adrenaline and nerves have to be extra in check, because any slight deviation in tempo means that the forces of gravity will fuck up the dancers. Once, years ago, I conducted a dance piece way, way too fast and I felt so awful afterwards when a very handsome, and very sweaty ballet gentleman was near tears from having had to rush through a whole sequence; since then I’ve been trying to learn how to keep steady and resist that performance excitement. Anyway, stressful. I feel like it would have been fine if there were a way to close down all my inboxes for a fortnight before any such performances, but that seems a little precious, and also, aren’t I a big girl who can play two concerts without the skin sloughing off the sides of my fingers and palms!? Anyway, the piece is coming, in various configurations, to a town near you this year and next!

More soon, I hope. I’m excited to get back to writing words, too!