Nico
Muhly,

A few days ago, I posted about how difficult it was for me to get a phone up and running in England. I got some sympathetic comments and then one sort of mean thing about being middle-class. That sort of angered me, because I realized: what do you do if you’re a non-English-speaking, non-Middle Class immigrant to London? If I can’t, with my fancy Ivy League education (and whatever Juilliard is — Shochu League?) get a pay-as-u-go phone working, what is it like if you’re Chinese? The end result of the phone saga is pretty great, though. The basic outline is this: I bought, legitimately and from the Apple Store Online, an iPhone linked to an Orange Pay-As-You-Go SIM. It worked. I gave everybody the number. And then suddenly, it no longer worked. There was no message or warning; it simply ceased working. I called them from my American phone. I argued with them. I faxed them my financial details. The Fraud Team had taken over my case. The Fraud Team is not “Customer-Facing.” The Fraud Team leaves work at 4:30 and doesn’t work weekends. I spent a weekend — and $425.44, I later found out — using my American phone to conduct my affairs. I went into an Orange Store. They were embarrassed and horrified and polite and apologetic and all, themselves, immigrants who had gone through similar hoops upon arrival from Pakistan and Bulgaria. An hour later, they made contact with the Fraud Team. The Fraud Team was not helpful; the Fraud Team communicates with the store employees using a little text-only computer terminal very similar to a Minitel. The Fraud Team took off at 4:30, presumably to light kittens aflame or worship Baphomet. The next day I went to another Orange store, and an Australian man told me: your best bet is either to only top up using cash or to have an English person pay for your phone bills; that way the credit card is linked to a UK address. You know how he knew this? Because that’s how he pays his own bill. Motherfuckers. The only way to make my legitimate phone work is to commit fraud? So now I have exactly the worst, most bizarre and illegal kind of phone, whose bill is paid by my friend J—. Doesn’t that sound like some Al-Qaeda pre-paid terror organization shit to you? I’m trying to figure out a way to make Orange, be they Customer-Facing or Not, to realize the error of their ways. If you make the bureaucratic process so opaque that Middle-Class people can’t even navigate it, chances are, your system is certainly not going to work for, let’s say, a Nigerian student who turns up and has his phone cut off and has no recourse to his other phone to call your customer servants.

All of this is not to say that I’m having a bad time! On my walk back from the first of two Orange Stores, I had to pass through the small network of streets in the City, near where the Fire of London started. This area is amazing because every streetcorner offers a quick glimpse of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which looks like a giant meringue on a plinth. When the light hits just right, which, in winter is several crepuscular hours, a walk through that area is unrelentingly beautiful. With a cup of coffee & with the promise of dinner with friends, I felt like the luckiest man alive. Every time I eat at St John — a pie with Alex, an ox tongue with Sigga Sunna, a snail with Jamie — I am filled with an overpowering life-umami.

The new piece I wrote for Mark Padmore and Pekka Kuusisto and the Britten Sinfonia has been happening on tour; I went to two of the first leg of performances (in Eindhoven and Amsterdam) and am heading to Cambridge tonight to hear another. It’s a complete decadence to hear a work so many times in one’s life, to say nothing of in a single month. I’m also excited because the performance in Amsterdam contained one of the most professional trainwrecks I’ve ever witnessed. Something happened — somebody came in early, somebody mis-cued, somebody wasn’t paying attention in the back — and it came dangerously close to falling apart. I like it though: the adrenaline focuses everything that happens immediately afterwards and you end up with a shimmering, taut remainder of the piece. The same thing happened when I went to see Signal play Steve Reich’s Double Seggistett at LPR a few months ago: for one split second — maybe half a bar? — there was a brief clenching of the ostinato, and the whole thing almost broke. Brad Lubman pinched something and relaxed something else, and then everybody was right there for the rest of the piece.

I’m interested in that tautness. In chamber music, you get this almost all the time. Watch a string quartet and you see every player constantly focused, negotiating, bartering, manic. In larger ensembles, this is not always the case. In the better ones, though, you start to see it creeping in on stage: I saw James Levine conduct the BSO in a Midsummer Overture at a tempo of quarter note equals, like, seventeen thousand, and there was a lot of focus on that stage. Last night, I went to see the New York Philharmonic on their tour in London, and their first encore, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, was like that: completely focused from the first stands of the violins to the back of the horns.

Sadly, I cannot say the same for some of the other pieces and players. That’s always what I do when I see big orchestras: I look at the back of the second violins, at the back of the violas, to see how engaged people are. It’s fascinating. Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra is a giant cauldron of textures, a sort of Szechuan hot-pot affair with little bits of things bubbling to the top covered in other things slicked with a third thing. The performance was great — don’t get me wrong — but Kind and Venerable Sir in the back of the violas: I’m watching u. And y’all phoned it in. That tremolo may not be the most important thing in the texture at that time, but you have to play it like it is — otherwise, what are we all doing with our lives?

All that said, it was great to see the Philharmonic outside of Fisher Hall, where I never go. The playing was great. The programming for the tour was, let’s say, a solid B. First night: That new Lindberg thing, followed by Prokofiev 2nd Piano Concerto which was fucking awesome. Bronfman ate that thing for dinner. Then Sibelius 2, which is always a plecz. Second night: A Haydn Symphony (bad idea), Adams’s The Wound-Dresser (more on this in a sec), Schubert Unfinished (fabulous) and Berg Three Pieces (fabulous). Then Egmont as an encore, then a Bernstein nibblet with the funniest English horn queef I have ever heard in my life. Now you look at these two days of tour programming and you think: okay, fine. It’s all fine. But in the back of my head something is screaming: more new music, more American music, more music by New Yorkers. Get that Haydn off of the stage and do a new American piece for chamber orchestra (Note: nothing’s wrong with Haydn. It’s just dopey to play on a tour and, like, yes, the trio from the minuet is hot shit and shows off the horns’ high notes, but it’s still just dopey). Do the Reich Duet for Two Violins! Commission something! Don’t do Egmont; do Short Ride in a Fast Machine. You already have one of the synthesizers for the Wound-Dresser! And all the percussion from the Berg! I know that I’m always going to back-seat program for the Phil, but I’ve said it before and I will continue saying it until I die: I want my hometown orchestra to be my home team. I want to see the season and scream, “I love my life and I love living in New York.” I don’t want to open up the LA season brochure and start looking into rental properties in Rancho Cucamonga just so I can hear Tehillim.

Anyway, whatever. They sounded great. I’m just saying. And they’re doing something of mine in a few months (for chamber-orchestra, off-venue, watch this space for more information) and I thought Alan Gilbert did a gorgeous job. There was one sort of sad moment in the Adams where Thomas Hampson (who sort of looks like Mitt Romný, has anybody else noticed this?) sings: “Poor boy, I never knew u, yet I þink I could not refuse this moment to d-i-i-ie 4 u” at which point the strings do this unspeakably gorgeous long, descending, Elgar melody, which burrows into the ground into the horns, and then gets picked up by a trumpet solo, Glory-style. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking moment and Gilbert was doing full 360° DaWinci arcs with his arms and the violins were playing it sort of like, Mezzo-Forte Poco Espressivo Ma Non Troppo. Of course I was looking at the back of the firsts and screaming with my eyes: bitches! It’s about War! It’s about the SIDA! it’s pertinent, it’s gorgeous, it’s a huge American melody. Make me some fucking gravy out of this line, like how you’re gonna out of the Schubert in twenty minutes’ time!

(As I write this, I am now on my way back from Cambridge, on a train that smells like tuna in the worst possible way).

This last week has gone by incredibly quickly; I’m not entirely sure how I lost track of so many days. Last Saturday, so exactly a week ago, I conducted a workshop for composers at Cambridge. This was, without a doubt, one of the most interesting experiences in my life. But I’ll start from the very beginning: rail replacement service caused me to be One and One Half Hours Late! I was so mortified. There is nothing worse, for me, than being late, and this was the worst kind: stuck on a train. Everybody involved seemed quite forgiving, though, so when I turned up 90 minutes after the start time, we got to work quickly. The format was familiar: an ensemble of student and professional players was assembled in a slightly overlit room, and six student composers had written pieces for the ensemble. It was, if I remember correctly, wind quintet, string quartet and piano, with a restriction on how many winds you could use. So you ended up with six pieces for the dreaded Mixed Ensemble.

What became immediately apparent to me is that these six composers were incredibly skilled, technically. Every gesture was really intelligently handled — quick atonal lines that whipped around corners like fancy waterslides (as opposed to not-fancy waterslides; those of you who have been on them, or have heard lesser works of Poulenc will know what I mean when I say that the corners do not Handle Well). They were especially good at the “single-note” orchestration trick where you have, say, an F, and the piano plays it loud, and a clarinet is playing it really really soft, and then a muted horn sneaks in, and then a cello plays the same note, but as a harmonic, a little bit later. It’s a good trick and these kids were ON it.

What also became clear to me, based on the reactions from my comments, was that these kids had never been explicitly praised or criticized before. It seems as if the only thing that they were comfortable hearing was a sort of middle-of-the-road platitude. The thing with music is that, yes, it’s unteachable. But there are some things that are Just Great about certain pieces, and other things that are Just Mistakes. The composer’s word, I think, is quite fallible — and I speak from experience. Oftentimes, I wish I had somebody who would just rush into my studio and say, here’s the deal with this piece: this part is awesome, and these two bars have to go. Or “those two bars are irrelevant.” I’ve written at length about this problem before; in the other Arts, both applied and otherwise, there are outside forces to temper the artist. Visual artists are restricted by the size of their canvas or the space their art will inhabit. Writers have editors! Can you imagine, composers, if you had an editor? Somebody you love & hate & trust & mistrust who has access to your music at any juncture? If you look at any novel, you see, in some back annex, the writer lavishing praise on their editors. It’s people who are Paid to Know Better than the Composer.

Anyway, we don’t have those. We have our friends, we have the musicians who play our music, and we have each other. And, of course, we have audiences, but you don’t want to be in the editing phase when you’re presenting a work to the public. So I’ve started being quite blunt with others and with myself especially about things that are working and things that are not working. And I do fantasize about what would happen if composers had editors. I know that in retrospect, somebody would have told me that a bunch of the shit I wrote between 2004-2006 was way too long. But just to be momentarily alternative-universe, do you think somebody would have told John Adams that the third act of Nixon was too long (it isn’t – it’s a dreamy reverie that is a welcome and rapturous thing) or that the end of act I of Klinghoffer is too long (it is, sort of – it’s kind of seventeen minutes of slightly similarly harmonically constructed material with obbligato solo instruments before we get the chugga-chugga-chugga Night Chorus)?

But this opens up the biggest question is: how can a composer learn to defend her work? If my editor told me, “Hey Nico, you’ve gotta cut six minutes from this piece,” and I disagreed, I’d have to access a very interesting linguistic register. It’s this thing of talking about your own art as an object distinct from your own body &/or mind. This is the thing I was trying to get the Cambridge kids to dip into: dear boy, with the beautiful atonal horn line: you’re good at that. You’re not good at pacing. Let’s work on it! Let’s talk about what you want to achieve, emotionally and intellectually, with all this beautiful counterpoint. If you have a clear agenda, it’s going to solve all your problems. Dear madam, with the gestural content to rival Boulez: let’s clean up your notation so we can talk about why you have titled your piece with Scripture. Does the scripture trickle down into the work, or does it frame the work? Why are these seven minutes of music preferable to, for instance, seven minutes of silent meditation on the same scripture?

In that spirit, we had our first rehearsal for my new piece Impossible Things — a double concerto for violinist Pekka Kuusisto and tenor Mark Padmore. Within six seconds of starting work, Mark, Pekka, and I, along with Miss Jacqueline, all agreed to change basically all of the tempo indications. I cut two bars. I confessed stupidity about a double-stop in the cellos. We rehearsed the ending, which is kind of fast. It sounded great. We took it on the road to Holland. At the pre-concert awkward pacing-around moment one of the violist confessed that one bar in the ending was “a little bit tricky.” He showed it to me: it was a fucking mess! A completely unidiomatic disaster of string crossings. What had happened is that it had been originally a violin line in a different key and when I moved things around, I forgot to check to see if the string crossings worked, which is normally a process of calling Nadia in the middle of the night while she’s at the kluh and being like, “hey, okay, so get into second position, and…” I thanked him, but then I realized, honey, tell a bitch during rehearsal! I would have fixed it right then and there!

Anyway, all of that is a very long way of saying, it’s a really good skill to have — almost as important as being able to excite a single pitch through orchestration — to be able to defend your work verbally, as well as being able to accept criticism on the teleological level, as in: why should this music exist as opposed to the same amount of silent reflection on the same themes?

From tha Þkrappbook:

an email from me to Pekka Kuusisto:

I have a few ideas about the piece — I figured out two possible cuts that I think will help with pacing. I’m wondering if you think you’ll have time to incorporate them maybe tomorrow in Tilburg?

I want to cut bars 151, 152, and 153.

I want to turn bar 331 into a 3/4 bar. So everybody just does whatever they’re doing for 3 beats and lose the last two “quavers” and crash right into 332. I think this is going to help enormously with this awkward transition.

Finally, I want to cut 517, 518, and 519, so basically, that bar at 516 happens and diminuendos right into the downbeat of 520 and your lyrical sóló

and I wrote you all these new double stops in the fast movement

a comment from an internet troll re: my last post about the inconveniences of getting a phone in London, and my response:

Grow some balls, you sound like a child. If the guy at orange wasn’t Bengali would it still be 9 out of 10 on the fraud scale? You sound pathetic. A call to arms for Londoners? From you? Yeah, the revolution starts here and boy is it middle-class. If Londoners were like you the city would be dead in ten years.

[Nico responds: Well, I think the nature of this revolution would be specifically designed for people like me and our petty, bourgeois concerns like phones and getting coffee & sandwiches quickly. I can't pretend to speak for the Subaltern in London, or anywhere for that matter — being born middle-class is so eternal, isn't it — but it sounds like you 'n' Gayatri are ready to really roll up the sleeves and get to work with the capital-R Rev! Onwards! I'll be on the sidelines with artisanal sandwiches for when you get tired. ]

an amazing Wideo of Gayatri Spivak talking about…essentially, herself, but, you know, in trajectory:

“This particular robbing of agency, as it were, had unleashed a much greater charge, and generally in the name of gender, gender as alibi….there is not enough time, we’ll try to make an end soon – in this context, I will argue……” — she is so great — she drops these little farts and then rushes away from them, never to return! I love this woman.

I have had a very frustrating pageant of inefficiency in London today. I got an English mobile number last night — which, in itself, was a very complicated ordeal despite the fact that I only wanted a Pay-As-Þú-Go phone. (the complexity is beyond description; let me just say that it was only pharmaceuticals that kept me from eating a man’s liver on Oxford St) It worked, and I set up a whole series of interviews and social appointments on it. And then, I woke up this morning to a doomed “no service” message. Restarts, network resets, etc. I eventually called my Cervix Provider, Orange, to discover (after 30 minutes on hold, with actually kind of satisfying hold music), that my account had been suspended for Fraud. The only way, darling Yogesh from Tech Support informed me, to reättain service was to fax (?) my most recent credit card statement (?) to a certain number. Now. Let’s think about Things that Seeme Fraudulent. As far as I’m concerned, faxing my bank statement to some Bengali dude is like, Fraud level 9 out of a possible 10. Me trying to move to London and behave like a normal human being is like, 2 out of a possible 10. Anyway, I endured the Faxing Process (which, let it be said is not easy; it involved PDF’s from Citibank, reformatting from 8.5×11 to A4 sized paper, and an amazing scene of four generous women from the Roundhouse huddled around their fax machine trying to get it to work.) They had no way of confirming that it worked. I don’t know if it worked. My phone still isn’t working.

I am now convinced that England is essentially an enormous logistical game, like that thing where you tilt a surface to get a marble to fall into a specific hole. At a certain point today, after 45 minutes with Yogesh and fielding all the insane emails attendant to my failure to “answer” my “phone,” I seriously entertained the idea of just Going Home, where the streets are paved with pork belly and I can make my phone go. Tickets were investigated; fraudulent medical excuses were fabricated.

After a few hours of really horrifying logistical +44 hours, I decided to just abandon hope of leaving and repair immediately to St John, where I et: Snail, Sausage & Chickpea, and some Parsnipp Soup, with a glass of white wine. All of this set me straight: London is a place obsessed and consumed by inconvenience, with a few fortresses of awesomeness, St John being one of them. The physical space is heaven, the food is heaven, the staff is heaven, the font is heaven, the glasses are heaven.

Later that day, I went to the Roundhouse to rehearse. I adore the Roundhouse. It is one of the most beautiful spaces in the world. The bar? Was great. I sat there for an hour, from 3-4, answered emails, made some arrangements for friends, and then was informed that the bar was closing for “a changeover.” A changeover to what, I axt. “Dinner service,” was the answer. “So, can I sit here while you change over?” “No.” Now we come to a crossroads. Do I get hood with these people? Or do I just leave like how they are very politely asking? I left because I had to make a phone call, but this woman’s attitude stuck in my craw. What am I meant to say to her ass, “I’m playing here Sunday; can you please just let me keep this wee table in the corner during your changeover? can I stand up for 5 minutes while you reärrange the candles and naps-kijn?” Instead I just sort of collected my things and left.

BUT THEN. Leitur. At 6 PM, I wanted to go to the bar, with an administratrix from the orchestra, to get a glass of wine. The barmaid on duty (I reïterate: barmaid on duty) informed us that we could not achieve wine. Why? Because. The fact that there were three half-full bottles of red wine literally within my arm’s reach was immaterial 2 her. I followed the lead of my administratrix hostess and we left. But then fifteen minutes later I said to myself, you know what? Fuck these people. So I marched back up and said, what amount of money can change your mind? The barmaid was horrified. I said, what can I say or do to achieve a glass of the red wine that is half open, slowly fermenting in front of my wery eyes. She said, “oh, well, you can have a plastic glass of it without any problem. It’s just a glass that we can’t do.”

Hello. What are we dealing with here? Was she saving face? Should she have said this bit about the plastic glass 30 minutes before? Am I a crazy New Yorker? Am I petulant? Is she crazy?

I want to use this space as an urge to Londoners to Stop the Madness. Question all the times that people tell you that you cannot do a thing that you clearly should be able to do. It’s wine behind the bar; it’s £4.30 in your pocket; surely we can make something happen. It’s foreign students and workers in your city: give a bitch a cellphone without struggle. It’s people who want to express their dollars in pounds: give a bitch a bank account without all this rigmarole. I’m really over the Eichmannesque behavior of everybody up in here. It’s 10 PM, I’ve been working all day, you have to let me eat! I would love (sort of) for there to be a place besides St John that is an Acceptable Atmosphere in which to exist.

One thing I have to say, though, amidst all of this, is that the Roundhouse is an amazing, amazing place. I did an interview for their in-house radio station and on my slightly curvèd walk to the studio, I walked past what seemed like almost infinite mini-studios with Macs with Logic and ProTools rigs. All these rooms were filled with fresh-faced 21-year old musicians who in some way establish tenure in this fabulous space. What this place amounts to, in New Yorker terms, is the thing that all of us have been dreaming of for years. It’s like Zankel Hall meets Terminal 5 meets a studio meets the American Music Center. I was beyond impressed with it; I was sort of moved by my brief walk past young people using the computer and very moved by one group of two of them: a gay boy and a (?) girl, riveted by the flashings of Logic on the screen of their iMac. I want the iTunes download of whatever it is that they made that day.

So, in summary:

London people: Resist this Bullshit!

London people: Support the Roundhouse!

London people: Eat the Snails & Chickpea!

Pre-concert talks are always really funny to me. I always fear them slightly but know that it’s really important to do because concertgoers tend to really like them. I never go to them, so I have no idea what you’re meant to do to make a successful one. I got sort of blind-sided today by a series of unfortunate events (1. coffee machine malfunction at home, 2. totally weird subway situation, 3. an unexpected walk outside in the very very cold with no coat to a Methodist church filled with home-schooled children who had written a wonderful spatial set of variations on Copland’s Sextet) and ended up at a pre-concert talk at the Wigmore hall where I was disastrously hungry and over-caffeinated and was too OCD to use the toilet and was wearing one layer 2 few. So! I ended up sounding slightly manic and in my frenzy fucked up my Queens (I lumped Purcell in with Elizabeth rather than Mary) and then got totally insane when this random guy asked me My Least Favorite Question in the World.

My Least Favorite Question in the World is a question that only the English ever ask. It is a question that is not in fact a question but is just a mean comment, disguised in an observation. It goes something like this: “Isn’t it the case that in the new music scene in New York, a lot of music is being written ___*insert generality here*___”. If the generality is that the pieces are short rather than long, this is code for “Americans are superficial.” If the generality is that pieces are more for orchestra and less for small ensemble it is a coded comment about Americans being opportunistic. Today’s variation was that music in “the” “new” “york” “scene” is composed, for the most part, of music for voices and percussion ensemble. And I just thought to myself, what on earth is the question here? And instead of answering politely, I kind of lost my cool and just accused this poor dude of coded language and was very unrelenting. I was basically like, “I’m sorry that all the fun festivals at the Barbican are Reich and Adams but, like, Tehillim is a beautiful piece of music and let’s not generalize about scenes” and then I added something about the Kwakiutl and something else about Lesbians just to confound anybody who was trying to follow me logically. After the talk, I tried to find him to apologize and sort of make peace but he had vanished and I had to Majorly Correct my caffeine/sweat/hot/cold/toilet qi.

Anyway, the short version of this story is: sorry, dude! You came to my pre-concert talk and I am super appreciative and you asked what I think was an innocent question and I unloaded a huge pile of sass on you for no reason.

But then, I sort of got to thinking (cue Carrie Bradshaw cut-away here) that questions about “scenes” in other places are always, in a sense, coded. I have written about my sense of, and my relationship to, “the” “new” “york” “scene” in this space before; I’m not even going to link to it because I was very cruel to a few people and hurt a bunch of feelings. If you want to find it, just search in the search box. But the point is, I am so committed to actively resisting these notions of scenes — I just bristle anytime anybody uses the word. But probing a little deeper into my weird hang-up about this, I realize that my music is slowly unraveling itself from being written in New York. Impossible Things, the piece that Mark Padmore and Pekka Kuusisto will premiere with the Britten SInfonia next week — not a note of it was written in America. Motion, which we’ve been touring for the last few days, was written almost entirely in Singapore and Cambodia. This giant opera I’ve been slaving over was written almost entirely in Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, with only the merest dynamics and articulations added in the 212. This big piano piece I’m writing now is going to have been entirely written in this ridiculously expensive, vaguely Saudi-banker efficiency in London. What right do I have to speak about what’s going on in New York? An English friend is instant messaging me right now saying that he’s about to see all my musician friends at a gay bar in New York — I am in my pajamas realizing figured bass and the church bells in Smithfield have just struck 3 AM; I am completely Remov’d from the Scene, pieces for voice and percussion notwithstanding. Who has a right to articulate what’s going on in a place?

So now I’ve come back around, and I feel like I was right to bristle at the question. The implication in asking about what’s going on somewhere else is, in some way, a dig. Isn’t all art in Russia this sort of ironic Stalinist self-referential portraiture? Isn’t all music in Bamako just folk music with an electric bass? Isn’t music in Paris just IRCAM algebraic jibjab? It becomes a question about your relationship with your own city: what is being made in London that’s beautiful? Who is making music that moves you, Question Dude? Is it Patrick Wolf (whose slow descent into more & more baritone pleaseth)? Is it Simon Simon Bainbridge? Is it Michael Nyman? Where Judith Weir at? What did you people do with Steve Martland, anyway?

I love London and would love to get a handle on what music is being made here that is touching people. As a foreigner, being fêted with these numerous and wonderful performances, it’s hard to get a handle on. I’m doing a workshop for young composers in Cambridge on Saturday, which I hope will give me some sense of, you know, who these people are and where they are deriving their pitch material from. But I’m not entirely sure that seven hours in Cambridge is going to necessarily give me the synecdochal overview that would be the analogue to whatever it was that Dude.co.uk was talking about with the voices and percussion thing. Did he mean the Little Match Girl Passion? Was it a dig on the Little Match Girl Passion? Tehillim? Four Proverbz? That batshit George Crumb thing that’s the most beautiful thing in the world, Unto the Hills?

I write this from London; I have finally finished one of my favorite tasks, which is Provisioning — buying those weird necessities that you never think about: band-aids, tea, shampoo, blu-tak, the proper house lotion, the proper loofah for the shower, the right kind of garbage bag. My girl Jamie came over not twelve seconds after I arrived bearing a bottle of Dubonnet and another bottle of Gin, so now I can make the drink of which the Queen Mum & the Queen herself were/are most fond. (I also got into a whole “gin and dubonnet internet wormhole featuring articles and pictures and all sorts of shit). Provisioning in London is not the easiest thing in the world because their drugstores or supermarkets don’t tend to have that genius “sundries” aisle like up in the Duane Reade. So, for instance, I just spent the better part of an hour trying to find anywhere within walking distance of my apartment that would sell me any kind of adhesive; near the end of the hour I grew so desperate I almost got all Margaret Cho’s mom and just bought some cooked rice and made a little sticky ball.

I am in London this month in residence with the Britten Sinfonia; the residence is multi-faceted and multi-media. There are three main elements to it, though. I programmed for them a lunchtime concert lasting precisely one hour, which consists of three Orlando Gibbons motets arranged by me for clarinet, piano & strang quartet. Then, they perform the Howells Rhapsodic Quintet, a new work by me (Motion) based on a Gibbons motet, and then the Copland Sextet for dessert. It’s a perfect little hour; I love that Howells so much because it is so awkward — he is a melodist, and the melodies are delicious, and he also tries to write little clarinet licks that are not so successful but there is something very beautiful about it. And the Copland is a classic! So that’s Part the First of my Residency. This lunchtime experience is happening all over the UK (and it happened in Krakow yesterday) and everybody should come because what better way to spend a lunchtime hour?

The second part is a big show — but a one-off — at the Roundhouse in London this coming Sunday. The Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Nick Collon, are doing two older works of mine (By All Means & Step Team), I am gonna play Philip Glass Mad Rush on the Pianoforte, I’ma conduct Steve Reich City Life, and Sam Amidon’s going to come and sing three songs, including a newly exploded and orchestrated version of The Only Tune. So that’s part two of the thing.

Part Three, and sort of the most involved part, is a big concert with a string orchestra, tenor Mark Padmore and violinist Pekka Kuusisto. I wrote Pekka a violin concerto and Mark a song cycle that happen to be the same piece of music, so it’s kind of a double-concerto but not really. With it, we’ve programmed Adams Shaker Loops, my favorite, Britten Les Illuminations, my favorite, and Reich Duet for Two Violins & Strangz, also my favorite. What more could you ask for? All of this kicks off in Eindhoven, NL, later this month and then arrives in the UK in the beginning of February.

One of the frustrations of my life is dealing with institutional PR imbalances. A good example is this gig at the Roundhouse. It is, by far, the most “high-profile” of all of the three shows — people are tweeting and blogging about it, half of my inbox is Roundhouse-logistics. But in terms of the actual work for me involved, it’s pretty minimal. It’s older works; I have to re-learn Mad Rush which is hard, I have to conduct City Life which is hard, during which you sort of have to think about 9/11 never 4get but! Compare that, which is a fun, fabulous, glamorous one-off, to the work of writing a thirty minute new work for violin and tenor! There are so many chores involved in doing that — you have to choose the text, in this case, newly translated Cavafy Poems. You email back and forth with the translator, you make crazy sketches, you write down the words ‘Alexandria’ and ‘Homosexual’ in nine different colors. You skype Finland. You buy every single recording Mark Padmore has ever made. You ask everybody in Christendom & the Caliphate what they think about Mark Padmore’s Voice. You sort through those emails. You buy Ian Bostridge’s thesis for six hundred dollars, high on ambien. You cut a poem. You add another. You make diagrams of the structure. You figure out that Mark Padmore has a very handsome e-flat. You fall down an internet wormhole about e-flat. You figure out that Pekka Kuusisto plays Sibelius better than anybody and avoid calling him asking him to play “that note from the second movement of the Sibelius concerto” over the phone and then doing the same to Hilary Hahn. You call the translator in Germany and ask if he means savoir or pouvoir. You fend off an email asking for programme notes before you’ve finished the third movement, a nice passacaglia. You argue with your copyists about syllables. Snippy words are exchanged. You go to Cambodia, you volunteer at the circus school, and somehow, your phone has reception and it’s people asking for more programme notes! It’s an enormous amount of work, a new piece, and there is something very relaxing about presenting a concert of older works. I’m not complaining; this is a good problem to have. But it’s complicated.

A big problem with my life was that my e-mail filter was marking as spam all emails from two very important English women who are sort of going to be coördinating my life for the next bit — Pippa Ricketts and Camilla Stagg. I lost almost a week of emails from both of them before I realized what had happened.

The big moral of the story is that I encourage all fine Englishpeople to come to all three events, as it will give you a pretty comprehensive portrait of my goings-on for the last six months. One is a lunchtime snack, another is a one-off extravaganza, and the third is a beautifully curated and, I hope, well-wrought evening of song and strings.