William Byrd’s music has always fascinated me both as a composer and as an erstwhile choirboy; on the page it looks like so little, but then in its realisation, an enormous emotional landscape unfolds. When Nick Collon asked if I might try to orchestrate a few motets for Aurora, I jumped at the chance. There is a moment in Byrd’s Miserere mei, Deus where the key suddenly shifts into an unexpected major, and the rhythmic footprint slows down. I aimed for an outrageous, but quiet, amplification of this moment that fascinated me as a treble; here, it is punctuated by registral extremes in the piano: gamelan gongs in the left hand and toy piano in the right. The second piece I arranged is Bow thine ear, O Lord, which is said to be one of Byrd’s most personal expressions of faith and the turmoil surrounding it. It has in it one of the high-water marks of the choral tradition, namely Byrd’s setting of the phrase “Sion is wasted and brought low”, which he sets twice in two different octaves, and it is scandalously lush even when performed by the most austere of choirs. Here, it’s brass, marimba, and ghostly strings, a texture that expands into the celesta and woodwinds intoning the word “Jerusalem”. I should point out that these are very liberal arrangements of the originals; occasionally, I have rendered the effect of one alto holding onto a note too long, a wayward tenor, a day-dreaming treble.

By All Means stems from a similar interest in the Anglican choral tradition, but with a slightly different set of rules. The commission was from the Juilliard School and the Royal Academy of Music, and it had to do with reacting to (and writing for roughly the same forces as) Webern’s Concerto for nine instruments, op. 24. My own response to this guideline was to focus on the opening three pitches of the row Webern uses, which, to me, produce a very diatonic outline of a B flat major chord. One of the most delicious psychological reactions I have had to most serial music is that my brain tries to turn twelve-tone music into post-Wagnerian tonal harmonies: thick, rich chords brimming with meaning and profound significance. I suffer from this disorder even when presented with the thorniest Wuorinen or the most inscrutable Babbitt. Listening to the row from op. 24, I was immediately reminded of the cross-relations in Weelkes motets, where a G major chord and a G minor chord can appear in the same bar a split second apart. By All Means is a large arch of several textures in which both Weelkes and Webern can coexist and collaborate: the scattered points of Webern’s orchestration organised together by a Tudor resolution, or the shimmering counterpoint of Weelkes sent astray by sudden chromatic variation.

Stepping is a form of almost militaristic dancing involving the entire body as well as the voice. The routines are highly choreographed and precise but maintain an expressive freedom that comes out of the energy required to pull off the moves. In writing Step Team for the Chicago Symphony MusicNOW series, I wanted to avoid too much delicate, pointillistic writing and instead focused on making the nine players function as one team with a singular rhythmic agenda. Whenever the Chicago Symphony comes to New York, I am always impressed with the massive steakhouse-style proportions of the brass sound, so this score features the bass trombone as a guide for the harmonic and lyrical material. At a certain point in the piece, the rhythmic unisons begin to break down, and individual players or groups of players start slowing down or speeding up against the pulse. The bass trombone works as a unifying element here, announcing the changes between sections. Some scattered pulses ensue, and the brass section continuously shepherds the other instruments back into line. Step Team ends with a gentle duet between the bass trombone and the piano, with a series of ornaments from the other players.

Orlando Gibbons! I love him so much. His cadences always drive me crazy with pleasure; when the Britten Sinfonia asked me to arrange a few anthems for small ensemble, I immediately said yes, on the condition that I could start with This is the Record of John, which is a chatty narrative piece featuring call-and-response interaction between soloists and the choir, with a fantastic accompanying meshwork of imitative phrases. Here, the viola is the star countertenor, slightly hungover but fiercely earnest.

Orlando Gibbons’s verse anthem See, see, the Word is incarnate is one of my favourite pieces of text setting: Gibbons divides up Godfrey Goodman’s verses into solo bits for solo or coupled countertenors, who weave in and out of a texture of viols. Then, the chorus comes in at the end of each verse, like a 1960s girl group, echoing the soloist: “Let us welcome such a guest!”, “Goodwill towards men!” Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorised everything and then would get entranced by the soloists (how can you not get drawn into a line like “See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood, the pricks of thorns, the print of nails”?) and miss my entrance. My piece, Motion, tries to capture the nervous energy of obsessive counting. The piece is built on little repeated fragments from the Gibbons, as well as on an extended quotation and ornamentation of one of the verses, where the viola and the cello criss-cross one another and the other instruments create a messy grid of anxious quavers. The piece ends ecstatically, using as its primary cell Gibbons’s melody “in the sight of multitudes a glorious Ascension”. The title comes from a vision of Christ’s reign: “the blind have sight and cripples have their motion” – the word “motion”, in Gibbons’s setting (and my appropriation), comprising three syllables.

Nico Muhly
4/2011

Writing a set of canticles (a Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, here, rather ambitiously called my First Service) seems like one of the things every composer ought to have done. These are the earliest works in this collection, dating from 2003, when I very anxiously came to Cambridge for their first presentations at Girton and Clare Colleges.
I like the idea of these specific texts having been sung basically every day since the sixteenth century – you have to set the texts delicately, obviously, but because everybody knows them so well, there is always possibility for small explorations into funnier textures and procedures. Another thing to keep in mind about these settings is that they are designed to be listened to while standing up; nobody wants an endless Magnificat. So, they proceed quickly, moving through the text at a conversational but authoritative pace. As I found with the Mass, there is a thrill in manipulating texts that are very well-known and that are recited daily. The only other text of this kind that comes to mind is the announcements made in transit: “mind the gap”, “fasten your seat belts”, “the nearest emergency exit might be located behind you”. Repetition is built into the texts on a macro level; why not, then, explore repetition on the surfaces of them as well?

The first piece I remember learning as a boy was Byrd’s setting of Senex puerum portabat, and so when asked to write a Christmas anthem with brass, I rushed at the chance to set the same text. I also appended a brighter text at the end, to take advantage of the brass quintet. My setting uses two kinds of repetition: metered, controlled pulses in the first half of the piece, and then wild, uncontrolled voices singing “Gloria in excelsis Deo”. The piece ends with a gentle set of Alleluias, a sort of post-partum comedown with gently lilting altos.

A Good Understanding is a celebratory, excited work originally written for adult voices with the addition of children’s voices at the end. The piece unfolds episodically, short choral phrases alternating with longer interludes from the organ and the percussion. The first half of the text is typical psaltry praise-making: outlining agreements, explaining the rules; the music is, accordingly, severe but practical. The second half of the text begins, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments”. I find the idea of “a good understanding” to be an especially exciting reward for following the rules; the trebles sing pulsed syllables and long descants to celebrate the covenant while the choir sings a lilting, repetitive refrain.

Expecting the Main Things from You is the only secular work on this disc, and although I have always considered setting secular texts to be incredibly difficult, I thought that Whitman’s texts here have the same kind of civic holiness found in the Psalms. Accordingly, the first movement begins with a somewhat obvious word-painting: the poet speaks of carpenters and we have the thwack of wood against wood, he speaks of deckhands and we hear a ship’s bell. However, the ant-farm soon vanishes and the texture dissolves into a lonesome solo violin outlining a delicate passacaglia. After an extended instrumental interlude, the choir emerges, talking about “the delicious singing of the mother”. The first movement ends – as do all three movements – with a wordless sung punctuation: a series of repeated pulses.

If the first and third poems reference the political urgency of the city, the second movement is a pastoral interlude. Accordingly, the percussion parts in this movement are built around three expanding and contracting rhythms in the woodblock, tam-tam and vibraphone. Three quarters of the choir sings a stylised Morse code (I was inspired by watching satellites pass overhead in the middle of the woods in Vermont; the now-omnipresent invisible haze of technology even in the fields), while some sopranos and altos overlay long, endless lines. The third movement is the most urgent and the most aggressive in its patterns: I wanted to reinforce Whitman’s movement from the general to the very specific and accusatory second person of the end of the poem. This is an exciting advantage in secular texts: the word “you” is, at least in the Rites of the church to which I am accustomed, sadly absent. It’s a wonderful word filled with more sounds than one would think, and can be a gentle embrace, or an aggressive finger-pointing. The last five minutes of the third movement obsess over these possibilities. A series of expanding and contracting rhythms and another wordless pulse bring the piece to a quiet close.

None of these works would be possible without their commissioners and first champions. Judith Clurman, a hugely energetic force in choral music, put her weight behind the First Service and commissioned Expecting the Main Things from You. Tim Brown and Martin Ennis, at Girton and Clare colleges respectively, very enthusiastically presented the canticles. And John Scott, a childhood hero of mine, has been performing Bright Mass with Canons since its premiere in 2006. It is with enormous pleasure that I’ve been working with Grant Gershon on this project, whose Los Angeles Master Chorale are a beacon of light for choral music both sacred and secular. His commitment to presenting new music, and his choir’s enthusiasm, have made them wonderful performers and partners in crime both for me and for many living composers.

Nico Muhly

One day tells its tale to another,
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
Although they have no words or language,
and their voices are not heard,
Their sound has gone out into all lands,
and their message to the ends of the world.

I wanted the ensemble to be a little quirky community of people living by the edge of the sea: a busybody flute, a wise viola, and the masculine, workmanlike bassoon, trombone, and upright bass. The piano acts as an agitator, an unwelcome visitor, bearing with it aggressive electronic noises and rhythmic interruptions. ”

Nico Muhly

-Pitchfork

-BBC Music

Precious? “Everyþing Bagel” from WD-50

Sloppy? Not Precious?

What makes all of this super interesting for me is that all of this is talking about Grizzly Bear. If you set up a sliding scale from Precious to Sloppy, where would you put any of the following:

Grizzly Bear, Dory

versus something like this:

Boulez, Messageesquisse, final section

or like:

Paul Simon The Cool, Cool River

Are you gwine give Paul Simon a hard time for the precision of this song? The presence of Possibly Ethnic Instruments? The lopey time signature that changes in the choruses?

or better yet:

Steve Reich The Cave, Genesis XXI

I feel like the scale breaks down. Precision and meticulousness just mean different things to all y’all indie rock people. Let me go out briefly on a limb. One of the most exciting things about the universe of indie rock or art rock or whatever the fuck you want to call it is the ability of the artist to represent, through recordings and live shows, an internal artistic universe. This is the difficulty composers always have: to represent the so-called life of the mind in small units of time. If you get commissioned for a five minute piece of music, you need to make it be, in addition to a successful five minute piece of music, an appealing glimpse into your musical/mental/erotic universe:

John Adams Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Larger works need to be larger glimpses: not just a peek through a window but a proper walk around the garden, with drinks:

Wagner Siegfried Dritter Aufzug: Vorspiel

CocoRosie are the best at this. You put on one of they jams and within seconds you realize that you are getting a really specific peek into a really specific place. If you’re into it, there are other buildings on the property:

CocoRosie K-hole
(is there a better lyric than “Mexican Poný / Fucked up Shoes”?)

So the point is: meticulousness & precision are the way to get this stuff across. And in the scale of things, Grizzly Bear is really not doing anything more than paying attention to each sound and each gesture “” and, I will add, just in my personal experience of dealing with them, not in a way that I would even begin to call overly-meticulous or precious, it was actually kind of a free-for-all with a larger shape governing smaller decisions. All of this is a very, very long way to just interrogate that sentence in the Times one more time:

But wow, these songs are precious, and they occasionally came spangled with extras that made them even more so.

Are they really? Are they so precious that they require a wow? Ùˆ! I bristle because I have been involved in some very meticulous music-making in my life, and this was one of the least. The application of that word just resonates in the same space in my head when President Bush said, “I don’t care what somebody on some college campus says.” Words like that ““ especially in reviews ”“ are training people to mistrust mindfulness and thoughtfulness, and it freaks me out a little bit to see a band I like so much get chided with a code-word for not having written meat & potatoes rock & roll.

That said, let me close out with two unprecious classix:

Classic the First

Philip Glass Floe from Glassworks Live at Sadler’s Wells

-Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone

- Los Angeles Times