So, what’s up with the freaky photo of your face covered in blood on the tour’s Facebook page?
Listen, if you deal with classical-music people, the kind of head shots you have to have as a composer are APPALLING. Go to ten composers’ Websites, you’ll want to kill yourself. It looks like some seventh-grade … it’s so bad. I just thought, Fuck that, it’s so uninteresting. The stuff I was sending out of myself last year was like, you know the one where I look all giddy and sort of like a serial killer? They were like, “Do you have anything more serious?” And I was like, “Well, yeah, I do, but I’m going to have blood on my face.” There’s no in between. It’s sad, too — have you ever noticed, you see a picture of Philip Glass and it’s always that same pose? You can just hear the photographer being like, ‘Put your hand over your mouth, look pensive!’ You’re like, ugh, God. It drives me crazy. You know who has great head shots? James Levine. It’s that one of him looking super excited to be conducting Berlioz. It’s awesome.

The album’s title track involves mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer repeatedly singing addresses and phone numbers. How did the idea occur to you?
I was thinking about writing for the voice, and in the classical tradition what you’re trained to think the voice carries. And the answer is the voice is the bearer of narrative, the voice is the bearer of emotion, it’s the oldest instrument, the simplest instrument. And I was interested in accepting all of those conditions except for narrative, right? I wanted to write a song without a plot. So I thought, okay, it would be great if I could just ask this girl everything she knows about her whole life: what phone numbers she can remember, what addresses, and if you think about it, it’s an interesting question. Like, what phone numbers do you have memorized? If someone asked you right now what numbers you have memorized, it would be an interesting list, because it probably wouldn’t be your best friends.

The album also includes Wonders, a piece for vocalist and trombonist Helgi Hrafn Jonsson. It seems like you’ve recently developed quite a love of the trombone…
I just got into it! It’s sort of like how people all of a sudden get into pork belly, you know? You find yourself eating the same thing for lunch every day, like, “Chipooootle!” I found a friend who was a countertenor AND a trombonist and was like, “Well, that’s perfect. Piece for you, coming right up!”

The press release for this concert mentioned liturgical dancing would be involved…
Oh, I don’t know what that is. That has nothing to do with me. Liturgical dancing is the lowest of the art forms, really. Honestly, that’s Sam Amidon just being indie. Don’t ask me about that.

Did you consider making this a theatrical show like your recent one at the Kitchen — which featured Sam singing atop a giant plaster horse?
No, listen, if we could have carted that horse around in the minivan, this would be a different conversation. I actually thought about it, but [Icelandic artist] Shoplifter is in Poland for the summer. And you need to bring a million trannies to do the makeup, so we decided to do it simple style this time. Next year!

You’ll be speaking from the stage at these shows, something different for you. Is it something you’ve ever wished you could do in a more traditional classical concert?
I actually like all the rules in concert halls, the silence, the clap here — all that shit I find very erotic. I never feel like I have to break down the fourth wall; that to me is uninteresting — I’m kind of mistrustful of trying to break that tradition too much. But you know when David Robertson [at the Philharmonic] does those pre-concert speeches and sometimes you’re like, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened” and other times you’re like, “Just turn around, Blondie, and conduct that Messiaen”? Sometimes you want it to just go.

Muhly, who turns 27 Tuesday, is the reigning It Boy of New York’s downtown music scene, and in his black clothes and shock of multidimensional hair, he fully looked the part. But Muhly has considerable talent, as he proved in works like “Keep in Touch” (a tour de force for Sirota, with Muhly accompanying on keyboard and electronics) and “Skip Town,” whose insistent patterns exploded with confidence and exhilarating, cathartic vitality.

The climax of the concert was a riveting performance of “The Only Tune,” from Muhly’s new album, “Mothertongue.” Starting with a quirky little folk song called “The Wind and the Rain,” Muhly built “Tune” into a searing, explosive powerhouse that defies categorization: a work of brain-bending originality and power.

Not everything on the program was as satisfying, though. Neo-folkie Amidon delivered a number of traditional American songs in an affected, faux-Appalachian twang that grated more than it convinced.

And while the self-described “insomnia pop” of Bartlett (a.k.a. “Doveman”) was pretty enough, songs like “Ghost” and “The Cat Awoke” were sung with such vague, breathy softness that they vanished almost as soon as he whispered them into the microphone.

The prolific Mr. Muhly, who turns 27 on Tuesday, has had his pieces performed uptown (at Carnegie Hall) and downtown (at the Kitchen), created music that was adapted from sources as unlikely as “The Elements of Style,” and worked closely for a spell with the almost painfully ethereal vocalist Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. As obsessed with choral music a millennium gone as he is with next-generation electronics — he pays the rent working as a keyboardist and conductor for Philip Glass — Mr. Muhly has no problem constructing pieces through instant messaging while digging back into the primal sources that make music at once visceral, ecstatic, and cerebral.

“He is not afraid,” Mr. Hegarty said of his colleague. “He hears things vividly.”

Mr. Muhly also speaks vividly. Grabbing a happy-hour cocktail at Good World, an Orchard Street bar not far from his Chinatown loft, the composer, who is nearly always described as boyish, was indeed … boyish. But if he looks a good bit younger than his years, the Vermont native displays a thriving intellect that connects seemingly random topics as swiftly as a Google search — whether he’s talking about Thomas Tallis or “Top Chef.”

“There’s something so manic about the chefs,” Mr. Muhly, who graduated from Columbia and Juilliard with dual degrees in English and music composition, said. “The knives and the heat. And Padma. She’s so out of control. Have you read her cookbook? It’s ridiculous. Like this fake Nigella Lawson supermodel vibe.” He mimed Padma Lakshmi, host of the hit Bravo reality series “Top Chef”: “‘I love to go and pamper myself silly and eat so much Korean barbecue. Because I’m wild!’”

Mr. Muhly laughed so hard he was about to fall off his chair.

“It’s great.”

Maybe one day Mr. Muhly will write an opera based on “Top Chef.” If you spend a little time with him, the idea begins to seem awfully normal. Or, spend some time listening to his new album “Mothertongue” (Bedroom Community/Brassland). His fusion of folk music and electronics provides a backdrop for Saturday’s performance at (Le) Poissin Rouge in Greenwich Village. The show, which Mr. Muhly described as a “bistro version” of the recording, also features his key collaborators Sam Amidon, Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman), and the violist Nadia Sirota.

Though he cheerfully concedes the pervasive influence of new-music kingpins such as Mr. Glass and John Adams on his own writing, Mr. Muhly took on “Mothertongue” as an occasion to reimagine much earlier incursions into his aesthetic consciousness. His original influences were his parents, whom he described as being “older than hippies” yet devoted enthusiasts of the folk-music revival of the early 1960s, as symbolized by such singers as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.

Check out Mr. Muhly’s seemingly radical adaptation of a lyric called “The Two Sisters.” Titled “The Only Tune,” it features Mr. Amidon’s singing and string-plucking, a lot of electronic manipulation, and three separate variations on the song that veer from sonic chaos to a transcendently soulful viola solo by Ms. Sirota that ties everything — the lyric’s tragic theme and Mr. Muhly’s extremely creative interpretations of it — together, juxtaposing the analytical and the passionate. The composer’s reaction against one tradition is actually a re-embrace of an older one.

“I hate seeing people singing folk songs and smiling,” he said. “When you listen to the Child Ballads, it’s some crazy old man in Scotland and you know he’s not smiling. Because the songs are all so horrible. They’re so vicious and pagan. Even the ones that aren’t pagan. I’m way more interested in these heavily stylized things. Like [English countertenor] Alfred Deller singing Elizabethan minstrel songs. It’s like Butoh, but way more text-appropriate.”

As a child, Mr. Muhly remembered, his parents sang him the song about the two sisters. The older one pushes the younger one into a stream. Later, the body is fished out of a mill pond and gets refashioned into a violin, an instrument whose only sound is of cold wind and rain.

“I’m like, ‘I can’t believe you’re singing this like it’s nothing. This is infanticide.’ There’s this texture of chilled-out-ness in folk music. So I was trying to do a piece to insist on how nasty it is. I want to own the murder. Jerry Garcia made a recording of it. It’s so dopey. It plods along. I mean, they push her in and make a fiddle.”

Mr. Muhly, whose speech can carom a bit like a pinball going “ding-ding-ding-ding,” has a way of making a strongly felt point through a tone of sheer dumbstruck wonder rather than, say, assuming the role of a didactic snoot.

“Someone took a girl’s body and made a violin. Like, that’s amazing. It requires some focus. We’re going to have bone. We’re going to have flesh. We’re going to have hair. Making that cut was the most fun thing ever. It was crazy to do and it felt so delicious.”

Recorded in Iceland at the studio run by the producer and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurðsson, “Mothertongue” is the product of a highly inclusive process.

“When you think about classical composers, you think about the composer being isolated,” Mr. Amidon said in a separate interview. “But with Nico, there’s a social element that’s really important.” The guitarist also noted Mr. Muhly’s reluctance to prefabricate anything. “We started with drawings on a piece of paper,” he said. “There was no score until the piece was done. And it’s very harmonically complex. I would mess something up, and he clearly was so open to the moment that he would keep my accident-laden version.”

Cracks in the veneer are valuable to Mr. Muhly, who actively resists the incessant pigeonholing that American popular culture imposes on its artists. It’s one reason he enjoys working in Iceland, where, he said, someone is either “indie” or is not.

“You can get away with a breadth of influence there,” he said.

As a cozily somnambulant ballad by Cat Power drifted into the early-evening bustle of the street corner outside, Mr. Muhly mimicked those who don’t quite get that there’s nothing to get. It’s all there. Always. All the time.

“People here, there is no end to asking, ‘How do you reconcile this plus this?’ It’s really boring. People asking, ‘How do you bridge the two different worlds?’ What worlds are you talking about?”

The composer mentioned a well-known music critic whose approach drives him crazy. “It’s unbearable. It’s always in the first person, and it’s always, ‘It sounds like this plus this.’ It does not. This is your dumb hermeneutical exercise. What is that narrative? If people ask me what my music sounds like and I’m feeling charitable, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, it’s like John Adams plus 16th-century choral music.’ And then I feel stupid for six weeks after. Dirty. I have to loofah.”

This time, Muhly will arrive by van. He’s going the indie-rock route, coming to the Museum of Fine Arts for Sunday’s concert as part of the 802 Tour, a collaboration with Sam Amidon and Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett.

Muhly is perfectly happy to ramble around the East Coast. His upcoming schedule is packed, with a pair of operas, a dance piece for Stephen Petronio, and a song cycle for soprano Jessica Rivera. This may be the last time for a while he can split drive time with his friends.

“In classical music, the concert experience is this very formalized thing,” explains Muhly in a recent phone interview. “You dress up nicely, you might shower before you go. It’s a special effort and the space is usually gorgeous. With this kind of tour, there’s an idea that the music is a continuum of the day and a more social interaction than not. This tour is more about staying on people’s floors and people’s couches and being more casual about what it means to make music.”

In a sense, Sunday’s gig is the perfect bill for the composer, whose new album, “Mothertongue,” is a study in new school classical. On the recording, he embraces the coolly electronic, mountain folk, and the Steve Reichian school of vocal mashing.

“I’ve been watching Nico for a couple of years now,” says Dan Hirsch, concert program manager at the MFA. “He comes from the classical world, but he really gets the emotional quality of these musicians. This is the first time he’s done a tour like this. And there’s this feeling that this is a very unique thing we may not be seeing much in the future.”

Muhly, who turns 27 at the end of this month, is already considered a leading light of contemporary classical music. As a composer, he’s been praised from the start, “poised for a major career” as early as 2004 by New Yorker critic Alex Ross. More recently, the Los Angeles Times declared that “Muhly’s career has been a pursuit to figure out what comes after every rule has already been broken.”

As a character, Muhly, with mussed-up hair and a conversational style that darts like lightning across power lines, is also irresistible. He’s a social sparkplug as likely to be spotted with composer Philip Glass as he is with indie-rock band Grizzly Bear. In interviews and on his blog, Muhly can sound equally engaged, whether debating the unfair labeling of musical genres or a recent episode of “Top Chef.” In a musical world in which too many are too delicate, he’s also not afraid to be unflinchingly honest.

Take his view of two major symphonies. He admires the daring work of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and bemoans the state of the New York Philharmonic. “You go to the Phil’s website and first it looks like a Tampax ad and then the programming is a disaster,” he says. “A festival of Brahms?”

Dennis Alves, director of artistic planning for the Pops, says that he appreciated Muhly’s attitude when he came to Boston last year. Many composers would prefer to work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, not the Pops, who are seen as the lighter, less artistically serious side of the BSO family. Not Muhly.

“He jumped at the chance to have his music played by the Pops,” said Alves. “He was so refreshing, willing to jump into whatever interests him. He’s not limiting himself.”

The 802 Tour - named for the area code in Vermont where all three performers grew up - came about naturally.

Amidon sings on Muhly’s sprawling folk song “The Only Tune.” Muhly did arrangements on Amidon’s new album, “All Is Well.” And Amidon plays on Bartlett’s albums. Muhly admits he’s intrigued by Bartlett’s distinctive voice.

“Every six months, I think of a new way to describe it,” Muhly says. “It sounds like what happens if you squeeze the air out of something. It’s the very last sound that comes out. The only reason you can hear it is because it’s heavily amplified. To me, it’s as if you play a pump organ and you let your foot off the pedal. His voice is definitely an interesting thing and it’s something you have to reckon with.”

Though Muhly has, in recent years, gathered steady acclaim for his compositions, he doesn’t consider himself the star of the tour. He’s one of five musicians taking driving shifts in the van. (A sixth musician, a violist, does not drive.) Instead of separate sets, Muhly, Amidon, and Bartlett decided to break the concert into two chunks, sharing the stage during those times.

There are several songs that stay in the setlist - Muhly always plays “The Only Tune” - but also plenty of wiggle room.

“For the most part, setting the mood is about seeing where the audience wants to go,” he says. “You can usually tell if going into a 16-minute-long solo viola piece that’s very dire is going to be appropriate at any moment. Then you do three fast, really prepared piano pieces or you stick the viola piece at the beginning of the second half. For me, the fun of this thing is that in a normal situation, I have to have committed to the order years in advance. This, for me, is very liberating in not knowing.”

Muhly, 27, is difficult to write about. Certainly he has already caused a lot of ink to be spilled, including a long profile in the New Yorker in February, at an age when many composers are still in graduate school. It is easy to see why the press likes him. He is smart, verbal, ingenuous, direct. Talking faster than the kinetic rhythms of some of his music, he embeds pointed observations in an agar of “likes” and “you knows,” not unlike the sweet fragments of sound that rise out of the many layers of his likable, involved, yet wholesome music.

But he is difficult to write about because in describing what he does, you come up against the traditional division between “classical” and “pop.” (In June, the Sunday Times of London named “Mothertongue” its pop CD of the week.) And this distinction is, to Muhly, irrelevant. Explaining it, therefore, is already taking a step away from the spirit of his work and back toward the Dark Ages when musical choices and tastes were linked, implicitly or not, to ideologies. For many, of course, they still are. But those “many” are more than 27 years old.

“Basically it’s like, do it all, and don’t make a big deal about doing it all,” Muhly says, sitting in a small studio within the Looking Glass Studios loft complex in Lower Manhattan, where since his sophomore year at Columbia he has worked for the composer Philip Glass; among other things, he enters Glass’s film scores into a computer. (He has also worked for that icon of the alt-classical scene, the Icelandic pop star Bjork.)

Even that “do it all” statement sounds more prescriptive on paper than it does in person. Muhly’s musical touchstones are the choral tradition of the Church of England and ’70s-era minimalism. While he has strong, definite tastes, expressed with gee-whiz enthusiasm — John Adams’s “Harmonium” is “my favorite thing in the universe” — he also relishes what he calls the freedom to “hear an interval and not be offended and have to leave the concert hall.” Adams himself, in the New Yorker article, referred to Muhly’s lack of musical politics by calling his work “nondenominational.”

“The albums aren’t manifestos,” Muhly says. “The albums are just saying, This is possible to do.” He adds, “As I make more of them, they’ll seem less manifesto-ish. Although I actually don’t care if people think they are.”
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So what are the albums? The first one, “Speaks Volumes,” is mainly instrumental works for acoustic instruments, with melody lines stretching or burbling in Reich-like patterns over extended drones, often miked so close that the clicks of keys and breaths of the performers become part of the experience.

“Mothertongue” is more liberated and more exuberantly weird. Its title work explores the way that numbers come to define a person’s life by layering multiple tracks of mezzo-soprano Abby Fischer singing and chattering Zip codes, past addresses and other data, interleaved with a range of other musical episodes, from swelling string chords to electronic growls to the static sound of a frying egg.

But the only one of the album’s works that will be included in tonight’s concert is the finale, “The Only Tune,” a deconstruction of a macabre folk song about a woman, drowned by her sister, whose bones and hair are made into a fiddle. The raw, homespun vocal line, delivered in stuttering fragments that gradually aggregate into a whole (juxtaposed with sounds including sharpening knives and raw whale meat sloshing in a bowl) is sung by Sam Amidon, one of the three collaborators on the current tour; tonight’s concert places equal focus on Muhly, Amidon and Doveman (the keyboard player Thomas Bartlett).

Nothing about Muhly is straightforward, not even his concert venue; the show was originally booked at the Birchmere but was moved at the last minute to a setting that reflects a different facet of Muhly’s musical personality, the Church of the Ascension in Silver Spring.

Muhly likens his albums to a dinner at home with friends. (A main figure at the table is the producer Valgeir Sigurdsson, whom Muhly met through his work with Bjork and who on many subsequent visits to Iceland has become an important co-conspirator; his label, Bedroom Community, has released both of Muhly’s CDs.) By contrast, the works he writes for classical music institutions are like haute cuisine or, to shift to another of Muhly’s favorite similes, high fashion.

“Think about concert music as the more experimental sculptural pieces, like a Japanese designer will make,” he says. “You’d never really wear it.”

In his musical universe, there is plenty of room for both. He has no interest in trying to change existing institutions to reflect his own point of view, and he embraces the formality of the traditional concert. “If I want something weird, I can do it myself,” he says. The new opera he is writing, based on the true story of a British teenager ensnared in the world of Internet sex chats, will certainly have nontraditional elements. Muhly describes some of the chorus passages, with repeated short obsessive phrases, as “the same way that you imagine the Internet sounds when you turn off your lights.” But he wants to write for real opera singers, not new-music specialists, and he sees one major benefit of the commission as exposing him to the Metropolitan Opera’s “amazing resources.”

Isn’t the classical concert experience off-putting to some people? “It’s hideously off-putting,” he says. “It’s also off-putting and bizarre to put your leg into a leather jodhpur and get into some crazy boot and ride a horse around in a circle for four hours. But it’s also gorgeous and divine.”

For all his strong statements, Muhly presents a certain malleability. His conversation throws up contradictions as he tries on different figurative outfits, his mind seizing an idea and running with it. He melds the cerebral with the sensual: When writing music, he starts with words and ideas rather than notes, and yet the music is striking for its frequent beauty. He says he doesn’t care whether the things he had in mind when he was composing come through, and yet he is openly concerned with what people think of his work.

If the albums “don’t belong to genres,” he says, “they belong to music that I hope you will want to listen to. I hope you like it.” More than anything, that desire to be liked seems to be a big motivation. So far, it seems to be working.

Besides the obligatory “my girlfriend brought me here,” people of all ages claimed to have known about Nico Muhly for as long as two years either from friends, living in NYC (natch), the New Yorker write up, or from blogs; the one blog uniformly mentioned being Alex Ross.

I first heard about Nico Muhly in March 2008 when my soundtrack label, Movie Score Media, released Muhly’s score to Joshua. Turns out Nico and I are labelmates on Movie Score Media, who distribute my Rock Haven soundtrack. The wonderful Mikael Carlsson who runs the label from Sweden regularly sends out emails about new releases, and the young prodigy’s bio and sound samples piqued my interest. Right after that, I happened across the New Yorker piece, and next thing ya know, his name seems to be everywhere.

Nico is touring with two other names I’ll admit I was completely unfamiliar with, although a minimum of internet research reveals they have labels and publicists of their own. It was nice to see “Sam” playing banjo. As my cohorts in The Winsome Griffles will attest, I’ve been playing banjo (or attempting to play banjo) way before it was hip.

In addition to Nico, Sam, and Doveman were a violist and a drummer, as well as an occasional guest electric guitarist. (And, on one Doveman number, a guest singer who sat terrified onstage and sang deliberately off mic, looking askance. “Awkward!”) The three principals of the concert traded off pieces more or less round robin. It was enjoyable when the music drifted and you didn’t notice where one piece ended and another began. It amused me that the group covered the keyboard’s manufacturer (I’m guessing CASIO) with gaffer tape, but the Apple logo was left unaltered. (Especially since the sounds were coming from the Apple not the controller.) Most segments of the show were a bit on the poppy side, as Nico is travelling with two pop musicians in the twee / canadian / quiet is the new loud / brooklyn vegan vein of things.

Doveman and Nico were physically very close onstage. They shared a piano bench. Nico bonked him with his nose once, and brushed his hair, on mic, as a percussion instrument for one song. As Nico is now a famous homosexual, I had to wonder if they were special friends, or if they were just exhibiting the small personal space that young people are more comfortable with, like puppies or kittens. (Ou des minets.)

Nico’s own music was the most interesting and dynamic of the concert. It is evident he is a talented conductor and ensemble player from his eye contact and head movement.

Nico’s music bears similarities to that of mentor Philip Glass, particularly a foldness for 2 against 3 in his piano music, hemiolas, irregular rhythms and accents. One number early in the first set featured bright, sharp piano/vla accents, which it was fun to watch them synchronize. More than a few times you could see some counting going on. Nico’s music fits well with current trends in both popular music and contemporary new music. His music requires a high but attainable level of musicianship. His piano solos seem at first repetitive and easy, but with metric modulations, and then you realize they are not all that easy, and yet not too difficult either. Nico’s use of electronics (his published solo pieces often use prerecorded CDs as accompaniment) appears effortless and natural. While pieces of concert music incorporating tape have been around for decades, Nico’s don’t feel as much experimental as something he’s fully integrated, having grown up in a world where pop music has already been electronic. Thus his pieces using electro accompaniment bridge the worlds of concert and pop music very well.

The concert closed with Nico’s tripartite “The Only Tune” (Two Sisters/Old Mill Pond/The Only Tune) from Mothertongue, which features Sam singing in his folksy voice. This was a high point of the evening. Nico’s original music has more dynamics than his tourmates’ compositions. “The Only Tune” bridges genres, being a personal take on folk music, the song cycle, electro acoustic music, and new music. Nico’s strength is not merely his hybridization of genres, but his ability to pick and choose their best aspects, and reconstruct and perform them with strong musicianship and confidence. Nico skillfully combines his exposure to many things: pop music, David Bowie, classical, concert music, church music, tape and electronic music, opera, folk, emo, all these different worlds coming together successfully.

I feel obligated to write a little about Nico Muhly the phenomenon.

There is a line of cute gay student composers from here to the beach in conservatories. Nico is very fortunate. He is talented too. He is doing things the right way: he is pursuing opportunities with vigor and performing with his friends. It’s not clear what direction will claim him most. He could be a pop star. He could write more soundtracks, like Eliot Goldenthal, another Corigliano protégé. He could focus on his classical commissions. He could get a DMA, a Pulitzer, or a Grawmeyer, and become a high profile Professor of Composition like Thomas Adès did. If he can preserve his involvement in diverse areas, in my mind, that is the best. In this tour he shows that he likes to make music with his friends, and that is a powerful and honest thing for anyone to do.

As far as the flak he’s received for his good fortune at receiving a commission from the Met, that sure is grist for the mill. Some comments indicate Muhly is too young, undeserving, or not fully formed enough to merit such an opportunity. We all end up shamed about some things we did or composed in our 20s. It is too early to know which ones they’ll be, or how his style will develop. Well ya know what? Nico writes serviceable music and the story concept, with libretto by Craig Lucas, is interesting and topical. This is today. This is vibrant. This is about our culture. This is what opera is supposed to be. It’s not a dead art form yet. As long as it’s living, let it be truly alive.

Ace (he had burrs in his tail which I removed; which reminded me very much of my childhood, where a burr on a dog was one of those trust games where you had to convince the dog that you had its best interests in mind when ripping something from its fur):

Castle:

Ræður:

We are all six of us hurtling from LAX to Washington, DC on Virgin America; I am stuck in one of those Rules & Regulations emotional disasters where my seat won’t recline because it is directly in front of an empty exit row and the famous power outlets are on the fritz; I can’t move to the empty exit row because the Nice Lady pursed her lips in a particular way and said that she “just couldn’t let me sit there.” I need to track down the exact quote, but I remember Gayatri Spivak once speaking (or writing?) about a ticket agent saying “I can’t let you on board;” she wrote that a better way to phrase it would be “the regulations are against it, thus, we are both victims.” Actually, here is the original:

“… I was supposed to take the airplane from Heathrow on Sunday. Air Canada says to me: ‘we can’t accept you.’ I said: ‘why?’ and she said: ‘You need a visa to go to Canada.’ I said: ‘look here, I am the same person, the same passport… ‘ Indian cultural identity right? But you become different. When it is from London, Indians can very well want to jump ship to Canada; I need a visa to travel from London to Canada on the same passport, but not from the United States. To cut a long story short,[...] I had to stay another day, and telephone Canada and tell them that I could not give my seminar. I said to the woman finally before I left, in some bitterness: ‘Just let me tell you one small thing: Don’t say “we can’t accept you” that sounds very bad from one human being to another; next time you should say: “The regulations are against it”; then we are both victims.’”

Quite so: in a situation like this, I can either a) stage an Episode and make a scene or b) sit back (theoretically, rather than actually, as this seat doesn’t recline) and pretend it’s not happening or c) try to befriend the Nice Lady and hope that she will turn the other way as I claim one of the empty seats. Is there any merit to any of this circular thought? Am I going to end up poisoned by stress? Should I just order a canister of Pringles and a glass of white wine and shut my pie hole? All this has reminded me of is that I wish Gayatri would just blog; she is so wonderful when she deals with the anecdotal, the Barthesian Mythology rendered severely Marxist and Feminist. The para-psychological peripatetic shuttling of the aboriginal subcontinent is the kind of stuff that she & Terry Eagleton can fight out in the academy; I want her to blog about Heathrow and the Subway and Yoga Pants and shit. Maximum length, 450 words. 123 go.

I’ve been very happy with the reception of Mothertongue in general, it’s been really positive and kind and indicative of good listening and productive curiosity. It’s a weird album, a difficult album, and I am really interested to see what people get out of it. I did an interview with a guy in Seattle – totally random, I had never met him before – who had such a smart, interesting read on the piece, I wanted to gay marry him right there on the phone. On the other side of things, I got a very mean review on Pitchfork by Jayson Greene (whom I think had interviewed me before), which is too bad, because it would have been nice to have a good one from them. Every time I get a bad review, I always take it to heart, because what they’re saying is usually stuff I tell myself in the middle of the night or in Glummer Mómentz. What’s particularly unfortunate about that review, though, is that it obsesses over other press coverage that I’ve gotten, of which, of course, I am neither author nor source. I’m happy to be evaluated by the notes, the rhythms, the sounds, and the textures but not by something that’s been done to me, like my height or the way I spell my name (for instance, it would be a similarly low blow for me to discount anything Jayson says because he spells his name in that silly fashion, in the same fashion that disgraced New York Times reporter did! OMG! j/k, j/k). Here, I am being called to task for the way the music relates to the press materials, which I suppose is “fair” but not necessarily in what we call good faith (or, for that matter, is going to make me want to gay marry you on the phone). Anyway, read it for yourselves and see what you think. In retrospect, I should have taken a more aggressive stance about how to write the press release for this album, because I can see how it can be reinterpreted as Pretentious and Overambitious Faggot Makes Indefensible Artistic Statement rather than OCD Church Musician Gets Archive Fever (which is the spirit in which the album was meant), but when the release was getting written, I was feeling really overwhelmed with the whole thing. This is not to say, however, that there is nothing to be gained by a bad review. In fact, if Pitchfork had loved on it, it would have seemed too easy, too much of a sweep of enthused press. Jayson makes a lot of good points about the chaotic nature of the album as a whole, and essentially tells me not to quit my day job, which is good advice, because I really like making arrangements for people. Read it and tell me what you think. Check out his use of the word “apparently” in case there’s any doubt of the attitude behind the review; it is viciously barbed and occupies a proud grammatical ledge in the sentence. Oh grammar: hoisted by my own pétard!

I had a funny encounter last night in the men’s room of the gig — sometimes, venues have different areas for performers and audiences and other times, not so much. One of the totally fascinating things about touring like this is to see the kinds of people who turn up for these shows. I had been doing an interview just before the show and was looking around at the people who were streaming in, buying beers, leaning against the side wall. I decided to find out as best I could who these people even were; I talked to a few people who had read about it in the paper. One woman, a fashion designer wearing a really good Rick Owens cropped leather jacket, seemed to have heard about it through friends. Anyway, in the bathroom, a tall, handsome younger guy with decidedly LA hair (floppy, blond, fully over the left eye) emerged from the stall and was like, “Nice Show” and I sort of half-aggressively said, “okthanks how come you came here?” Evidently he had seen a piece of mine at the Los Angeles Ballet and liked it and bought tickets to the show; this, to me, is amazing and really, really heartening not just personally but for the way that music is disseminated.

One of the advantages of getting all of this press has more to do with the idea that a young composer can make people pay attention to the fact that we exist; ideally, everybody should know a composer, just as everybody should know a butcher and a place to get your shoes re-soled. The fact that I’ve gotten a lot of press is, obviously, useful for me personally, but I hope that the net result is a wider interest in people in their 20’s who are thinking seriously about classical music, thinking about notation, thinking about being responsible citizens of not only the musical community but the world. If part of this includes a backlash against me, that’s fine; I’m a big girl and I know how these things go. Anyway, I like the crotch on the idea that people I don’t know are behaving in a non-cynical, almost linear way with music (“I saw this thing that I liked, I want to go see more of that thing that I liked, even though I don’t know much about what-all is going to happen”) rather than in a jaded, non-exploratory way (“new music is bullshit, whatever”). If you like something, find a path through it and then follow the path outwards, to other pieces, other composers, other musics. If you don’t like it, close your eyes and think about Brahms; it soothes the mind and calms the bowels.

Speaking of the Bowels & Pétards, this has not been the most adventurous culinary tour. Thomas and I are both huge enthusiasts of Taco Bell, despite their insane advertisements. We have discussed how their meat is the Ultimate Braise: slow cooked over, presumably, days in its own oily juices. I’ve had a Cambodian ground beef with a similar texture that had been on my friend’s mom’s stove for a long weekend; you won’t hear me complaining about eating a Crunchwrap Supreme. That said, yesterday, we wandered around Hollywood and found the most delicious bouge-gasm taquería called La Loteria, where we had The Margarita of Necessity and the Tacos of Gluttony, which set the tone for a really good show (click through for a review with good pictures) last night. One of the tacos consisted of pork rinds in a poisonously green puréed tomatillo sauce. It was really, really good – so good that Thomas and I called Nadia and Dan from their coffee & internet stop to come and partake.

Now, some photos. This is us, in Seattle, acknowledging Dan Bora, our intrepid sound engineer:

Sam Amidon, Nadia Sirota, Oren Bloedow, Thomas Bartlett, Nico Muhly

Photo by Dean Wenick

While we were driving from Portland to San Francisco (which is a long-ass drive; don’t do it!) we pulled over in a dire little town called La Center, and had lunch in the restaurant attendant to the casino. The following interchange took place:

Nico: Hi, could I have a burger with bleu cheese, medium rare, please?
Waitress: Oh, we don’t cook to order. Yeah, um, in the restaurant industry, you can’t cook anything to order anymore. It’s not medium rare, rare; it’s just cooked.

I love this idea of an industry-wide moratorium on cooking to order. Julius, a gay bar that time forgot, on the corner of 10th street and Waverlý in New York, is one of the skuzzier places in the universe (I think the only time I have witnessed a true Crime against Nature was in the corner booth there) still cooks a burger to order, although maybe they haven’t gotten the memo from The Industry yet. The other amazing thing that happened on that leg of the drive was that we espied a boobie that exists in a sort of Zaha Hadid architectural universe. It reminds me of spilt amoxicillin, or that runaway breast in Sleeper. Maybe you had to have been there to appreciate it, but here is a picture anyway:

I have not been able to watch a single Olympic; I sort of watched a gymnastic out of the corner of my eye in some random Sheraton in Seattle, but for the most part the whole thing has been so chattery that I can’t really deal. When newscasters take the Olympic Tone it is really unspeakable; I wish more coverage was of the explicitly sexual variety:

Indeed. Don’t they have editors to deal with this kind of thing? Or maybe there was an editor, Travis or Chad or some shit, who is giggling in a hot tub right now. Or at Julius.

Sam and I are continuing our Modern Dance Extreme Poses…

…In front of a redwood tree:

On the street in Mount Shasta:

As an Estarbucks Advertisement:

Nadia learned how to Hula Hoop (note Ace in the background, as well as Mark, our host)

Thomas and I are wearing funny outfits:

And two final thoughts: An advertisement for Viagra just said, “Ask your doctor if you heart is strong enough for sex.” Can you imagine the way your doctor would say that to you? “I’m sorry, your heart is not strong enough for sex. Also your cholesterol is a little high.” That sounds like a really good goth album I could make with Ben Frost. I’ma call him the minute I land. The other thing is that in all this discussion of Estarbucks, Essheraton, Escoop, I realized that it works like that in Arabic too, where the definite article “al-“ takes on certain initial consonants of the words to which it is attached. Instead of saying, for instance, al-salaam, you say as-salaam, and the s sound is doubled, with a shadda, which looks like the tiniest, most italic little w hovering over a consonant. Es-strawberry. اِسّطرابري – I wonder if that would be the proper way to render this out in English.

In other words, Muhly has attained certifiable whiz-kid status in an impossibly short time. He’s become the de facto poster boy for a growing movement of young composers divorced from the rock-vs-classical culture wars of the 1970s. (In their genre-blind abandon, such composers have, on occasion, been known to go so far as to publicly endorse the music of both Radiohead and Björk.) The wide-ranging catholicism of Muhly’s resumé is heartening, and he has done exquisite work on some seminal indie records. The unearthly strings on Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s The Letting Go are his, for example, as are the revolving, John Adams-like choral harmonies on songs like Björk’s “A Hidden Place”. But Muhly’s solo albums– the recently released Mothertongue and his previous record, Speaks Volumes– suffer from glib imitation and facile pastiche, common failings among talented and clever young musicians.

The problem is most evident on the album’s opening “Mothertongue” suite. Over a distinctly Dntel-sounding electronic buzz (sync it up with “The Dream of Evan and Chan” for reference), mezzo-soprano Abigail Fisher speak-sings a series of numbers and place names– a jumble of all the different addresses Muhly has called home during his life, the liner notes inform us. The four-movement piece lights briefly on some promising notions in its twenty minutes– found-sound samples of mundane morning routines (the crunch of breakfast cereal, muttering during the shower), for example– but flits away distractedly before anything interesting is allowed to materialize. The suite is a tepid wash of atmospherics, ebbing away with the same air of dreamy inconsequence with which it drifted in. You know you’re in trouble when the audio sample of a burbling coffee machine or the sound of a knife scraping butter on toast exerts as great a hold on the listener’s interest as everything that preceded it.

The second full piece on Mothertongue, the three-movement “Wonders”, opens with tinkling harpsichord and the ethereal vocals of Icelandic singer Helgi Hrafn Jónsson, paying tribute to the choral music of Renaissance-era English composers like William Byrd and John Taverner. On paper, the work is a riot of ideas: to this regal setting, Muhly adds samples of whistling wind, the sound of butcher knives scraping together, and whale fat sloshing around in a bucket. Yet the curiously faceless result reflects none of this anarchic, try-anything spirit– again, mostly because Muhly seems unable to let any of these ideas settle or gather any weight. Instead, they come and go leaving little impression– after having listened through the piece several times, I’d still be hard-pressed to tell you where that bowl of whale flesh comes in.

The record’s single striking moment comes when Muhly lets friend and singer-songwriter Sam Amidon croon a plaintive, simple folk song over a plunking banjo in “The Only Tune”. Even then, Muhly doodles irritatingly with the song, under the impression, apparently, that randomly isolating vocal lines and surrounding them with Reich-aping repetitive figures represents, as he puts it, “an explosion of the folk song.” Here and elsewhere, the music’s glassy surface never reveals greater depths, and the result comes off like minimalism for the age of “continuous partial attention.” (Interestingly enough, in the same New Yorker profile, Mead mentions that Muhly, while composing, will often simultaneously maintain “multiple online conversations” and “many games of Internet scrabble.” Irrelevant, maybe, but one wonders: If the composer doesn’t bother to give this music his undivided attention, why should anyone else?)

To his credit, Muhly has talent and an eager curiosity; the problem is, this inquisitive intelligence often finds more meaningful expression in his interviews (or on his gabby, regularly updated blog) than in his music. His best work remains in the indie sphere, where his skillful arrangements and expansive musical vocabulary offer welcome dimension to pop songs. He has also demonstrated himself to be a musical ambassador par excellence, a patient, generous, and enthusiastic bringer-together of worlds. This skill was eminently on display in the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s transcendent concert with Antony and the Johnsons last fall, for which Muhly wrote the arrangements. Thanks to Muhly’s irreverent streak, the concert’s encore included a fully orchestrated take on Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” that transformed the original’s synapse-fusing excess into mournful, restrained chamber pop. It was the sort of unlikely alchemy at which Muhly excels. When he tries to work on a larger canvas, however, he so far falls flat.

We totally bought onions rinng:

Nico & Sam performing Modern Dance

Sadly, we had to cancel our show in Vancouver, which is particularly sad because my hairdresser told me that there were “mad Asians there” and that the food was delicious. Additionally, I was excited to visit on this store called Kómakínó which seems like it’s completely up my alley. Sorry, people of Vancouver!

Molecular Gastronomy is essentially the space where chemistry and cooking interact, or, more specifically, an explicit acknowledgement of the fact that there is an overlap. Molecular Gastronomy plays on turning texture on its head, so, you can end up with, for instance, a slice of foie gras transformed into the shape of an udon noodle, or, a cauliflower purée rendered meringue-solid by the addition of a chemical. It’s actually totally awesome when done right; one of my favorite restaurants in Christendom, WD-50, is the few places pulling it off in New York with consistent aplomb and deliciousness. So it is terrifying to watch this douchey guy on TV be really into it.

I feel the same way, though, about self-avowed Minimalist Composers. I love minimalism; it is my emotional summer home (Anglican choral music being the winter residence). I get very, very anxious when people confess to using minimalist techniques because I suspect that the technique is leading the emotions rather than the emotions requiring the technique. The internet is filled with people who are very quick to acknowledge their stylistic allegiances, as if style is a political party; I always thought style was the process by which you judiciously (and daringly and provocatively) apply the fabrics that best suit the body that you have been given.

When done right, molecular gastronomy can be unspeakably evocative. There is a drink at WD-50 which consists of tequila, dried thai long chilis, and smoked pear juice, which all sounds too cool for school, until you taste it. I got the tiniest sip down and was immediately reminded of the smell of an censer a friend of my mother had sent me when I was a child: it was a little pueblo house with a couple of poncho-clad figurines standing out front of it; this same friend later wrote a book in which she analyzed gruesome fin-de-siècle crime scene photographs of mutilated bodies in Paris; all of these memories were immediately available to me on first sip.

Minimal composition, for me, should aspire to evoke similarly specific emotions; whereas Romantic music appeals to the Jungian journeys we “all” supposedly can relate to (the home, the woods, the lover, the villain), minimal music, for me, is unspecific in origin but specific and very personal in destination. You take six pitches, and oscillate between them in some sort of pattern, and one person in the audience remembers playing a broken pump organ, and another remembers a childhood spent playing underneath high-tension electric wires.

When on the road, I like to start playing shows with this piece called Twitchy Organs., which is a cycle of six pitches that can be played by any combination of musicians. Mainly, it’s an experiment in seeing how I react to it; while the other musicians play the pitches in order but not in time with each other, I start playing a specific melody that can happen at any speed that works around the notes. I had a very specific idea in mind when I wrote this piece, which is a very high-tech train station in the middle of the countryside, almost entirely unpopulated. I’m not sure if I’ve been to this train station – I think as a kid, I went to a train station in suburban Bern wot had LED displays and a low, electrical hum; there are regional rail stations in Parisian suburbs that share, I think, the same emotional content – but I know that it’s a specific idea. However, under no circumstances do I want Twitchy Organs. to mean that same thing to anybody else; that’s why it’s not called This One Time I May Or May Not Have Gone To A Railway Station up in Switzerland that was Very Beautiful for Reasons Mysterious.. Ideally, somebody will listen to it and remember a very specific, very difficult to pin-down memory, and that, for me, will be a success.

One of the things I used to always struggle with with the masterpieces of classical minimal composition is the resistance, on the part of the composers, to suggest narratives. I’m sure that was particularly frustrating in the 1960’s and 70’s, when they were being written, but for me, the pieces (I’m thinking specifically of Music for Eighteen Musicians and Music in Twelve Parts.) now suggest the time in my life when I first heard them: the Reich in high school, sitting on the floor, and the Glass in Freshman year in college, on a discman, taking the N train slowly down Broadway and getting out early to be able to finish the piece while walking the rest of the distance. Mm, Music in Twelve Parts.

Last night I had an amazing language experience. I ate with B— and T— at Gemma which is the surprisingly delicious restaurant in the Bowery Hotel at 3rd street. As we got dessert, the runner put it down and said, “this is a chocolate cake with an escoop of vanilla ice cream.” I am obsessed with this idea of knowing the grammatical rule that the indefinite article in English works like that (a + consonant noun/an + vowel (or h) noun) but still maintaining the Spanish-language inflected idea that the letter S has to be prefaced by a vowel.

t’s random list time! But this time all questions? How come my iPhone can speak Chinese now but can’t make the Icelandic letters eth (ð) and thorn (þ)? What happens to these people who win Top Chef or who lose Top Chef? Where Marcel at? Where Ílan at? Was Salman Rushdie married to Padma Lakshmi when he got his eyes de-hooded? Can cook people still call that kind of strainer a “Chinois” or is it too racist? Speaking of which, did everybody take note of the Spanish Basketball Team? I haven’t seen a single Olympic this year and it doesn’t look good for seeing any in the future.

Finally, the people over at Parterre Box have finally gotten a hold of me, you have to read the comments, they are amazing, ranging from the curious to the outright mean (”Has anyone else listened to excerpts from his MotherTongue album on YouTube? What crap. Composing an opera for the Met? Talk about having greatness thrust upon one.”) I wonder what is even up from Mothertongue on YouTube! Or did they mean iTunes? This kind of attention is pretty wild; I feel like these people know more what this piece is going to sound like than I do. Maybe I’ll just give them a little peek to calm their nerves: it’s going to be good! See the embedded: it looks like music, it’ll sound like music, and it will be ravishing. I hope.