Nico
Muhly,

I’m back out on the road, against, I think, my better instincts, but I’m excited. I was in London for a week and change curating, in some loose sense, a festival called A Scream & An Outrage at the Barbican; it was six concerts over three days and a million interstitial performances in between those shows; a lot of the most complicated sheep-wolf-cabbage work was done by the wonderful people at the Barbican, but I remained the literal face (there were posters of my head all over East London; I was mortified) of this thing and had to sustain a very high level of energy for a much longer time than I’m used to doing. As a result, I found myself losing patience with small things — the pitch of somebody’s voice in the supermarket, the time it took to make a cup of coffee, the peculiar smell in the hallway of the hotel, the choreography of bodies in the train. I felt, quite actively, the relationship between attempting to hold things together on a sort of fundamental level with a loss of control over smaller, normally trivial and ignorable things. Somebody did a slipshod job of planning an orchestra break and I shouted at her; I saw that two people’s names were misspelled on their dressing-room doors and I gave a (I think uninvolved?) person a side-eye & curt word for the ages. I feel terrible about it.

I’m trying to learn how to rationalize my own neurotic perfectionism with the realities of the world of getting things done. I wake up most days with a jolt — not unlike the jolt of having a just-pre-sleep falling sensation, or hearing a strange sound in the home — of pounding anxiety: have I done everything I can do, just on an artistic level, to make this music as good as possible? Have I checked everything? Have I made sure that things are, to the best of my ability, in good working order? I physicalize this anxiety, and it’s inescapable: even if everything’s in order, there are still blows to the solarplexus of deep, throbbing worry that something isn’t good enough, that I’ve been paid too much for a horrible piece, that the parts will turn up with gibberish on them, that I’ll have misunderstood the assignment. It’s not something I would necessarily wish on anybody else, but it’s definitely something I don’t understand when it’s missing. I think also I have an erotic fixation on Things – literally any Things – being done well. When I walk past, for instance, the store Russ & Dóttirs on Houston street as I just did and saw a man cutting a side of salmon so evenly, so thinly… it gave me a little shiver. Watching somebody make ravioli expertly, watching an oboist navigate a passage over the break expertly, watching somebody fold a fitted sheet…

I will say that one of the highlights of the London experience was realizing the Drones &… sequences in the way we did. Basically, as the audience entered the hall, six or seven of us were already on the floor droning. This meant that the piece just sort of started inside its own environment. David Lang came and droned with us:

These amazing looking men (one known to me and one not) came to one of the morning shows:

Does anybody who reads this blog understand the specifics of international banking? I want to know specifically about Chip & Pin versus Chip & Signature and why we haven’t adopted this in America. I keep on running into it as an active problem, particularly in the Netherlands. In a country obsessed by efficiency, it seems strange that they have set up train ticket kiosks that won’t take a credit card. If you look closely up in the +31, you see that oftentimes the credit card machines have had their swiping slot taped closed, often in a somewhat ramshackle way. B– and I convinced a woman at a monkeys-only zoo to literally peel back the tape such that she might take my €39; otherwise, there was no way for her to get those euros. Amazingly, she was perfectly happy to let us leave rather than to peel back the dirt- (and presumably monkey faeces-) befouled piece of cardboard to take fifty bucks. And surely the point of commerce, on every level, is to part me with my € in exchange for goods and possibly services? The thing with the trains is extra irritating because if you don’t have a Chip ‘n’ Pin thing you have to actually literally get cash out from a machine that’s over there. The main train station in Amsterdam — again, a really efficient hub for what is one of the most efficient train systems in, one is told, the world — has little pieces of tape over their credit card slots in the “wait in line behind every German backpacker” area. I know precisely what I want: A round trip ticket in 2nd class to Brussels. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just take my money, rather than making me wait in the Sad Line? I don’t have any questions; I looked up which track it leaves from already. I’d even pay a few extra euros for the privilege of using my spooky and foreign American Express card. (Also I’ve been told that the trick is to buy one of these Travelex chip and pin travel cards in the airport in the Netherlands. Would you believe me when I told you that I went to the same kiosk and they were unable to transfer money from my American Express? Grandma was vexèd). However, I was, today, sad to leave Eindhoven; I’d been composer in residence there for the last few seasons, and they’ve quite generously commissioned several major works as well as a bunch of smaller ones. It’s a funny little town with strange proportions but it’s been a great way to build a lot of rep and work with wonderful musicians in ensembles of every imaginable configuration.

I’ve been working with a lot of orchestras recently: some known to me and others not. I’ve done a few shows in the last month with non-classical singers/songwriters and orchestras, and have been able, in my role as sort of interpreter/arranger, to see orchestras through the eyes of these new collaborators. I have to say: the first orchestral rehearsal of something is t.u.r.r.i.f.y.i.n.g. I did a show with Glen Hansard, who is, I think, one of the most natural performers ever — pure charisma. And it was scary for him for a minute! An orchestra, individual-by-individual, is made up of totally pleasant people, but as a collective organism it is wildly intimidating. There is a hard-to-find balance between asking for what you want, demanding it, begging for it, being nice, being tart, being polite and being obsequious. All of these negotiations are done through a conductor, of course, with whom one has a whole other complicated arranged marriage. I feel like after many missteps, I’ve gotten there, but of all the various anxieties that make up my days, turning up at an orchestra rehearsal is still a rather three-dimensional one. I feel like I spend lots of time trying to mind-read to look for sympathetic faces; I know it’s a kind of phrenological junk science but I find myself doing it everywhere. A kindly sideways smile from a clarinet player will make my week; similarly, an unreturned smile from a low brass player can send me into a fugue state of self-doubt and adrenaline-addled worry. I caught myself doing it at the Apple Store in Amsterdam; somebody made off with my UK to EUR power lead, and instead of MacGyvering the plug comme d’habitude I decided to treat myself to a proper cable. I walked in the store and immediately was like, okay, smiling dude with bad facial hair, definitely no, unsmiling dude with better facial hair no, very short indonesian woman with a nose piercing maaaaaybe, really tall blond woman with a pony tail maybe for a bigger purchase but not for this, guy with gamer pot-belly would be good for a harddrive purchase because he looks like somebody who once lost a lot of data in a backup fiasco (or in a breakup?) but not for this cable…ah! skinny shortish hipster boy with a nervous twitch and greying fingers; the transaction will happen quickly and he’ll want to get it over with to go smoke in the alley off to the side.

I’m finally at a little check-in point in my life and work where I’ve finished a huge pile of writing and just done a slightly inappropriate amount of performing. I’d quite wisely planned to have a lot of spare time this summer for mental rejuvenation; writing and performing and fussing with operas is exhausting in an unforseeable way; you think to yourself, ok, this morning I have two hours in which perhaps I might have an idea or, at least, the energy to realize an idea that’s already somewhat down on paper — and then the morning arrives and that energy just isn’t there. I just did what should have been an energizing sequence of concerts in Eindhoven, but the combination of fussing with older works and conducting and preparing two different ensembles at the same time occupied all my remaining headspace and I didn’t write half of what I’d hoped to. I did, however, hear some great music. The wonderful viol consort Fretwork came and played with the Gesualdo Consort, a five-voice vocal ensemble (featuring a countertenor called Marnix de Cat which is surely the best name in the industry):

I had forgotten in all of this how much I love the combination of viols and voices. Functionally, the music they play is “the same” — vocal lines and gamba lines being, at a certain time, interchangeable. You end up with a delicious and natural sense of phrasing that takes much longer to achieve with modern instruments.

One thing that I’ve found to be enormously useful in these scenarios — multiple gigs in a row in a million places — is to say yes to every press request but never read anything; this includes, obviously, reviews, but less obviously, advance press and press about one’s friends and collaborators. The idea is that you operate in an atmosphere where the things that bear your fingerprints are more scores than newspapers, and more instruments than computer keyboards. It’s wildly liberating, actually, and it was difficult for about a year and now it’s a really good habit. Occasionally something funny happens; I walked into rehearsal one day in London and an interview with me had been lovingly clipped out of the paper and left on my celeste! And because ça faisait longtime since I’d done the interview self, I caught myself reading it quickly and discovered a bunch of weird syntactical stuff I’m sure I never said, some mischaracterisations and simplifications of what I had actually said — all neutral and, I think, net positive — but it strengthened my resolve to just Not Worry About It Anymore. When even a silly fluffy preview piece gives me a dart of anxiety to the neck, why put myself through it?

I have a new theory which is that Europe People will never ever ever under any circumstances make jeans look alright on their rumps. Like once every fifty people in England you’ll see it and it’ll make sense almost but the rest of the time there is just a fundamental misunderstanding between fabric, donk, and pocket placement. Just give it up! Or maybe I should just give up trying to help them find better options. Just when I thought I had seen it all, B– and I saw this amazing man at the zoo:

Now, what I think we’re dealing with here is a denim diaper. That’s the closest thing I can think to describe what this garment was.

We met a curious juvenile jay in Zwolle:

We had a meal in which a course was composed on our hands:

And in conclusion, to paraphrase Sondheim:

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

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

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

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

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

okay good

okay bye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve just spent two weeks working with the National Youth Orchestra. This is probably the most prolonged amount of time I’ve spent with people between the ages of 15 and 18 since I was myself that age, and it’s been, in a word, intense. The basic setup of this orchestra is that it’s 165 people, so we’re dealing with 7 or 8 of each woodwind, 10 horns, 8 trumpets, that sort of thing. Eleven (!) percussionists. The whole summer course is structured around a fortnight spent in barrack-like dorms at the University of Birmingham, in a sort of suburban utopian landscape just south of the city. There is an element of summer camp about it, but with twelve hours a day of music making, and that isn’t really an exaggeration. Every minute of these musicians’ days is scheduled rigorously, which I think is partially designed to keep them out of trouble and off the pole, presumably. I occupied a strange sort of space: I was not really faculty, or support team, or a student, so I kind of floated in and out of rehearsals and attempted to participate socially and musically as much as was appropriate. The first few days were a little bit awkward — they’d gone over the piece without the harps, who are kind of the motor behind the entire first section, and I think it rather terrified everybody that they had, in fact, commissioned some pointillistic and awful piece of abstract silence punctuated by an occasional pizzicato or clarinet gurgle.

There’s also a thing with English musicians of every age such that they cannot, under any circumstances, tell you that they like a piece of music you’ve written until you’ve had a drink together. I learned this a few years ago when I worked with an orchestra for a week and nobody said anything at all; one bass player muttered to me in the men’s room “it’s not bad, that piece,” which was as close as I got to a compliment or even an acknowledgement that I was present. Until the pub! Then it was a lovefest: mentions of favourite bars of music, actual conversations about the Koussevitsky concerto, promises to exchange scores and mp3’s. This time was no different; three of the musicians adorably and somewhat sheepishly invited me to their pub night, which is essentially ninety minutes of sanctioned drinking for the 18 year-olds. Girl. They were ordering shot upon shot (like, trays) of alarmingly sweet concoctions: triple sec and diet Red Bull, tequila suspended in what tasted of tanning lotion, and something else that I think must have been light rum and Jheri curl juice. The same musicians who had been brilliantly parsing Messiaen were straight up crunk. It was brilliant and wonderful, and I was particularly pleased because they felt empowered (?) to talk to me about the piece I’d written, and about other issues in music, and just life in general: it turns out that the age-old social lubricant always applies. To my horror, a bunch of them took pictures of me in which I look like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the day they got him out of that hole.

There was also, I was pleased to see, a lovely resistance to my memories of how high school was organised: everybody was uniformly nice to one another and there didn’t seem to be any strange hierarchies of attractiveness or perceived ability. Dealing with young people always has, for me, a distant melancholic drone. Once I went to university and got busy, the years between 22 and, like, last week are kind of a blur of travel, intense work, exhaustion, sweating. The older members of this orchestra are about to jump into school, and this is their last moment, in a sense, to be this devoted to music. This is their last time to be beautiful with one another, to have the skin not ravaged by sun, claret, and jetlag, to have the sort of timelapse romances only possible at camp. I was heartened and bittersweetened to see a more flexible homosocial level of interaction almost in constant play: a hand on the shoulder, shared glances of genuine support and pride at a gesture well-played in rehearsal that would have been, I think, impossible when I was 18 without it being accompanied by a series of insinuations and counterreactions. At Snape, in the two lambent hours before the concert, the musicians roamed through the rushes in groups of two, three, four, ambling along the boardwalks and, by necessity, standing close enough together that the effect, viewed from the comfortable distance of the hill, was of elderly couples walking out together in some Italian piazza, a recollection from the distant past, the modern clothes and conversations obscured by the angle of the light and the susurration of the reeds. These small ensembles were heartbreaking: a harpist and a trumpet player, a group of three small boys who play the oboe, a solitary tubist, a cellist and a violist. It gave me a flash of the sort of piece I could have written: an amble, an aleatoric series of duets and trios walking in a comfortable, almost hand-holding unison.

It reminded me, in a poignant way, how solitary and strange the business of being a composer is. There’s one of me, and 165 of them. If you write for orchestra, you are dependent both physically and emotionally on the whims and abilities of strangers. I tried to learn everybody’s name but it’s impossible; there’s always a sense that the composer is never quite part of the team — there’s a structural opposition built-in to the relationship. I’d love to find ways to dismantle this; my strategies now are to always try, when possible, to sit in the orchestra and try to get a sense of how it feels to play the piece. This, however, is not always looked upon kindly by conductors, and some irritating halls have a setup such that there is an impermeability between the front of house and the stage. I’ve also found that I enjoy physically humbling myself before the players — sitting on the floor at their feet rather than trying to be an angry schoolmistress has, at times, defused awkward situations. I felt, in a sense, between worlds with the NYO kids: I’m old enough to be able to impart, however obliquely, sensible advice, and I can help them strategise playing music not only by me but by others. But the sort of teacherly mode is tempered by my own constant and obsessive desire to be liked by everybody, particularly musicians, and to register as a sort of desirable and sympathetic friend and colleague.

The really heartening thing for me was the NYO’s rehearsal discipline. They did a somewhat cultish thing wherein they obeyed two minutes of absolute silence before the conductor arrived on the podium. At first I thought that I had signed up for some kind of teen version of The Wicker Man and that I was going to be burned in some enormous effigy of a viola, but actually, what it did was insist that music arises out of silence, which is something so important to remember. There was very little talking during the crucial moment when the conductor has pulled over the piece to try to adjust things, and this is something I’m just going to say: a lot of professional orchestras are terrible at this, and it’s usually just a few individuals. With new music that’s not had the benefit of hundreds of years of performance practice to air out the closets of its notation, every second of rehearsal time is precious. I had a piece with a orchestra earlier this summer, and there was this completely irritating violinist who, immediately at the end of every rehearsal take, would grab the crossword puzzle and start talking to his stand partners, soliciting their opinion on the weather, etc., even when the conductor was addressing his section! It was horrible, and vexing, and distracting, and kind of soured me against the piece I’d written; if you can’t keep the attention of the people playing it, how can it possibly land on the ears of an audience? In my vision of paradise, that man would be frog-marched through town and made to listen to his own inane banter amplified on public loudspeakers. I love the idea that the people who are in the NYO are going to be the orchestral musicians of the future, who understand the importance not just of playing well but listening well, and supporting one another. I was moved by somebody who came up and said he liked the trombone solo — not a trombonist! It means that the ears are open, and working alongside the mouth and the hands and the feet, and it means that musicianship, and not just technique, is accumulating.

Anyway, there it is. This also marks the end of what has been almost constant travel for four months. I’m in the US of loosely A for over two months now, and I can’t wait to get back into the rhythms of New York. I’ve learned to exist comfortably on the road, but not in the way I can when surrounded by the dog, my man, my linens, and my own sense of the footprint of the day being the dominant one. The NYO were absolutely heaven to work with, and I’m so glad I carved out enough time to really be part of the construction of the piece. There’s a version of the trip where I could just swan in and make strange analogies accompanied by severe hand gestures and leave, but I am so happy for the extra time. I hope the musicians will all stay in touch — it is a gorgeous thing to have friends & allies scattered around the world’s orchestras.

The process of idling at the airport, taxiing, and taking off (to say nothing of the flight itself) is a series of changing drones. Idling, for instance, is a constant c#, with an ever-changing top note: f#, e#, or e. All of this is slightly flatter than a=440. The ventilation system insists on a kind of extra-flat g#, but the whole thing is gorgeously rooted on the everpresent c#. When the plane levels out, though, a g# in the bass reframes the whole thing, so you end up with a chord in a strange position: confident, but with a changing root. I feel like I would be very happy listening to even a transcription of this music.

I’ve been in Iceland for the last week working and trying, in some way, to relax a bit before the chaos of Gait and the UK during the olympics happens tomorrow. I am rooting for England: I want the country to not fuck up the transit and prove to everybody that they can, in fact, get it together. I’m trying not to participate in the media frenzy of obsessing over the inevitable chaos, although I was secretly pleased to read the accounts of the first athletes’ busses getting lost despite the basically straight line TFL has carved out for them from Heathrow to the Olympic Village. And we’re all in agreement that all that nonsense about who can and cannot say “olympic” is stupid, right? and the french fries??

I went with my man to the Westfjords of Iceland for a few days last week, and instead of going to the (relatively) bustling main city, Ísafjörður, we headed south to Patreksfjörður, a very sleepy fishing town. It was exactly what I needed — a quiet village just for a minute. It was restorative in the sense that it was completely free of any possible obligations or distractions, and it was lightly raining the whole time, which meant that I could just read about North Korean inflation in the 60′s and watch BBC’s Wild China for hours at a time. I’ve found that thinking about music is much easier if I’ve spent about 36 hours thinking about anything but. Did you know that it’s bats in China that eat fish?!? And they eat the shit while hanging upside-down? I am shocked. The series is great and totally worth watching for the footage alone. They’ve chosen a kind of generic pentatonic orchestral music with a touch of erhu score that must have cost a fortune: strings everywhere, big thematic gestures. Not my favorite thing in the world but there’s a kind of magical theme that is decidedly not racist that I’ve been humming — it reminds me of some Elgar, maybe, with a big descending interval of the sort that makes English people well up. I cannot talk to you about the Chinese giant salamander or these baby alligators.

I don’t know why this is, but whenever I deal with young people — like, from 13 to say 20 — I always get a cramp of “first day of school” style anxiety, of the sort I haven’t really needed to feel for ten years. I remember being that age myself: a wild combination of insecure, judgemental, strident, shy, curious, and mean. At my high school we had, each year, a batch of ambitious younger teachers, some grad students from Brown, and we were awful: squinting at their ambitiously ironed clearly new first-day-of-school khaki pants (it was the 90′s), or questioning the cut of their jeans in a painfully obvious sotto voce. There was one woman in particular about whom I still feel a degree of guilt: she turned up on her first day teaching high school history or English wearing an outfit one would wear to homeschool evangelical Christian children in the midwest. We are talking a white turtleneck under a denim floor-length dress with socks and sandals, the denim dressing being already smudged with chalk dust and dri-erase ink by noon. We were merciless. It took a few weeks before we could ignore these perceived sartorial infractions and start focusing on the content of the teaching. Anyway, maybe these days everybody is mean enough to each other online (which was a register to which we did not enjoy access) that everything is pleasant in real life.

Everybody at the NYO is outrageously nice. Think Greenwood rather than Tanglewood, if you’re coming from the American system of summer zones with youth. I’m staying in what is essentially a dormroom whose simplicity is actually soothing. There are plugs everywhere, and the internet is fast. The +44 is obsessed with fire doors, which essentially means that they have a series of closed doors in a damp, northern European place, causing mildew and a generally pervasive sense of damp. The first thing I do when entering English dwellings is create an outrageous cross-breeze, which has been very effective in fighting the Damp.

Does everybody know the John Adams piece China Gates? I love me some China Gates. I want it to be in the same category of piano pieces that all piano students have to learn, like the Schumann Revérie:

Here is a funny performance with a sassy performance… explication?

So when I was finishing up this piece Gait for the NYO, I wanted there to be a flash of this Adams piece at the very end, a sort of ecstatic vision of the piano piece radically exploded into this enormous orchestra. So, that’s happened. The explosion was so severe that the copyist(s!) had to scheme to make different Sibelius files to fit all the notes on the pages.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what is and what isn’t standard rep. One of the ways composers are taught to write is through constant score study. So, for instance, you hear something you like in a Brahms symphony and you get the score out of the library and figure out how he did it. There is a list of, probably, the better part of a thousand pieces of music whose scores are, I think, assumed to be “known” by composers of orchestral music. With musicians, there are a whole bunch of different itineraries. Obviously each instrument has its own specific catalogue of music that only real die-hards know (the Ney Rosauro marimba music comes to mind), and then there are players who find themselves, for whatever reason, in very specific ensembles (like, it’s a Debussy trio for flute, viola and harp, and such ensembles usually end up needing to commission many companion pieces, and therefore, there is an entire rep of music for that ensemble that is regrettably unknown).

I’m very much of the opinion that any amount of study of really anything will make you a better musician. Three years of Dari in Afghanistan, great, four years of jazz vibraphone, great, great, everything’s great. Learning how to cook Chinese food, that’s great. I’m also a huge fan of canonical learning — it’s nice to meet a musician from China, or Israel, and know that you have a sort of common ground of references. In the last few months, I’ve noticed something, though. I’ve been working mainly with orchestras in New York & London, and while the canonical understanding is firm, there are some funny non-overlapping areas. I’d love to think that all orchestra players would have, at some point, made their way through Harmonielehre, the massive Adams score from the 80′s. I’d also like to think that all string players (with the exception of the basses), would have played Different Trains a few times. (The basses, I’d like to think, would have spent a few wayward evenings learning how to play the viola da gamba, but now I’m getting greedy). Of course, this is a fantasy world, but I wonder if the languages between musicians and composers aren’t drifting slightly.

One of the best ways, I’ve found, to connect with players is to know their rep. Pieces that we, as composers, might find musically dubious are, in some cases, bread and butter for violists, or clarinettists. A perfect example of this, I think, is the Hindemith sonatas for solo instruments. I really don’t like listening to this music. But I know that it’s useful because it makes up a big piece of the viola mental pie. I’m always looking out for the pieces that players keep alive: weird clarinet sonatas, obscure cello trios.

The goal, of course, is for some sense of fluency both in writing and playing. Some rhythms, in the hands of Orchestra A, are like breathing. The same rhythms, in the hands of Orchestra B, are like breathing water. It’s not a comment on the quality of the band, but rather, the musicians’ access to the music that has informed the composer’s world. Similarly, the way we, as composers, learn to write music is through study and by making mistakes. I think this includes studying the music you love, as well as the music musicians love, and orchestras (inasmuch as orchestras are sentient) love to play. If you have a friend in an orchestra, sitting in the back of the seconds, ask her what her favorite music is. Chances are it’s not going to be the same thing as your favorite music, and it might be shocking music, but you are inevitably going to learn something very useful from whatever Ibert concerto she mentions.

I’m in London about to open this ballet Machina, which is part of an outrageously ambitious commission of three ballets based on the Titian Diana paintings. What’s doubly outrageous about it is that it’s a piece for two choreographers; when they first told me about it (two choreographers plus an artist making sets for the first time plus orchestra plus whee), I was like, this is the most facacta thing. But actually it’s great. Conrad Shawcross, has made this gorgeous and elegant robot that sits in the back of the stage like a giant spider, observing and menacing the dancers. It’s gorgeous. Everybody come. Then Iceland for a week then NYO Gait Mania!

This blog post is a result of many months of casual thought and casual conversations, boiled down into a perhaps more casual than usual blog post. Maura Lafferty graciously agreed to sort of have an organized discussion between our two blogs, so I would encourage you to read her post before you read mine.

My online life is wide-ranging but a little bit curated. I try really hard to stay actively involved with my friends on Facebook — and by friends, I mean people I know outside the context of that social network. I follow a few hundred people on twitter, and I actively follow a few dozen blogs about music, linguistics, computers, art. I follow them in a slightly old-fashioned way: they’re all tabbed, rather that RSSed, so I have to manually see if anybody has updated. I sort of prefer it this way, and sometimes I get far behind, so I like to check back in on things that are not technically “new” but which I might have missed over the course of travels or inattention. I removed the google alert I had on myself, and I had never taken out any others, so I can safely avoid anybody with my name in their mouth coming out of random air, as well as my friends’ names. The press thing is tricky, because sometimes a press outlet’s social media staff will @ me in a link to a review, so I become kind of aware of things in the periphery, but for the most part, I’ve been pretty successful in avoiding both preview and review press, and during the operas, the opera blog-o-sphere.

One thing that hasn’t been expurgated from my feed is a relentless and sort of obsessive focus on genre that people constantly throw around. I did a show in London that I thought was pretty great, and then online it was all indie-classical this and indie-classical that and I was like, do you know? Forget that. Nothing is gained by that description, even if it makes the PR people’s jobs easier. It attracts haters and lumps people together in a way that belies how actual communities of musicians function. Bedroom Community is a great example of how this can work well — there isn’t a Bedroom Community sound, there isn’t a manifesto of stylistic concerns. We like one another’s music, and we like one another’s processes as collaborators, and that is so much more important than trying to think of a name that could possibly encompass, like, that genius thing Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason made together and Puzzle Muteson’s album.

I realize that this comes from, in part, the printed (or formal?) press as well as the blogosphere. Reviewers and previewers get an enormous pass if they can describe a composer’s work as being part of some sort of Genre: post-minimalist, new complexity, Darmstadt School, chamber pop, whatever, or this new hellery, Indie-Classical. The other day, Maura Lafferty, who is a new music marketing person, tweeted a link to this article. I’m gonna address all those things specifically but let’s go through this carefully.

There are, I think, two global problems with genre obsession: one on “their” side and one on “ours.” On “their” side (and by they, I mean people who write about music either professionally or casually), it’s a shorthand for actually talking about how the notes and the rhythms work. On “our” side, it can become, for composers, both a social and musical crutch, where one ends up writing to one’s press-generated biography, rather than from a musical core.

Part of my objection to terminology is personal. I’ve been writing basically the same music since I’m 14. It’s gotten better, and it’s taken strange turns, but the thing is the same. What people call it has, obviously, changed with the ages, but the idea that anybody gets to define what I’m up to, for some reason, seems even more grotesque than misunderstanding it. I suppose part of this comes from a background of (admittedly East Coast American) hybridity: I’m a half-jewish homosexual who grew up in Providence with roots in Vermont. Even that sentence seems strange; I don’t think I would have coffee with somebody who self-described like that on the internet, and that’s the point: we are how we do. It’s an active life, it’s not these terrible sentences and hyphenations.

Another source of vexation is the counter-argument I see sometimes which is that musicians should be able to describe their music. I agree! Sort of. I can tell you what all of my influences are, and will do that with great pleasure. But I am not going to write a press-release for myself. And here is where we get to the “our side” problem. Once one has been been described a certain way in the press, there is a temptation to continue writing that way despite one’s better instincts. If somebody writes about your music — even as a compliment — as, like, “a natural and enormously successful fusion of the music of India and the classical techniques of the West, Hindi-Classical!” the temptation is to start writing as if that were the starting-point, rather than just some journalistic shorthand. It’s horrifying because it has nothing to do with anything. Also, how hard is it to just write about how the music sounds without invoking anybody else’s name or slapping a name on it? An exercise: talk about Beethoven Op. 111 without talking about any other composer. Talk about Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody without talking about any other composer. You can even talk about Nixon in China without talking about Satyagraha or Akhnaten; it’s respectful to John Adams to be able to do so. You can talk about Bach without invoking the Baroque; you can (and should) talk about Mozart without invoking the Classical — which is not something Mozart would have had to deal with in his day. He might have had to have dealt with some provincial horseshit about the current musical fads in Vienna or Salzburg or whatever, but we can all (with the possible exception of whatever his name is who writes even more disparaging things about Brooklyn than I do, Snuggles, in LA), in hindsight, realize how dumb that is.

(An comedic aside. I used to live in Deepeste Darkeste Chinatown, and moved, a few years ago, about four blocks north. Now, the zip code is still the same, but for real-estate purposes this neighborhood is distinct enough to have its own series of mortifying hyphenations: NoChiTo, for North of Chinatown, or, my favorite, Little Chittaly.)

All of this is in reaction to a series of tweets I got, and a link to this article. The article itself is worth reading and contains some good advice and some, in my opinion, shocking advice; the page itself I cannot speak about; a lot of the advice is really sound and practical, but her website is insanely frustrating, you can only sort by keyword, and am I wrong or does it look like the website you end up with if you make a typo in a url? Like www.nytmies.com; look at them side by side? Am I wrong? Or like Canadian Pharmacy. The comments on the article are amazing, too, because they advise people to use QR codes — I urge you to click around on the videos if you want to gain further insight into this particular genre of thought and its attendant design.

One of the big arguments on this page (which you’ve all read, right?) is that our Authoress, let’s call her A, was standing at the Mercury Lounge between shows and somehow ended up talking to somebody who poƒƒeƒƒ’t a show flyer. Already it’s problematic because who stands around at the bar at the Mercury Lounge with show flyers?! A comments that the artist “lost [her] forever” because:

Because not one sentence was included about what genre of music this artist played much less what his music sounded like, who he was compared to (sound alike). In other words what I could expect by coming out to his show. In short I had no idea what this artist sounded like.

Ooh, girl, did it ever occur to you that perhaps he was dead 2 u because he gave you a flyer at the bar at the mercury lounge? He could have spoken to you, struck up a conversation. If you took the flyer, it means you have more room in your apartment than I do. I will confess, I don’t think I have so much as beheld a show flyer since maybe 2001, and I think that turned out to be a 9/11 truth manifesto zine.

Now, the part of this post that I really liked, actually, was the next one, which I will quote here in full:

Me: What do you sound like?
Artist: I sound like absolutely nothing you’ve ever heard before.
Me: (annoyed and now understanding why he’s not where he wants to be as an artist) Really? So you have invented a new genre of music, and you don’t sound like anyone else in the history of music?
Artist: Yes
Me: Can you at least tell me what type of music you play?
Artist: It’s old school Hip-Hop
OK finally we were getting somewhere and, I totally understood his point, but here’s the problem with having an approach like his:
People are constantly looking for a context to put things into. And if you don’t provide them with one, they will move on to the next thing that their little pea brains actually can grasp.
The critical that was missing in both scenarios was: The Pitch

Yes gawd! She’s right, in a sense. It’s true that artists who are terrible about talking about what they do are doomed. (I would posit that artists who follow all of her advice will sound, in conversation, like people who are trying entirely too hard in a gross, off-putting way— we’ve all met those people where an interaction is so buzz-word coded and business card and godforbid a QR code gets involved. You get the sense that they’ve written a bio and are writing the music after the fact.) But it’s also true that artists should be able to describe the universe in which their music exists quicker than they should be able to describe what it is specifically that they write. I have had so much better luck by describing what I’m reading, what I’ve been listening to, what I like, what I am like, than describing my music. I’ve lured strangers to shows by having conversations with them about a book, somebody else’s music, that genius Diaghilev biography. That starts to create the game universe of my music, rather than just being like, “I am a pretty princess for the following reasons.” Context does not mean genre, which is something that lazy journalists do, as I said, to avoid talking about notes and rhythms.

When people ask me specifically, “what do you sound like,” I usually deflect, and try to talk about the music I love. Even in a crowded bar (not the Mercury Lounge specifically), I’ve gotten away with, “Well, the music I love the most is the music of the English Renaissance, so, old choral things, but also kind of American Minimalism from the 60’s and 70’s, so it’s electrified and sacred and fast and slow at the same time! You should come to the show!” Which is not to say that anybody should call it Electrified and Sacred.

I always think about this genre conversation in the same way. Anybody who tells you what “kind” of food they cook is running some kind of scam. The restaurant group Momofuku has been so successful by constantly resisting those definitions: it’s Korean, American, French… you could hyphenate it and identity politics it until your hyphen key falls off, and you still won’t get close to describing what it means to pan-fry dduk, make a sausage “bolognese,” after a fashion, add the numbing szechuan peppers-corn, and choy sum in a single dish. Can’t we talk about how insanely delicious it is (or insanely whatever: not delicious, too spicy, too obvious, not enough sear on each side of the tteok, and yes I did just transliter8 the Korean in two different ways suck it) instead of the hyphenation parade? And if they did have a single word for what it was, wouldn’t you be suspicious, as if they had hired somebody to come up with the same word?

If you asked somebody what kind of restaurant they ran, and they gave you some hyphenated shit, would you go? Wouldn’t you be more intrigued and charmed by them if they told you a very quick story about a Persian mom and an Italian dad but how even that doesn’t matter? And how you should come and meet Kevin, the bartender, and how there’s this thing they’ve been doing with polenta fries? You’ve all heard this conversation in college, right, where a white person meets a person of color and asks a question similar to, “Wait, so, if you’re from India, and you eat Indian food at home, do you call it Indian Food or do you call it, like, just Food?” The big point here is that genre is a performance, and the name of the thing is the last last last thing that should ever matter. People who are cooking in states of various translation (French woman living in Cambodia with a Spanish husband, Greenlandic woman living in Spain) don’t hyphenate what they call their dinner, it’s just Dinner. In music, the active performance of genre seems to exist after one’s press-bio, rather than before. My argument has always been that genre is a constant process, and you, the author, have no say in it. You can impose decorations on it, manipulate it through education, through the Hague, through Christ, through G-D, through England, through Tanglewood, through all sorts of fabulous and edifying things. But the Thing is the Thing.

So that’s my little sqreed about that. I’d like to open it back up to Maura, though (and of course to Ariel!), and of course to all of you, in the comments thread, and ask a few more questions. I’m wondering if I’m missing some enormous point about how I should just lean back and embrace this name that gives me a dark itch. Or it could also be that artists should never, ever, worry about how they’re described by PR, as it’s not our job, and instead we should be writing music. Another question I have is about the very word “Indie,” and specifically how that can ever really mesh with classical music, which relies, oftentimes, on enormous institutions shuffling around large amounts of money. Our heroes from the 60’s, who stopped taking money from the academy because they weren’t going to get none, are very recognized by major presenting organizations around the world; it’s still socially groups of friends, the Glass and Reich ensembles, and even the Bang-on-a-Can universe, but they’re not having, like, a bake sale on Prince Street to fund an album. I wonder when an “indie” filmmaker stops being one? Does Indie Rock stop being Indie when a band sells out the O2 arena three nights in a row? Okay bye.