Nico
Muhly,

So last night I went with Liz, Nadia, Chris and Leander to the movie adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. It was not as bad as I had feared, but, I have to say, the music was really dreadful. It was written by Alexandre Desplat, who wrote the score for that weird movie Birth; people who like film music (who are a sort of terrifying sub-genre of people, akin to Wagner People, or Joyce People – you can tell them from their crazy eyes and constant squabbling) got their panties all up in a twist about how fabulous the score to Birth is. (It’s an okay score, I guess, but the best moment comes at the beginning when Nicole Kidman is sitting listening to the prelude to Die Walküre).

Now, the issue with the Golden Compass score is that it is exactly the kind of manipulative, cartoony orthodoxy that the books seek so hard to undermine. There was one vile little turn of phrase that reminded me so much of that song “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail, which works so well in that movie because it’s a cartoon about mice. Here, in this complicated, multi-layered story, having this kind of music just forces the whole film into a tedious urban sprawl of forced emotions. If you want to describe a parallel universe musically, why not set up some parallel rules of harmony, or instrumentation? Inasmuch as Pullman has subtle twists in nomenclature, why not perform a similar Clever Act in the music? I did, however, like the throat singing and the natural harmonic series, so, at least there was that.

In other news, Mike Huckabee is so gross. You all read that he, “advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public and suggested homosexuality could ‘pose a dangerous public health risk.’” Right, fine. But then just last Saturday, he argued that “there was still too much confusion about HIV transmission in those early years.” The article then goes on to point out that even by 1992, when he answered the question, “it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.” Awesome, right? I love it when these guys just straight up say what they think; it’s so much easier than trying to piece together all the back-stepping and do-one-þing-&-say-another. The image above is from Tibor Kalman’s notorious Colors magazine editorial in which an image of Reagan was doctored to make it look like he had lesions. Here’s Maira talking about it.

Here is a link to a story of a very particularly heartbreaking genre. I am really excited to follow this as it develops and will be Very Sad if British Privacy Concerns get in the way of my getting to the bottom of it! I have an enormous “capacity” (if that’s the word) for stories (both fictional and real) about missing people, or people who have come back from a long illness or disappearance to find the world changed. Another such book was Clare Sambrook’s Hide & Seek which I very strongly recommend.

I just got a piece of spam whose entire text reads:

affine affine slog demean orthonormal relayed bisexual afro duration elijah frugal cluster spy relayed nostradamus fiery buttock bitt fiery spy sensate relayed slog apportion elliott amadeus cachalot curlicue bisexual stifle shako invertebrate twelfth attentive attentive principle apportion bison rage amadeus motherland hater invertebrate nostradamus cachalot twosome womb frugal motherland hater affine amadeus lithuania these stifle spy demean elliott curlicue afro slog gainful elijah demean cachalot amadeus

Which I think is pretty great. Slog Apportion Elliott Amadeus feels like a whole meme. Twosome Womb Frugal Motherland is the title of my next album, without a doubt, either that or, like, the Arvo Pärt / Kristín Valtýsdóttir collaboration we’ve all been waiting for!

As part of my research for my Electric Violin Concerto, I uncovered this amazing YouTube video of Carl Sagan talking about the constellations. Listen to the music about a minute and a half in. I feel like a lot of people my age or slightly older will forever associate this kind of music with capital-S Science.

So good, right? That’s almost as good as these Philip Glass + Sesame Street Color Wheel things:

I hope there is a generation of kids who were 5 years old in 1977 (that means you, Taye Diggs and Drea De Matteo) who can’t think about primary colors without hearing:

Speaking of which, I hope you are all coming to hear Einstein tomorrow at Carnegie. No excuses! 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.

Another reason to love Chinatown is that it is basically immune from the early-onslaught Christmas cheer that seems to be everywhere else. It seems so inappropriate to hear “Frosty the Snowman” in 55° weather, don’t you think?

The night before I left Iceland I went to a show by these boys called Sprengjuhöllin, whose album Valgeir just recorded & produced. One of the songs became insanely popular and was played in basically every place of retail in Reykjavík. This isn’t that song, but this is another track where Snorri, their sadder singer (they have a more upbeat one, too) sings all sad-like:

Sprengjuhöllin Verum í Sambandi

Then, on Sunday, we drove out to this town Borgarnes, to hear a two-hour recitation of one of the sagas. This funny actor Benedikt Erlingsson does the whole thing alone, with a lot of funny voices and running around this tiny loftspace with a triangular roof-shape. It was very pleasantly confusing (it was all in Icelandic). The most arresting image is the curse-pole (niðstöng), which is essentially a horse’s head stuck on a pole and pointed towards somebody you want to curse:

And when all was ready for sailing, Egil went up into the island. He took in his hand a hazel-pole, and went to a rocky eminence that looked inward to the mainland. Then he took a horse’s head and fixed it on the pole. After that, in solemn form of curse, he thus spake: ‘Here set I up a curse-pole, and this curse I turn on king Eric and queen Gunnhilda. (Here he turned the horse’s head landwards.) This curse I turn also on the guardian-spirits who dwell in this land, that they may all wander astray, nor reach or find their home till they have driven out of the land king Eric and Gunnhilda.’
This spoken, he planted the pole down in a rift of the rock, and let it stand there. The horse’s head he turned inwards to the mainland; but on the pole he cut runes, expressing the whole form of curse.

How great is that. During the show, though, dude was constantly picking on people in the audience to do something or respond to him in some way. I kept on shifting lower in my seat thinking “dontpickmedontpickmedontpickme” and fortunately, he found the one other foreigner (a Faroese!) to make fun of. It was a total relief and all the agèd Icelanders were weirdly bemused to have a Faroese there.

I heard another fun thing in Iceland which was this band Hjatalín, which amounts to funny pop music with woodwinds, which I think is a nice combination. I have somewhere in my Deepe Archÿve their newest album, which I can’t seem to find, but here is one track, as well as a link to their MæSpeis if anybody wants to investigate further.

Hjaltalín Traffic Music

I am writing this electric violin concerto. I am making chicken stock. I am trying to convince Liz to help me install hooks on my walls so I can hang up my clothes. I am anxiously awaiting the masters of Album II (called Mothertongue). I am horrified by the republican YouTube debates! Did anybody see that? Thank god for that Gays in the Military dude. It really is an amazing thing to me that straight people would rather die than let gay people translate Arabic for them. Remember that crazy urban legend a few years ago where Lauryn Hill allegedly said that she’d rather die than have white people buy her albums? This reminds me of that, but it’s not a joke. This website, by the way, is a weirdly designed but totally useful place to reference these things.

1. Fighting Drag Queens.

2. Patricia Cornwell CRAZY. thanks to jenny for the link

3. More soon.

Did everybody see this article about Pope Benedict trying to make the Vatican choir sing more gregorian chant? I’m sort of with him; the older stuff, as far as Papist Choral Music goes, is much better. Also, the Vatican Choir(s), at least the time I’ve heard them, are pretty grim. That space is so acoustically unforgiving that you end up with a lot of shouting and a lot of intonation issues. I would love it if the Vatican were the place where you could go to hear amazing Gregorian chant; I’ve always thought that the plainchant tradition was underrepresented in the (few) Catholic services I’ve attended. I like the idea of the older, more orthodox forms of Christianity retaining as much of their 400-500-600-700 year-old traditions as possible; there is plenty of room for that to happily coëxist with the more neon, hand-clapping and liturgical dancing forms of worship.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving! We managed to rustle up a fresh turkey breast (cooked on the grill), and then the following improvised treats:

- Potatoes and carrots puréed with their skins on (shh) with skyr, butter, garlic, and cream

- Carrots with ginger syrup and maple syrup from my parents’ neighbors in Vermont

- Brussels Sprouts (which I cooked with a sauce made out of melted Funyuns (“steiktur laukur”), which are sort of a national treat here, and are to be found atop most hot dogs) with hot pepper, butter, and steiktur laukur garnish. My mother, reached by phone when faced with the Sad Sprout Bag, recommended slicing them up to keep them from being too ugly, but then I had this unfulfillable fantasy of doing it that way with some sort of bacon product, which was nowhere to be found, so I stuck to the original Funyun plan.

- A serious red-wine and Funyun reduction for the turkey, thrice strained and blended

- Cranberry Sauce! They totally had one (1) bag of Ocean Spray™ cranberries up in the Hagkaup in Kópavogur. I boiled it down with orange zest and put some secret ginger slices up in.

- I somehow also contrived to candy some ginger and orange peel in the hopes that people would eat it which, thank god they did.

All-in-all, a very successful meal. I was sad that my scheme for foal-and-whale stuffing didn’t come to fruition but that’s probably for the best.

The mix is proceeding nicely. I am in the mental-process right now of trying to decide the order of the tracks as well as the subdivision thereof (there are 3 songs each longer than 15 minutes; there is discussion of splitting them up on the album which would require that each section have, at the very least, a title). A lot of late night notes have been taken (click to enlarge the evidence). I always wonder about the importance of sequencing an album; I know that if I buy something, I will listen to it in its intended sequence maybe one or two times and that’s it (unless, obviously, it’s a classical pieces with movements, but even then, sometimes you only want the third movement of Sibelius 5, you know?). That said, I know that most people who still do CD’s (like my parents’ generation, and older) will appreciate a well-sequenced album and not just some alphabetized list sent over iChat.

It’s always fun to be in a place that isn’t observing a United States-only holiday. As I predicted, I have been extra productive because there isn’t the constant feeling that New York is moving quickly while I’m sitting in a hot tub. The internet is shut down in New York; Gawker isn’t updating itself, the Times is slowly chugging along, nobody is on instant messenger all day. It’s a great, relaxed feeling.

I’m about to go to the pool and sit for a bit. I am trying to devise ways to keep my hands out of water to keep them from turning into prunes.

I am inordinately excited about Oliver Sacks’s new book! I love him. One of my favorite thing to do when I travel is to keep a small running list of books on Amazon.com and then have them turn up in time for my arrival back home; I bought the Sacks book, I bought Phoebe Damrosch’s Service Included (as reviewed here), the new Nigella Lawson, and a birthday present for a friend (well in advance!).

Two nights ago we had a dusky walk to the pool with a really spectacular sunset (click to enlarge!). I’m not sure why I am so obsessed with this intersection between something being state-run and it being really clean and wonderful. I guess in my vision of utopia, that’s sort of how things are organized…? I love the weirdness of the municipal buildings in Chinatown, though: the “No Spitting!” sign in Chinese in the post office, the completely surreal video collection at the local library, the old-fashioned spatial organization of the Knickerbocker post office on East Broadway. I don’t think you could get away with such quirkiness in this Scandolovely configuration; I think the weirdest thing you have here is a diagram in the municipal showers with Big Red Dots instructing you where on your body you have to wash before entering the pool. I had thought it was myth, but in October, I actually saw somebody get asked by the Man in the Booth to go back and have a do-over.

An observation: winters in Vermont are windy, sure, but the wind seems to be circular and sort of dramatic/romantic in its paths, whipping around trees and over and through buildings. Here, however, the fact of the island’s existence seems irrelevant to nature; the wind rushes right by, on its way to Norway. It’s a lonesome feeling, but when you get inside, it is that much cozier for it.

I have just eBayed an alto recorder.

I am going to figure out how to make thanksgiving dinner here (which is, no shitting, called þakkagjörðarhátiðamatur), where they don’t have sausage to speak of.

Also: BAA BAA BAA! Did everybody else know this already?

London is fully out of control. The cost of a train trip somewhere in town (like, seven blocks) can be the equivalent of $6 or $7. If you have a magic tap-in, tap-out card, called the “Oyster,” things are slightly easier; the last time I was in London, I, for whatever reason, spent a zillion dollars and pumped money into this card and completely forgot about it. So imagine my delight when I arrived on Thursday and had scads of travel money left! Such a nice present from my past self. Whenever I have money, I buy six million little tubes of lip chap and put them in every right-hand jacket pocket “just in case;” I send ahead small tubes of hand cream to foreign destinations to save myself the plastic bag nightmare.

I have achieved Iceland. I have eaten so much pastry. I am about to go swimming. We begin the mix tomorrow morning; I’m on a strict diet of Gibbons verse anthems! Here comes one now:

Orlando Gibbons See, see the Word is incarnate

I wish I knew whose recording this is. This is my only non-copyprotected one; I also have a very good recording by New College, Oxford as well as Magdalen College, Oxford. In general, I think this recording is a little SLOW and also a little LOW (a lot of these anthems exist in various transpositions; although I have never seen this happen, you can imagine English people getting into Very Hushed but Furious Arguments about the nature of these translations).

In a bit of genius, the first verse is alto solo, the second, a duet, the third, a trio, and the fourth verse (which is my most favorite) a quartet. Very satisfying. When I was a boy, I was very excited by the bonus syllables in “The blind have sight and cripples have their motion” (motion being rendered mo-ti-on). Full text is below:

See, the Word is incarnate; God is made man in the womb of a Virgin.
Shepherds rejoice, wise men adore and angels sing
‘Glory be to God on high: peace on earth, good will towards men.
The law is cancelled,
Jews and Gentiles converted by the preaching of glad tidings of salvation.
The blind have sight and cripples have their motion;
diseases cured, the dead are raised, and miracles are wrought.
Let us welcome such a guest with Hosanna.
The Paschal Lamb is offered, Christ Jesus made a sacrifice for sin.
The earth quakes, the sun is darkened, the powers of hell are shaken;
and lo, he is risen up in victory.
Sing Alleluia.
See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood,
the prick of thorns, the print of nails.
And in the sight of multitudes a glorious ascension.
When now he sits on God’s right hand
where all the choir of heaven all jointly sing:
Glory be to the Lamb that sitteth on the throne.
Let us continue our wonted note with Hosanna:
Blessed be He that cometh in the Name of the Lord;
with Alleluia, we triumph in victory,
the serpent’s head is bruised, Christ’s kingdom exalted,
and heaven laid open to sinners.
Amen.

Every time I travel, I somehow manage to leave one little thing behind. In the case of this trip to Chicago, I totally left a little container of cucumber-scented face-scrub. Too bad. Sometimes, I’ve left whole sweaters and other times it’s nothing more than a tube of lip chap. I’ve been reading a book about apocalyptic christianity (Have a Nice Doomsday, by Nicholas Guyatt), which features descriptions of people re-united with their loved ones in an instant during the rapture; I have a similar idea that all of these lotions and unguents are going to come flying at my face during the end times. We’ll see. The book features him traveling around the country interviewing various minor and major celebrities of the Apocalyptic Publishing Sub-Industry, and for a while, it’s a good time, and then his insistence on his distance from his subjects starts to become grating (we have to hear about how difficult it is to be a vegetarian in Texas, and there are numerous cringe-inducing paragraphs where he essentially describes himself as the Hugh Grant character in those 90’s RomComz, awkwardly English in the face of American Excess.)

Speaking of awkwardly English, I am going there this week. England in November, England in November. I’m going to meet with Tom, for whom I am writing a concerto: an electric six-string violin concerto, to be specific. I’m very excited about it. My original intent was to actually write a piece where somehow Tom would be playing this pervy instrument and then also his acoustic violin (which, it must be said, is very fancy indeed; I think it’s one of those instruments that is Literally Priceless); in any event, I have since modified my proposal and am going to writing a piece that’s sort of about early attempts at cosmology, attempts at understanding the constellations, with some brief asides to Arabic grammatical and/or astrological charts. I’m not entirely sure what the outcome is going to be; electric instruments tend to occupy that weird intermediary space between weaponry and sex toys. Go here and see what I’m talking about:

abc

In any event, I’m excited to get out of New York during the Rockette-Holiday-Shopping-Wormhole. Even though Chinatown tends to not participate in the normal ebb-and-flow of the midtown tourist season, they are still playing Frosty the Snowman in the Duane Reade, which is really not acceptable, seeing as how it’s not even advent. What I want them to do is play Ben Frosty the Snowman and then we’ll talk. I’ll be going directly to Iceland after London, to mix Mothertongue (album II), and with any luck will have the chance to sit in the hot tub and properly write Tom’s piece, having seen what the thing can do. I’m writing it for a new-ish orchestra called Aurora, in London, who seem to be totally great; look how organized they are here. There is something so wonderful about these organized-out English websites; I think that there was a lot of shame about how benighted things had been, from a design point of view, particularly in supermarkets, that now all the big supermarket chains have these totally art-directed sites. Check out this one, from Waitrose’s. Did you notice this sentence: “All our pork is reared under the Assured British Pig Scheme.” Then you google their ass and you find a slightly less organized website, but a fascinating and endearing government program nonetheless. (PS, If you, like me, can’t leave well enough alone, you may find yourself signing a series of petitions such as “Pigs are worth it” (dot Koh dot you-kay).

In celebration of the travel and its attendant losses, here is the first track from the David Lang / Michael Gordon / Julia Wolfe oratorio Lost Objects which is so beautiful I could die. It used to be a game around my house to sing that little motive about really any random thing we had lost. Then we rediscovered Eddie Murphy’s Boogie in Your Butt and the game changed slightly, do you all remember that song?

Lang/Wolfe/Gordon I Lost a Sock from Lost Objects

PS, you’re not meant to be able to tell which Bang-On-A-Can wrote which Bang-On-A-Movement but you can usually tell. This one is Str8 Up David Lang, in my opinion.

Chicago! It was so much fun, I was really taken aback by how seriously Cliff Colnot (the conductor) took the piece, as well as the degree of intensity that the musicians brought to it. It was a strange program: first, a viola concertino by Mark-Anthony Turnage, who is a really genius composer whose opera Greek was one of my favorite things when I was first starting to compose, a piece by 19-year old Mark Simpson, a piece by American composer Derek Johnson (whom I had never heard of but who was very nice indeed), and then my piece being the last and the première. All of this was somehow overseen by Osvaldo Golijov, who shares the duty of Chicago Symphony Composer-In-Residence with Mark-Anthony. Part of the deal was that Osvaldo was going to interview us from the stage, asking us about the pieces. He had taken his Wacky Uncle pill right before he interviewed me; it was fantastic, because I was completely unsure as to what he was going to say. He, interestingly and touchingly, asked about Picasso, whose Guernica was one of the inspirational images/processes behind Golijov’s own La Pasión según San Marcos, which was my first exposure to his music. Here it wacky is:

And then here is Derek, and Mark-Anthony, and Mark, and me, looking crazed. Due to a complicated mishap I had left my belt back at the hotel, which Anjuli and Will managed to find for me, but then I didn’t get to see them before I was documented Beltless, which is a little crazy-making.

I think it was a really well-programmed evening of music, at least stylistically speaking. Mark-Anthony’s music is usually sort of aggro (in the best way), but this piece was very sensual, elegiac, and delicately handled. Derek’s piece was fascinating to me; during all the rehearsals and little sectional things I was really into it, especially when I had a score handy. The score was gorgeous just in terms of layout and typesetting, and all the little details he uses to anchor the piece were very clearly notated (for instance there was this little finger indicating you had to damp the piano in a certain way; I usually just use a “+” symbol, but now that I’ve seen his little finger I must have it!). The piece was organized around these weird plucked low piano notes which were also sometimes muted with an eraser; it made a quasi-gamelan effect and you could really hear the distances between them expanding and contracting; it sort of reminded me of John Adams’s China Gates, actually, but the style is so different that I wasn’t about to say so. The problem with his piece was that it suffered from a serious case of out-of-control program note syndrome. Check this out – and this is a fractional excerpt of the total:

An elaboration of this rhythmic device is employed across the structure of the entire piece to govern the changing speeds of the rhythmic and harmonic forces. There is a constant recycling of evolving rhythmic figures and harmonic progressions, but the perspective between these musical objects is always shifting. The conceit of carefully controlled nonalignment against a backdrop of larger symmetrical spaces could be likened to the ever-changing proportions of our lives against the cyclical passing of days, months, and years, or, in a more poetic sense, to Heraclitus’s notion that you “can’t step into the same river twice.”

Hera, as they say, Clitus. I think I will go on and on in a later post about “Program Note Syndrome” but what I will say is this: I think a bunch of people came to that concert and were put off by the length and density of the notes (which was Bad length and Bad density) and applied their thoughts thereupon to the piece, which is also long and dense, but not necessarily in the bad way. There is a way to poison yourself with program notes which, you know, is always actually tragic because we as composers are not meant to be writers and have a messed-up command of the language. By the time I’ve written a piece, the last thing I want to do is to consolidate all the 45,000 ideas I had into a paragraph. My trick to writing them is actually to read them aloud to the cats, and if anything strikes me as awkward or too texty, I start again. People have to read this shit in passing in the half-dark right before your piece (or, in some cases, during your piece) and I think that the last person they need to hear from at that time is Heraclitus. If somebody had asked me to write a note for Derek’s piece, it would have read like this, “This twenty minute work, Frozen Light, employs large, dense blocks of sound moving at different speeds, like (insert pithy simile here). As the piece progresses, our sense of scale, foreground, and background slowly shifts, creating (insert emotion here)” or something like that; the piece did, in fact, speak for itself. But that’s enough about that. I am going to talk about program notes in a later post soon, and I will say that in my many years, I have read some really outrageous notes, and Derek’s really were not that out of control; I think that I’ve written some pretty wild ones in my own time, too.

Mark Simpson, who is young and Liverpudlian, wrote a piece in two movements that was just the kind of quasi-tonal music I like the best, where you get the sense that there is an organizing principle to it but that your structural experience is limited to being on the fast roller-coaster that runs through the space. It’s a brave kind of piece to write, too, because this is the sort of music that, on the score, looks amazing and when you listen to it following along, you see all the little pitch enjambments and loops, but when you lift your head and just listen, you need to be able to hinge onto something. It also featured a nice steady hi-hat in the second movement, which was satisfying. Here is another piece with satisfying hi-hat, from the dreamy third act of John Adams’s Nixon in China. Those of you who know his orchestra piece “The Chairman Dances” will recognize this as the place from which most of the material from that piece flows. I think that there is nothing more beautiful than “Oh, California / Hold me close!” about 2:45 in. Is it perverted that everything I hear, I’m like, ooh, there’s a John Adams piece that has Hi-Hat, too? I think what happened was that Osvaldo was happily talking about Peter Sellars alltaf alltaf and so I had Nixon in the mind.

John Adams Some men you cannot satisfy from Nixon in China

A really quick post – two articles worth reading: In the Guardian, Steven Stucky talking about American and British new music

& up in the Times:

An article by Bernard “K-Flex” Holland about how he prepares to attend and subsequently review premieres of new pieces. What’s kind of great about it is that he articulates something I think we all, as audiences of new music, feel, which is that people actually have to listen to this stuff, so it had better be awesome. He then goes on to make stranger points about Haydn and stuff.