Nico
Muhly,

Last night was the premiere of From Here On Out. I hid in the back with Benjamin and we breathlessly watched everything go incredibly well. The extent to which the performance was out of my hands was pretty much total, which helped with the nerves. Yesterday afternoon, though, I had a dramatic last-minute change of mind about one chord at the end. The structure of the third section of the ballet is essentially fast dark music turning to fast bright music and then, suddenly, getting twice as dark in the last sixty seconds. The “bright” climax of this process is one moment where the brass play a giant B-flat major chord, and as I listened in rehearsal, I realized that in order to have a great big chord like that, I would have had to have set it up better and spaced it right. Hearing it live, of course, changes everything. It sounded like somebody trying to have an ironic-distance moment ““ like painting a huge sunrise or a resurrection scene but with bad technique. It’s exactly the kind of thing I actively avoid trying to ever do in my music. So I had to make an on-the-spot change that, while totally subtle, I think saved the moment:

This is a little ridiculous, the spacing isn’t quite right if I “fully mean it.”

This is exactly right, and properly dressed for the occasion; a big pile of notes. Tonight, if they let me, I might kill that bottom F to make some more room up in there.

I’m not sure if, in a few days, I’ll feel like the right thing to do is to go back and really space out my first chord properly, but for now, I’m happy.