Let me tell you a story.

I find doing press sometimes really frustrating. You have to do it, basically, because that’s how people know to come to the show, and it’s how we keep the Conversation about music afloat. My general philosophy has been to trust the press officers of the presenting organizations of whatever project I’m doing and just say yes to everything because it feels rude to not do that.  Sometimes, around a big project or tour or show, there will be a little snow flurry of things to do — a bit of radio, a bit of phone interviews, a few things via email. Ideal world: it all gets consolidated and you knock it out like a video game, even if the radio is in a random place and the phone stuff is at weird times.  Sometimes something great happens — you’ll get an interviewer who asks you a probing question you’ve never thought of before, that shines light on your work or your process or life in general in a fresh and surprising way.  I was asked a few such questions by Debbie Millman this last year, I had a great interview with somebody in Ireland this year who made me rethink how I write programme notes, a few years ago somebody asked me such smart questions about Philip Glass’s Piano Études that we are still friends to this day (I literally just offered him the use of my hotel bathtub in London, long story).  The thread that ties all these things together is not just research but genuine curiosity.  It’s not about knowing every biographical detail about the subject, or every piece of trivia about the topic at hand (although it helps).  It’s about knowing that you can treat the conversation as precisely that — a fluid, elegant dialogue, even if it’s over email.

Occasionally, you get an interview where you quickly realize that there is a really basic Message the writer is trying to get across — and indeed, oftentimes it’s just “you, the reader, should come to this show.”  I’m fine with that — this is when Paper and Orchestra are in an (1) friendly cahoot and the paper asks the composer to say three things about the piece, two things about how nice it is to be in Orchestraville, one wacky detail, and is there anything else you’d like to add thank you so much see you on Friday.  Other times, though, you get something like what I’m fixing to show you here. This is the Prove My Thesis interview.  This is when the writer has in mind a Way that the world works (the implication being in this worldview that there is only one possible way) and that the interview subject is going to Confirm this Genius Idea in neat quotes.  This is the work of That Guy from Class — remember him?  Where it’s not like he didn’t read the book, because his eyes certainly passed over the pages, but it’s more like he took everything wrong out of the text, and then wants to get weird about “isn’t there no wrong answer in literature?”  It reminds me of when you buy a cat a present and all the cat wants is the box.

I found myself in the presence of just such an interview the other day.  I should preface this by saying that of course — of course! — this was one of those “I need the answers right away” interview requests, and the press agent is nice and a friend of a friend and I was like, okay great, I can hook you up, send the questions.  So of course — of course! — Dude sends the questions like, a day later, because it’s Dude, and I should have known right away we were in for a treat.  I did the “Standing Up For Myself Email” to the press agent, which reads:

For future reference, if somebody’s like “i need them ASAP” and then doesn’t actually send them ASAP, I become inclined not to do them ASAP, as it were.  I set aside time to deal with all this kind of stuff this morning, and am now about to go into a tech rehearsal for 14 hours, so, I don’t know what his deadline is… anyway, whatever.

MAIN PROBLEM: you have not asked a single question about notes and rhythms, just about like, perception of scenes that don’t exist?  But we will address that, and various problems, as they arise in this enfilade of horrors.

First things first: a number of people with whom I have spoken over the past five years – and who are associated with the scene variously known as ‘new classical’, ‘post-classical’ and ‘neo-classical’ – are uncomfortable with the terms. Do you see them as applicable, and why (or why not)? Is the term ‘classical’ even relevant? Are there terms – whether applied to the music or not – that you find more acceptable? Given that I am being encouraged to put you all under the same roof, what would be the most satisfying term I could use?

I’ve never heard any of these terms before.  Read this.  — who is encouraging you to use them? [NOTE FROM NICO: really do read this.  It’s got the Thing I Think About That Thing in it.]

You may have answered this above, but… Is it appropriate to suggest that artists as diverse as yourself, Nils Frahm, Johann Johannsson, Hauschka and Tim Hecker are part of a similar ‘movement’, or does that seem as suitable as grouping Britney Spears, Foo Fighters and Nick Cave together? What, if anything, do you think you all have in common?

Tim Hecker is involved now?  I mean… look, taxonomies work in a lot of different ways.  You can organise things however you want, really, but it’s definitely never (v important) the job of the composer or artist to do this, because then you’re writing to your bio, rather than writing music.  Every second a composer spends thinking about this is a second she should have been using to write music.  That having been said, sure, I’ll buy it, but I’d also say that I have a lot in common with composers like Andrew Norman, Missy Mazzoli, Sean Shepherd inasmuch as we all write large orchestra music, firmly rooted in the classical ‘concert’ music tradition.  You could also, if you wanted, say I have a lot in common with Tom Adès because we both derive musical material from the past — in his case, the ecstatic harmonic motion in Couperin, and in my case, Tallis and Byrd.  You could say I have everything to do with Timo Andres because we are both over six feet tall and love capers.  The point of all the record stories dying — thank GOD, by the way — is that we don’t have to have these physical taxonomies anymore where you go into the special porn room to buy classical music.

Do you see yourself and those mentioned above (and others often grouped with them) as your contemporaries? Do you relate to, or admire, any of these artists in particular? Are there others about whom you hold strong opinions whom you’d like me to consider, or wish to champion?

You’ve worked with a diverse range of musicians who aren’t necessarily associated with this ‘scene’, including Rufus Wanwright, Sufjan Stevens and Antony & The Johnsons. Do you find that there’s a tightly knit community surrounding this music, and is it as unusual as outsiders think for musicians working with, for instance, rock music, to want to experiment in other fields?

I don’t understand the question and you misspelled Rufus’s last name.  I’ve never worked with any of the people you talked about above (Haushka et al) so I’m not sure which tightly knit community you’re referencing?  Also “outsiders think?”  Who are these outsiders?  You?  Which fields?  This whole question is word salad.

Some people consider ‘new classical’ music to be loftier and more intellectual than ‘rock’ music. Is this a patronising view, and do you think that the attitude is changing?

When you write “some people,” what on earth do you mean.  Citation?

Furthermore, there was a time when the idea of a ‘rock’ musician working within these realms was considered slightly laughable. I think, for instance, of the insults levelled in the past – by some people – at people like Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello, and back in the 1970s it would have been seen as the height of prog rock indulgence. Why do you think audiences are more willing to take this seriously?

Which realm!?!?!  I literally have no idea what you’re talking about.  Elvis Costello!?

Instrumental, classically influenced music emerging through the independent scene (and indeed major labels) isn’t exactly a new thing. I think, for instance, of Mute working with Balanescu Quartet and Holger Czukay, or plenty of Nonesuch’s releases. Is the volume of music being released now any different to years past, or do you feel – as others do – that it’s not just a matter of a spotlight being put on it and that in fact there’s far more being released than ever?

Ugh, I find your questions increasingly frustrating.  What spotlight are you talking about?  I feel like you are operating under a set of premises or assumptions that are unprovable and are based on your perception of other people’s (or the press’s, more probably) perceptions of the attention given to a made up group of artists.  THAT HAVING BEEN SAID I will throw you a bone to say that this isn’t new.  CF Philip Glass & Ravi Shankar, the Mute/Balanescu thing is a good example, Nyman + McAlmont — it’s 6 in the morning so I can’t really think of more but… you know.

I believe that you were classically trained (as music journalists like to put it!). How did you come to work as a composer? When did you start writing music like this? Were you brought up on pop and rock, or was ‘classical’ music always your foremost interest? Have they both always been vital to your musical existence, and do you still listen to other kinds of music?

I was classically trained; I went to Juilliard for 5 years, I have a masters’ degree in the classical composition.  I was brought up as a chorister,  here, read this: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/apr/27/classicalmusicandopera1, — the backbone of everything I do is renaissance choral music.  From there, I learned the piano, and from there, realised I was a lousy enough pianist that I had to start writing my own things.

You’re unusual within this ‘movement’ in that you tend to compose music for others, whether it be Metropolitan Opera, St Pauls Cathedral, The Library Of Congress etc. This is, in a sense, a far more old fashioned approach to composition. Do you find it frustrating that you hand over your music to others to perform, or does this in fact free you up to focus more on writing? 

I can’t with you and this movement shit again.  It’s so lazy and it makes me want to throw the laptop across the room.  You could shine a light through my work and hit all the things you talked about above and never hit anything that I imagine you think is part of this ‘movement.’  I don’t think what I’m doing is unusual; I’m just doing the things I’m good at, with some stretching at the margins.  I don’t like the idea that you’ve created this artificial ‘scene’ and then put me as the family crayzee cousin, always writin’ wacky music for the Lord’s House!

I’m struck, I have to say, by the breadth of your work. Does the fact that so much of your music is commissioned mean that you are limited in any way by the approach of those who’ve invited you to work with them, or does it in fact allow you to work in milieu that would otherwise be impossible? And is it accurate to say that you are approached, or do you also approach others?

Good question.  I would say that most of my music is commissioned.  I find the restrictions of a commission to be very very helpful.  A lot of times a commission is really open ended (“write 20 minutes for orchestra”) but other times it’s really specific (“We’re doing a concert where all the texts are about sleep, or sleeping, and you have five minutes.”)  I like these restrictions.  I’ve been very, very lucky inasmuch as I haven’t had to approach others in this way, although there are sort of dream projects where I do try to shop it around a bit.  My viola concerto is a good example of this.  I imagine you have a recording of it seeing as how you got here via Bedroom Community /[publicist] She can send it to you if you haven’t.  That is a combo platter — a piece I’ve wanted to write since 2001, but also something that four different orchestras co-commissioned.  After six months writing that, when the phone rings and Joanna Newsom wants a string and oboe arrangement, there is nothing more delicious because it’s a similar muscle but doing something for somebody else — it’s like going over somebody else’s house and cooking and being useful and friendly.

Why do you think that there’s been such a surge of interest from music fans in instrumental music that rejects traditional rock music structures (verse / chorus / verse etc) and arrangements (guitar, bass, drums etc) in favour of more ambitious melodic narratives and more traditional instrumentation (pianos, strings, brass etc). I’ve wondered, for instance, if it’s due to the need for people to find a refuge away from the ubiquitous sound of ‘pop’ music? Or away from the chaotic political and social times in which we live, and which confront us, thanks partly to social media, in a far more aggressive manner than before (refugees, gun crime, the American elections, Syria etc)?

Now, this I’ll buy, maybe.  I don’t know if we need to get Syria involved.  I also don’t know that this surge you reference is something that exists in what I like to call Reality.  I think a lot of people — thinking, for instance, of my parents, who are in their early 70’s — took a big detour from listening to pop music qua pop music and settled in Joni Mitchell world.  That kind of songwriting — with chapters, rather than traditional verse/chorus structures, has been around forever!  And didn’t die either — think about Joanna Newsom, think about longform Björk of late, think about Sun Kil Moon etc… Think about the folk tradition, think about really anything.  I’m not sure that the world is organised into “Britney” and “Not Britney.”  I think a lot of people grew up listening to jazz and have never stopped.  I think a lot of people just have more access to the music that their peers are making.  Also: one week ago I literally flew to Las Vegas and saw the Britney Spears residency show.

To employ significant numbers of musicians is obviously a costly endeavour. Has the fact that instrumental music is more acceptable to big, funded venues – such as London’s Barbican or Royal Festival Hall – made it easier to work in these realms? Have the actions of such venues – inviting more bands to perform within them at events such as the UK’s Meltdown – helped bring an audience to ‘new classical’ music by broadening their horizons and making it seem less intimidating to attend shows that seem more ‘serious’?

Now, this might be an opportunity for you to do some Serious Journalism.  Ring up the Barbican’s PR office and ask them to set up an interview with you and the classical music programmer Chris Sharp, and with the “other” music programmer Bryn Ormrod.  They will know the answer to this as it relates to money, numbers, and the raw data.  Time, money, and space are complicated things, but unless u, as an artist, are totally self-producing, it is sage, I think, to take advantage of the wild luxury of the fact that somebody else is buying dinner.  Also, the relationship between ensembles (which is to say, orchestras) and the halls who present them is a financially complicated one — but again, for me, as a creator of the notes on the page and occasionally a performer, I don’t rea-a-a-a-lly have to worry about it.  Maybe that’s a bit grand, or naïve, but that’s all I got.  But seriously call them.  I’d actually be interested to know what they say.

Do you think the ‘greying’ of the music-buying audience – who, in past generations, would have shifted over to buying classical music and abandoned rock – has also ensured that so many people are interested in ‘new classical’ without investigating more long term, traditional established composers like Beethoven and Bach, to whom they would once have turned? Perhaps it provides them with an opportunity to enjoy more complex music without apparently ‘giving up’ on their musical roots?

I just don’t know.  I’m probably the worst person to ask about this.  When I go all up into the concert hall, I see young people.  I still actually disagree with most of the assumptions in the question, if I’m parsing the grammar correctly.

Music like yours has increasingly found itself working alongside other disciplines, notably film and dance. (I’m thinking in particular of OSTs like Nils Frahm’s Victoria, Johann Johannsson’s and Max Richter’s regular soundtrack work etc.) Has this helped you find a wider audience? Is the success of other artists in these realms in any way responsible for a general crossover? Does it alter the manner in which you compose? And is it important for you that such music is also able to stand on its own, or do you see the two disciplines, when they are interlinked in this way, as inseparable?

Good question.  Yes.  All of this is a good thing.  Music for use, as it were, has value.  If your friend asks you to write a piece for a ballet, or a film, do it.  It’s so great.  See above about open-ended commissions — this is the opposite of that, where you get instant feedback from your collaborators, and the music is only successful if it works in the context of the overall collaboration.  I wish more people did it.  Learning to work quickly and collaboratively has helped me with everything I do, from making dinner to writing concert music to everything!!!

There seems to be a canon of influences named by musicians from this ‘movement’: Arvo Pæart, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, Penguin Café Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Harold Budd, Erik Satie, Gorecki etc. Do they play a big role in your work? What do you think they share in common? Are there others that you feel are important to mention? How did you come to be familiar with them, and was it hard to find a way to integrate the inspiration they offered into your work?

Lord have mercy.

One artist with whom I have been talking has said that a decade ago he felt his contemporaries exhibited a “strong individual language” which has since become synonymous with “soft piano music and compositions that I can’t identify with”. Certainly, it sometimes seems as though nowadays I am sent ‘new classical’ music on an almost daily basis, and I would be lying if I said it all excites me. Some seems to be derivative and comparatively unimaginative – often, for instance, with a heavy emphasis on arpeggios – as though the very fact that the artists are simply rejecting traditional structures and arrangements is enough to justify its existence. Do you feel that the growth of interest in the music has led to a ‘blanding’ of the scene, and is there a danger that this will eventually lead to a dead end? And is there a danger that the ‘novelty’ this offers to those otherwise interested in rock and pop is in danger of fading?

Sure?  I mean, there’s more bad music in the world than good music, but I don’t feel the need to extrapolate some kind of grandpa-ass world view about it.  Tell your artist friend to spend less time having thoughts about what other people are doing and get back to the manuscript paper.  She sound mean and jealous.

Do you consider yourself to be an ‘indie artist’? Does such music sit comfortably under this (admittedly huge and nowadays rather vague) umbrella? Is it possible to consider oneself as indie once one has experienced success on the scale that you have? Why do you think independent labels are signing music outside the realms of what is normally considered ‘indie’ music?

Rock ‘n’ roll has, since punk at the very least, prided itself on breaking conventions, with untrained musicians applauded for refusing to conform to tradition. Do you think these possibilities have now been exhausted?

See blog link above

Do you think your music is attracting people that wouldn’t normally listen to anything but ‘popular’ music simply because of the record label on which it appears?

Well, I hope it isn’t that simple.  I think you’re not giving listeners the benefit of the doubt about what they listen to.  They’re like “ooh, label I like!  Ooh, boring piano music with arpeggios.  Welp, must be good!”  HOWEVER.  I would like to think that the label system of organising music would draw the ear not just to my music but the other way around.  For instance, Bedroom Community has been incredibly good about this.  People who know my music from, for instance, the choral music universe suddenly have a path through to Sam Amidon’s music, or Ben Frost’s.  This can only be a good thing, and yes, it does take a label, I think, to at least uphold a formal structure for this to happen.  I find myself doing this too — for instance, your boyfriend Nils is on Erased Tapes; through his music I’ve found other artists on that label I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise — and by access I mean that I don’t spend a lot of time fishing around for new things, about which I feel bad!  So the label shortcut can sometimes be useful.  But this relates to my big disagreement about a lot of these questions, which is that People who listen to music aren’t like, moths drawn to flame, the flame being soft piano arpeggios.  People, as far as I can tell, trust their friends, talk to each other, and still are ready to be surprised.  I think that all artists need to be evangelists for not just their own music but for the music they love.  A lot of the music *I* love sounds very little like my own, but still you will find me on the street corner with a tin foil hat talmbout “listen to more Takemitsu.”

At a time when it’s getting harder and harder to make money from making music, and artists are being advised to tour in order to make money, isn’t it a tremendous gamble to record something that requires a significant number of musicians to perform it on the road?

Yes.  But it’s so worth it.

Popular music’s appeal has often been based upon the performer as much as the music, but your music can be performed by anyone who can read sheet music, just as classical music was in the past (albeit with instrumentation that was perhaps not available in the past). Does the idea of your music being performed by others appeal to you, and is that a goal when you’re writing?

Yes!  This is a good question.  This is one of the great mysteries and funz of the classical tradition.  What happens is that your music starts to mean different things to different people.  Having music in the fingers of strangers is a beautiful and strange feeling.  Nothing makes me happier to think that people I don’t know have spent hours, days, weeks, learning my music.  Particularly because so much of my music starts as music for friends — cf all my work with Nadia Sirota — when suddenly a violist pops up in Finland playing those pieces, it feels like a small miracle and a beautiful, unexpected connection.

Do you think that there will come a time when the traditional divisions between the classical and popular music worlds will no longer exist?

Jesus take the wheel.

Given that popular music emerged as a reaction to the staid world of classical music, and that liking classical music has for many years been ‘uncool’, do you think that ‘classical’ music is the new rock ‘n’ roll, in that it represents a rejection of contemporary musical trends? Can you imagine kids trying to annoy their parents by playing your records in years to come?

Baby girl, I’ma stop you right now about your origin theory of popular music!  Is that literally what you think!?!?!?!?  Are you English?  I think you’re probably English.  I would take a second and rethink how this works vis à vis everything.  Think: African Diaspora.  Think: folk traditions — even in the +44!  I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask this but I would not encourage you to ask other people this same thing in this way because they are going to think that you are Touched.

Is there anything else you would like to add (assuming you’re not already exhausted!)?

Yes.  It’s a dude called Will Robin who has written an entire thesis about this idea of “indie classical” music.  Apparently he has my name in his mouth; I haven’t read it because I’d rather write music.  BUT a link to his thesis is attached, and I’d recommend that you read it as it touches on a lot of things you’ve asked.  I’m sorry to be so tart with thee but this feels like a weird combination of answering things I always have to answer but also that I’m on the wrong train in which I’ve just spent a million years talking about everything about music except for the actual music herself.  I feel like you’ve engaged in a lot of un-interrogated thought about these peripheral matters and I’d love to see what you divine from Will Robin’s thesis.

Then! Longtime collaboratrix Nadia has made a record with two pieces of mine on it. The first is Keep in Touch, which is the first long-form piece I wrote for her when we were both fresh out of grad school. We made a version of it on my album Speaks Volumes, for which Anohni did the vocal arrangements, and Valgeir and I went nuts with the electronic elements. So, ten years (?) later, Chris Thompson made an arrangement for Nadia and the wonderful chamber group Alarm Will Sound. It’s so cool to hear a piece reimagined a decade after its birth. The second piece is the viola concerto I wrote for Nadia, which was a longtime dream of ours; we’d sit at the bar and be like, “hey wouldn’t it be cool if someday…” and then somebody arrived a few years ago when a handful of orchestras agreed to co-commission this thing, and then we made a recording with the Detroit Symphony and then Valgeir mixed it and it sounds awesome and it’s all on Bedroom Community and you can buy the whole thing here. Nadia and I are going to do a show about it on the 27th of September, and you can get tickets here and we both expect to see all of you there!

So, I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon driving around Santa Cruz listening to every recording of John Scott in his various guises as conductor and organist I could find on my phone and other devices. It turns out there are LOADS there: hours, days, even? His recording of the chant for psalm 37 on volume ninety-seven-jillion of the Psalms from St Paul’s series remains one of my favorite things in the world. I emailed him this fact five days ago, and he wrote back from Sweden (his first trip, apparently!) seconds later, “Oh those divine Howells chants!” with his typical enthusiasm and joy. This was a man deeply devoted to the tradition of music and the music of tradition, to his service to the church, and to his ability to transmit the possibility of the divine to friends and strangers. It is insane to me that he died – like, actively unbelievable. There are so many of us whom he touched as a recording artist, as a conductor, organist, educator, mentor, hero, husband, father, martini partner and interlocutor. He loved plainchant — Lent has never been so austere! — but could throw down a Howells Coll Reg with the lashings of cream and coulis required by such music. Any of the choristers — now grown — with whom he recorded in 2003, I’m sure, remember his insistence on the distance between repeated notes in Tallis’s Salvator Mundi; when he played my music at the organ in 2013, I was consistently humbled by the freakish connection between his technical abilities and expressive musicianship; to watch him conduct the choir for a random Thursday’s evensong was to watch an essay on simultaneous restraint and spontaneity: centuries of performance practice reanimated, stylised, and tightened. I think of his influence as a form of epidemic: a great choirmaster infects everybody near him with an evangelical love for the music, the tradition, and the rigor required to get it done correctly but in the (liturgical) background: music for use, but music for the only use worth using. Even though the world feels dimmer without him in it, I am excited to spend tomorrow, the rest of the summer, and the rest of my life listening to his recordings, thinking about his influence on all of us, and thinking about the subtle magnificence of his contribution to the world in which we all live. We are all better musicians because of John.

Recently, I thought to myself, in a moment of rare clarity about my own life, that maybe I wasn’t feeling as great as I might. From 2009-2014, I wrote two operas, several orchestra pieces, a few film scores, tons of choral music, and a pile of chamber music. I was constantly busy, and all of my projects were great ones to have and all of my collaborators were stellar and it was all, on paper, going fine. Something a friend’s mother said to me kept haunting me, though — she’d come to the Met premiere of my opera Two Boys in 2013, and the opening night crowd was enthusiastic and was, as is the custom at such events, clapping enthusiastically as I took a bow. She said to me afterwards, “Wow! You must feel ten feet tall.” I said thank you and smiled but I couldn’t shake that comment from my head. I thought about it a few months ago and realised that no, I really didn’t. It wasn’t the opposite — I didn’t feel “small,” but I felt empty, or invisible. This physical manifestation of the work wasn’t something I’d made; it was something that was happening around me to which I was a passive and silent witness.

I tried, at that moment a few months ago, to sort out the difference between ‘pride in having made something’ and ‘feelings of happiness with a project’ and the dual senses of personal satisfaction, professional satisfaction and/or ‘achievement’ and realised that I didn’t have any way of teasing them apart, because they were foreign feelings; I hadn’t had them in years. All I had was a sense of gnawing anxiety, tempered, usually, by a feeling of displaced pride in other people having done the work for me — the conductor, the orchestra, the librettist, the stagehands, the wig-maker. I thought back on less complicated projects; one of the best things I’ve written, I think, is a song Old Bones for my friend Iestyn. I felt like I’d achieved, somehow, having made good something for him, which in turn makes him happy, but I couldn’t save anything for myself in that transaction.  I’ve written for Nadia, and for Pekka, and I was ‘happy’ because I love writing for people I love, because it makes them shine, and even though I think the pieces are fine, the satisfaction, for me, is displaced.

Once I had that revelation, I didn’t panic, but I thought: have I really not been happy or satisfied during any of this work for over a decade? I thought, as an anxious extension, about my obsessive relationship to working and work and what it even means to work. It’s not that I’m “a workaholic,” it’s just that I don’t know any other way to engage with the world. My work — in which I include writing emails, cooking, thinking — is the only way I know how to engage with anybody or anything. You turn an interaction, any interaction, into a kind of project, and then do it the best you can. This is related, I think, to doing “the best you can” in general, but in a specific, focused way, in which each task is divided into a sequence of sub-tasks, each of which has its own economy of goodness.  This is inherently a dangerous way to behave, because it can sound (and feel to others) craven and plotting, as if being friends with somebody is a project to be in some way completed or a problem to be in some way solved.

I still didn’t panic. I thought back over the past ten years, and then I had a vision: this sense of work dominating everything made me highly irritable in many professional and personal interactions. In the closed systems of my own processes, I can run quality control obsessively over everything I do: I can stay up until two in the morning editing clarinet parts, and I can worry about how for that clarinettist, her first experience of my music will be this four page document, I can slice the garlic how it needs to be sliced and I can butcher the meat in the right way for the task at hand. Once I get anybody else involved on any level, though, I expect, unfairly, for them to have spent the same amount of time and energy doing their jobs as I’d done mine, which is to say: expended a violent breath of energy at the thing, continuously, all day, every day. I became angry — and directionlessly choleric, as my body got hot, I sweated, I shook — at the objects that surrounded me. The noise of traffic would send me into a tailspin of not just anger, but despair at not having my environment coöperate with me. A honking truck became not, as it should be, a part of the sonic landscape of a city, but instead it came to represent a broken contract between me and the world. A sense of magical thinking arose naturally, where the only explanation for things not going as I wanted them was that I wasn’t working hard enough, that I wasn’t devoted enough to the task, or that I wasn’t giving enough of myself to anything or anybody to warrant getting anything in return.

I found myself, particularly when tired (which was always), or after having had too much to drink (which was often), irascible and shouty, telling people they were doing their jobs badly or bungling something when it was really not my place to say anything. I cussed people out for doing what, in the economy of my work, would be unacceptable, but which, in reality, was perfectly fine.  I was unable to distinguish people deliberately doing or saying hurtful things (which, at the age of 33, still happens to me from time to time) from forgetting to dot an i or cross a t. I could feel my body pointedly roiling — the sweat, yes, but a gut-clenching sense of a drop from a high place — at the accumulating details of my life. A little cut on the hand, agitated into a wound, the noise of laughing children on the street, the edge of the dog’s toy getting caught in the wheel of my work-chair, the feeling of my stomach touching the fabric of my shirt, the acute knowledge of the various asymmetries and plumpnesses of the body. All of these things were incendiary and dangerous: the arsonist’s last glug of gasoline thrown on the carpet before lighting the match.

After these episodes — which could last days, or weeks — there could arrive a period of calm. I would try to reconcile with those I’d wronged, but found it difficult to understand what I was apologising for, precisely. They had, after all, misspelt something important, or taken too long to write back to an email, or been lazy about a complicated project, and they needed to know. Right? I found myself physically angry at people for whom work wasn’t a consuming fire but for whom was, at most, a part of their day which could be offset or justified by taking vacations, sleeping late on purpose, taking an hour for lunch and sitting in the park, or getting str8 married and taking time off to do this. I was furious with musicians who lived off of their parents’ money, I was furious with people who dared to plan their careers in units of ten years. I was furious with myself for being furious about these things. I was impossible with my boyfriend with whom I share a small apartment, because each of his movements was another shot fired in my already complicated battle with my environments both physical and emotional. He’s only known me within the space of this 10-ish years of treatment, and never really knew any other conditions aside from my slightly terrifying and almost religious relationship to my work and my community as the only worthwhile transactions in a life lived vigorously.

At the end of these daily forceful and exhausting immolations, the only thing that could bring me something resembling peace was watching somebody do something – anything – well. I live in Chinatown, and there is nothing more calm-inducing than watching an old man work a meat cleaver expertly. I am soothed by watching a woman pinch a dumpling together, and I am soothed by watching the Man Who Grills Meat fan the meat just-so with his meat-fanning fan. I could no longer read new books or the newspaper; I had to read books I already knew that I liked, because I couldn’t be let down by them or tricked into going along with somebody else’s uninteresting plan. I could only listen to music I already knew, because the shock of something new would send me into a state of heightened agitation. I developed an agoraphobic anxiety and found myself only able to explain it to virtual strangers, and fibbed my way out of going to any live music for almost two months. I found myself not craving but needing routine in an almost aspergic way, but with a life completely and necessarily noncondusive to even being able to do the same thing three days in a row.

So I sought help. I found a new doctor, who does not take my insurance and therefore costs as much as my rent, literally no joke. She looked at my medical history with what I would generously call the world’s subtlest cut-eye; I’m sure that doctors don’t like to second-guess what another doctor thought best ten years ago, but within 30 minutes of being there, she was like, “we gotta get you off of this stuff.” I went off of it, and onto something else. My body ached and I was confused all the time. I told her that I had three goals: to not be angry all the time, to be able to engage with my environment and friends and boyfriend and collaborators in a healthier way, and to start seeing if there was a way to start to feel happy about my work — or not really the work, even, but about myself as it related to the work, or about myself as it related to anything.

Medication helps with a lot of these things — within a few weeks, the constant agita let up, confirming to me that it was actually chemical and not some devil perched in the back of my skull. I’d been told that the drugs working correctly might feel like a veil lifting, but in my case it was more like a kabuki-drop: a sudden whoosh of waking up without a clamor of small pressurised objects rattling around. As a result of this clarity, I was able to think about the very rare times that I’d felt happy about my own self. I realized that the thing I’ve made of which I am the proudest — or, perhaps the only thing I’ve made about which I feel even a nominal amount of pride — is my community. It’s a large and multi-faceted creature, with ever-widening spaces between its elements as we all age, but it’s a collection of people for whom I have a near obsessive love.

I’ve never really bought the concentric-circle model of friendships. My model is much more “let’s just go for it all the way,” which I think can be off-putting for people. I am in a near constant dialogue with myself thinking about other people — oh, this funny image, I hope T— has seen it, or I really should email M— about that piece of his which I liked and which I listened to, or I feel like the world would be a better place if N— had read this book. When people text me, I text them right back. I write back to emails quickly and try to stay connected to everybody and be au courant with my friends’ lives in as generous a way as I can. I write back to professional out-of-office emails with bitter, scathing essays about why it is that they can’t manage to make their iPhones work in whatever sad holiday destination (Alicante, usually) they’ve chosen instead of performing professional immolation on the fires of productivity.  I’ve never gotten an out-of-offce reply when I haven’t been nine miles deep into a river of work, and you can imagine the resentment and fury that creates.

Once the new medication had sorted a few things out, however, I started accessing an emotional register of genuine sadness surrounding my community, something I’d not felt in years. My obsessive communications with my friends: what if this was actually a huge chore for them, and that my vigor (and rigor) in that part of my life could never be reciprocated? If a loved one doesn’t write back, does that mean that I am specifically unlovable, doomed to a life of sending unreturned emails and un-replied-to texts? The machinery of my head has been, until recently, too busy to really let that feeling in for analysis, and I managed to actually write a whole opera about it as a giant, expensive act of displacement and disengagement. “Are you there,” the opera asks; nobody answers, and the boy at the centre of it gets a knife to the heart. Letting this feeling in — to use the somewhat three-little-pigsian argot of pop psychology — has been, I think, one of the more difficult things I’ve done as an adult. Why won’t she write back? Why won’t he text back? What does that have to do with meeeeee? I found myself hoarding kind words from any of my friends or even passing acquaintances like a squirrel with his nut: a tiny compliment from a friend stored in the back of the head to be taken out and surveyed in darker moments.

After so many years of never thinking about myself — emotionally paying myself last, as it were — I feel an enormous guilt in spending the time thinking about myself at all. I am (or perhaps was?) a big proponent of the “it’s not about you” strategy of dealing with emotional conflict: always assume that the offended party is the correct one, and ignore any evidence that you, too, might have been wronged, and it’ll all be alright. I felt that self-care was a nonsense excuse to not do one’s job, and that taking time to think about these things, even in the context of the doctor’s office, was a form of extreme and dangerous narcissism born out of Tumblr and Twitter activism, or out of the thickets of trigger warnings that surround the castle of anything difficult to think about.

I haven’t yet managed to shake my molten rage at administrative things in my life going wrong.

I feel bad even retelling this story, but I think it points towards a few important things. I had a concert in a church the other day, and I had been in communication with the producer and his staff about wanting to set aside some seats for friends, and he had a very welcome ‘no problem’ kind of attitude. It was a free concert but one which needed tickets. I was very grateful for their help with all of this and tried to be as on top of the ticket situation as possible, sending names via email, confirming, double-checking that the number (12) was alright. An hour before the show I checked again with Capable Seeming Ticket Lady, and confirmed that the names would indeed be left at the door, and gave her another name I’d just gotten via SMS. Now. I then went for a little stroll and had a bracing lager, and I came back from this stroll to discoverer two strange tableaux-vivants. The first tableau was a bunch of my friends — who, in this case were all tall blond English men, don’t judge me, u don’t know my journey — clustered around the door next to a confused-looking woman with a clipboardt. She was not, however, as confused as the blind woman with her collapsible cane, wearing what looked like corrective shoes, precariously hobbling over the uneven cobbled surface of the churchyard, tripping on bollards and chain gates and heading the wrong way towards a certain spill against a leaning plane tree. So, I ran to the blind woman and took her arm and began to escort her towards the door, at which point I sort of nervously looked at the clipboardt lady and discovered that all of the name-emailing I’d done had resulted in the Seemingly Capable Ticket Lady scrawling MY last name, misspelt, with a blue pen, and then “+12” next to it. Now. How are these tall English boys going to get access to the Lord’s House when I had told them to just give their name at the door and it would all be okay? Also present in this dozen people was one of the performers’ momma. Not nann one of the names I’d emailed and confirmed had made its way to the door. This is an good example of a contract with the world being broken.

What I should have done is taken a deep breath and moved on with my life, chalking this particular incident up to the fact that arts administrators and their underlings are, I’m sure, hideously overworked people — although, me too: I am chained alway by devils to my desk writing music for their employers, gnashing my teeth and suffering the self-induced psycho-electrical shocks of self-discipline and profound fear), but, at that particular time in front of the church in London, the combination of my friends being inconvenienced, the appalling bootleg fuckery of my scrawled name, and the idea that the door staff were letting this blind woman trip all over the cobblestones sent me into a 2011-style ragefest galore. I was not asking for an extinct animal to be brought before me, I was not asking for some kind of exotic honey to applied to my body for reasons of allergies.  I just wanted my friends to be able to arrive at a door, give their name, and be granted access to the space behind the same door, at that time.

So, furiously, I marched back to the vestry, found Seemingly Competent Ticket Lady, and I am sorry to say that, beloveds, I read her for filth. I told her what time it was in every timezone.  I let it all in, and then I let it all out, in her face, at that time. But something curious happened: I found that my rage had three dimensions and an origin story: I could see the whole thing, I could understand its weight, and I understood, at that time, that the whole thing was springing from this inner vacancy and sadness, with the idea of my writing a piece of choral music (for which I am now able to feel a tiny shimmer of pride!) that asks “are you there” being answered, in an acute sense, by this organisational incompetence. I heard myself saying all these terrible things, and once it started, it all spilled out like change from a torn pocket. During this diatribe, I left myself momentarily, and had a conflicting group of emotions, which were: first I have to stop yelling, but also: I know both why I am yelling on a small level (she did totally fuck up and should have been pilloried before the village) but also on a large level (I am a person slowly getting better who is not yet better) and also: I finally know how this relates to larger problems about whose nature I am finally learning.

I am sorry, truly and deeply and honestly (despite my flippant attitude in the previous paragraph), to have lost it at this woman who I’m sure forgot to do her job for perfectly good reasons. The details are lost to history. It is never appropriate to turn into a volcano of rage no matter what has happened to you, and I speak as a volcano who has erupted a number of inappropriate times, despite my goal of dormancy and peace.

I’m telling this story to say that the nature of getting better, of becoming well, is not that you will automatically stop doing bad things, or that you will stop letting bad things happen to you. Getting well is going to involve sometimes doing these awful things and experiencing these terrible things and having those bad things done to you, but having, at the same time, a growing understanding of their beginnings and middles, and an awareness of the effort it is going to take to herd them towards their ends.

At the end of that concert where I lost my mind, the choir sang Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, which is one of my favourite pieces of art ever in the world, and which is one of the reasons I am a composer now. Its text is by Christopher Smart, who spent a good deal of his life in an insane asylum. The text — of which Britten sets only a part — is an ecstatic journey of religious devotion through mania and altered states: Smart offers us the wordplay of the schizophrenic and the self-annihilating coldness of the depressed at the same time. At the end of one of the particularly excited sections describing a heavenly orchestra of instruments, Smart describes the hand of God cutting through the joyfully chaotic cacophony to play the harp. Britten treats the ensuing text with an almost maternal delicacy, relishing, in a lambent and suspended F-major chord, the symmetries of the music the text suggests, and tells us, with gentle hopefulness:

For at that time malignity ceases
And the devils themselves are at peace.
For this time is perceptible to man
By a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.

I don’t think I am yet at, or even near, that time, and my flightpath might be asymptotic to that time, but I like seeing, through the flashes of fire and reminders of difficulty, a path towards stillness and serenity.

–

The first point of clarification: “He thinks, for example, that classical music could learn from how pop uses music software and recording studios. (“I think classical electronic music always sounds like trash,” he said.)”  Now, that is a crazy statement!  I’m not 100% sure what I was referring to, but certainly I can use myself as an example here.  When I first wrote this piece called Keep in Touch, for Nadia and Antony and what essentially amounts to pre-recorded tape, I made the electronic elements myself using basically souped up GarageBand.  It wasn’t until Valgeir Sigurðsson started fondling it that I realized how trashy it sounded; it sounded about as trashy as when you turn on the radio and hear a great song but with MIDI strings. You’re like, “all that money and then this?” I think that the non-classical universe has citizens who simply spend more time in front of electronic instruments and computers, and it is meet and right to ring them up and ask for their counsel and assistance when dabbling in the more plugged-in corners, I think. I certainly wouldn’t dare try it totally alone. In the same way that I spent years in a darkened room basically snuggling with the score to Petrouchka, there are people who spent those same years of their lives making samples, designing synthesizers, sitting in a darkened room of their own. So, that’s what that’s all about; I can’t actually think about any “Classical electronic music” off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Jacob Cooper’s Silver Threads, which you should all buy, and also which came out three months after I said this so obvz I hadn’t heard it, and also which I think sounds great, partially, I imagine, because he rang up Damian Taylor, who, in addition to having the same birthday as I do, is one of the smartest and nicest and most sensitive programmer/engineer/computer types around.  I certainly didn’t have anything else in mind, with the possible exception of those v.v.v.v. early Babbitt pieces that just sound like straight up R2D2, but that’s more funny to me than anything else.  Bleep boop!

Then, a more delicate situation here:

“I’ve always found the best thing to do is to make work that doesn’t have to happen in a huge space. I think it would be fine if major orchestras closed,” he said. “In a lot of cases the halls are too big. I went to see a huge orchestra concert at Avery Fisher Hall, which is an excrescence in New York…and it’s like, let it close. That’s fine; it’ll be fine. They’ll find somewhere else.”

Okay, so this is an example of me saying two things at once, for which: my apologies.  Actually this is three things at once, in a jumble that, I see here, looks really inflammatory and ugly on the page.  What I was trying to say was I was SO excited when there was that three second period when the New York Philharmonic was going to play in Carnegie Hall full time. I’m told the seating capacity is more, which, might be true?  But I guess things in Carnegie always just seem more fun to me, and it sounds great in there, as if each sound was dipped in butter. I don’t like going to Fisher; I literally just don’t like being in there. I can never find the men’s room, the architecture gives me the shiverz. When I gave this interview, I had just been to something — Sibelius and Esa-Pekka and randomly the Mother Goose suite — there, and I hadn’t been in maybe five or six years, and two things happened. First, the orchestra sounded great and LOUD. The horn section was heroically, heroically great in Sibelius 5 and the Salonen concerto was tight and precise. However, I was just shocked by the strange dimensions of the stage, the slight sense that I couldn’t quite hear anything — as if there were a membrane between me and the musicians — the acoustic panels, the very depressing narrow side-areas for donors…don’t front like you haven’t seen those areas. My sense is that if they shut down Fisher for a few years, or moved the orchestra, the Phil itself would still be fine. I’ve seen that ensemble more, I realize here, looking through my calendar, at Symphony Space, in the parks — once even in Queens!  I went to Queens to see the Phil! – than in that hall. They are doing just fine when they go to other spaces and, actually, I buy all of their live recordings on iTunes anyway which sound great. So that’s what that was.  I’ve said maybe six thousand times online, offline etc. that I want the Phil to be awesome because they are my home team orchestra and I want for them to be the most kick-ass orchestra in the world with the most kick-ass hall etc. Again, I apologize for the seemingly flippant/aggressive snippet; it’s not something I would have said today, with the Phil’s neighbors at the Met involved in such a tense and acrimonious negotiation, much of which seems to be playing out in the press and on various blogs and Facebook &c. to the benefit of perhaps nobody.

The final thing I want to say here, which is perhaps more to the point, is that the way music gets paid for is really unknowable to me. I can’t pretend to understand it. In the time that I wrote this blogpost, in fact, a really awful cut to the ENO’s budget in London was announced; I love that company and love working there and with them — it can only be bad news, and yet, they seem to have spun it as potentially okay news?  I tried to follow the Minnesota negotiations and between the paper, Facebook, blogs, in-person conversations — at a certain point I just got so exasperated and frustrated by the idea of this semi-visible world of fighting people messing up our lives — it feels like Zeus and Hera, with their eternal squabbles and jealousies and resentments — people telling half truths, leaking information, good faith and bad faith arguments in the same sentence, with various intermediaries and intercessors throwing incense around. San Diego felt rather the same way; what’s going on at the Met seems the same way. It feels, sometimes, that the adults are fighting and that we’re the kids, cowering in our rooms pretending not to hear. I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s fantasized about just running away from home, and trying to find a more direct way to communicate between musicians and audiences, all of whom, I think, are going to figure it out in spite of these crises and inevitable transformations both real, imagined, and somewhere in between. Sometimes, I wonder if a closing doesn’t, in some way, shift energy: has anybody else noticed a wonderful explosion of chamber opera, a heightened attention to the 20-person operation compared to the slightly larger model recently in New York and elsewhere?  I feel like in London I can’t open a door without a brilliant amplified chamber opera popping out; this isn’t to say that it exists to the exclusion of Don Carlo, it’s just a different model.

It seems, though, that many places that have been In Trouble are no longer In Trouble — is that not the case?  Remember turning on the internet during the San Diego thing and it really felt like La Jolla would be a nuclear wasteland by nightfall with zombie opera singers preying on the flesh of the living and gay people sacrificing lambs to a makeshift statue of Maria Callas by that fig tree, and now it all seems to be, more or less, Fine?  Musicians are resilient as anything, and audiences are hungry for music, and I don’t think that has really changed. Audiences are even hungry for orchestral music! They go to see it in parking garages in South London, they go to Carnegie Hall, they go to the Phil. I love writing orchestral music; it is thrilling to write. It is also crazy; it’s a crazy thing that we do and it’s a crazy thing that it still exists, and I will do everything I can in my power to keep it alive, which, in my case, essentially means writing orchestra music, as is my plan — I’ve got a thing for Philly, a thing for Utah, and I’m giddy at the prospects, and from this point on I will shut up about anybody closing down.

And one final thought, more shop talk than anything else. For young composers, writing an orchestra piece can feel like the ne plus ultra of achievements, the distant summit to climb. As I said, writing for orchestra is amazing and I love it, but it doesn’t have to be for everybody. Think about Steve Reich, for whom you all know I have deep deep love. Homegirl has written, what, two pieces for orchestra (The Four Sections, and Three Movements, one movement of which is repurposed)?  I guess The Desert Music counts too but that works way better in the small, Alarm Will Sound edition.  In a long-ass career, the pieces of his that are the most defining, the closest, I would argue, to the heart of the artist, are the ones for small amplified ensemble with voices pre-recorded on a tape or live or both: Different Trains, The Cave. Then, looking back another third of a century, the early works — the ones that made him a sort of household (u know what I mean) name, are for his friends: Music for 18, Music for a Large Ensemble.  I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but his is a career — as, I would argue, is Philip Glass’s — that was built on a foundation of knowing, in some fundamental way, that orchestras weren’t going to want to commission them ever ever, as I’m sure it must have seemed in the 1960’s and 70’s. Even though that changed for Philip — and he would be the first to tell you that it was a surprise, and indeed, the result of having made his name writing music outside of that tradition —  the music of his that, for me, bears a more intimate touch is the music he wrote for his friends. Going back to what I said in Pittsburgh  (“I’ve always found the best thing to do is to make work that doesn’t have to happen in a huge space”), I think the advice is solid. Knowing how to make music despite the Arts Council is practical and sensible. It doesn’t mean that in such a making, one is saying that DIY music is the only way forward; it’s just a different skill-set. Writing a chamber opera doesn’t mean you don’t believe in grand; writing a piece of electronic music doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned the viola.

The experience of writing a new piece for orchestra is very scary; I’ve had some wild rides where you find yourself quite bumped up against the wall of the way the week in which your piece is premiered is scheduled. Things they don’t teach you in school turn into the biggest logistical obstacles: unexpectedly reduced strings for the Mozart means a tech call to move the chairs for your piece which means 20 minutes less rehearsal which means… and so on.  I’ve written before about the craziness of recordings in these situations.  It is very high-stress and I still get “first day of school” jitters in front of orchestras and usually need to sit down in a dark room after the first rehearsal, with a serious glass of wine. I have fought fought fought fought fought for more rehearsal time for new music; I have embarrassed myself, I have totally nailed or messed up the Confucian rituals of obeisance and deference some groups need, I have had nightmares about it, I have, in the thirty-nine seconds a composer is given to make comments, said clever things and blunt things and stupid things and funny things and things that fell flat. All of that having been said, there is nothing like that first moment when things start to emulsify in the room with the orchestra, when the little idea you had at your tiny desk has bloomed into this pulsing, shimmering thing, beautiful and ugly and surprising. It’s the Sorcerer’s Apprentice but strangely sanctioned — you’ve been allowed to manipulate seventy plus people, with their years of training and musicianship, into this twelve-minute distillation and explosion of an idea. It’s an experience I wish everybody could have, and it’s an opportunity for composers that I will fight for, both online and off.

I am wishing you all a very happy 4th of July weekend and a joyful Canada Day if that’s ur bag.

PS I stand by the record store thing 100%. Nothing freaked me out more than having to go into the classical — or god4bid opera  — section of Tower Records by Lincoln Center. I haven’t bought music clothed in years and I love it.

I have always liked Coldplay. There is something inherently honest-seeming about their faces, and I liked how once they got paid, they could afford to steal (in the most loving way) from other bands who also got paid — there is something much less offensive, I think, about people who own homes with nice linens and stuff taking artistic cues from other people who own homes with nice linens. For that reason, when I smell a texture taken pretty explicitly from Sigur Rós or Arcade Fire, it feels like a lateral homage rather than the ugly “who did it first” business we suffer through in the discourses surrounding borrowing from people who are, perhaps, slightly less paid.

What I like about this new album, Ghost Stories, the band’s sixth, is how unchallenging it is. I don’t mean this in a snarky way; it is unchallenging in the way a conversation with an old friend always has an ease and fluency to it. The rhymes are so symmetrical, so square, that you can predict the end of the line based on the first word alone. The musical phrases are similar: listen to the hook that begins “Ink” — it’s a little curlicue of a phrase that could only do one thing, and it does it confidently. Very satisfying.

The album begins with “Always in My Head,” which features one of these Lovingly Borrowed from Sigur Rós textures, a sort of processed thing that contains voices (did they use one of them little Casio keyboards that enjoy such cachet in certain circles?), and then a looped guitar with delay over a plodding bass line. It unfolds perfectly, like a row house: there is no other place for the toilet to go, so obviously it goes there, at the top of the stairs. There is no other thing to do at the chorus than to bring back that guitar loop, so here it is! It is very satisfying. Incidentally, if you squint at the cover art, it looks like a very specific piece of Sigur Rós merch; I think I have it on a tote bag somewhere.

In “Magic,” we get a taste of electronic drums and a bass moving in 10ths, and gloriously, the voice is presented in an unaffected and straightforward way, and we can really hear the grain of Chris Martin’s voice, by which I mean all the little tics and rasps that make us human. This is a welcome moment. I sort of can’t bear anybody setting the word “you,” which is difficult in the English language, but we seem to be stuck with it. Martin tries, here, several variations, ranging from “yeh” to “yoo” to the slightly Texan possibilities of “yew.” He performs a moist sandhi on “but you,” rendering it slightly more like “butt chew,” for what it’s worth. “You” is a hard word to sing.

We have talked about “Ink” already.

I’m really unclear about the merits of calling your song “True Love.” It has processed beds of strings, and a pointedly uneven vocal performance — Martin approaches the microphone from various angles, and shows his work, and one gets a sense of the challenges of his range in the slightly liquid phrase endings. They start high, in the falsetto range, and slither down through various passages and rooms and end in a conversational baritone. It’s sort of a handbook of how to use one’s entire range. There is a string arrangement that is disappointingly on the nose: it moves at exactly the same time as the chords, so why is it there? It’s like having a giant picture of your body printed on your body instead of wearing clothes.

“Midnight” begins with a looped and rhythmic texture. The voice comes in like that Imogen Heap song we all bought the shit out of — what was that called, “Hide and Seek?” Love that song. “Midnight” is super exciting to me because it sort of doesn’t do anything — there isn’t really a structure so much as a sequence of concentric circles surrounding the same chord. At the midway point, there is a thickening, a tumescence, over wordless singing in the stratosphere, which then expertly melts back into the polyphonic (Imogen) heap of textures, and then, obviously, straight into four-on-the-floor, but so satisfying. An arpeggiated synth! We are at the kluhb! Sidechain gate on the processed hi-hat — it’s all here. A build and a breakdown: they’ve done everything right here. It’s ritualistic and understated, and banks not on raw power but on a slow accumulation of elements.

“Another’s Arms” feels like it sits in precisely the wrong range of Martin’s voice. I can’t quite ever tell what he’s saying — sitting on the couch watching TV? — and he’s affected too wide a range of what sound like American pronunciations of words to have the sentiment land correctly. “Me” comes out as “Meh,” and quite right, too; the effect is bland, anonymous, and the exact opposite of the vocal honesty we found in “Magic” and “True Love.”

They appear to have hired either real human beings to play violins near the beginning of “Oceans,” or at least a very expensive sample library of harmonics. I am going to hold my tongue about the success of that arrangement because I’m actually just bitter they didn’t call me; ooh, the thangz I would have done to that song! What I like about this song is that it’s really an acoustic guitar jam with a little sonar ping instead of a snare drum, and the guitar performance is natural and unquantized, which is to say, sometimes it doesn’t align perfectly, and it makes me like it more. Then there is a random electronic looped outro that delivers us directly into:

The festival jammer! “A Sky Full of Stars” is what we’re dealing with here. “‘Cause you’re a sky full of stars/I’m gonna give you my heart.” I mean, that is not a cute lyric. It sounds like the little hooks of inspirational jib-jab that are sung over dance music in the gay clubs: “Keep going/Keep reaching /I believe in u” and things of this nature. The song proceeds in a professionally straightforward way; he wants to die in [our] arms, the electronic beats break down into just a single acoustic guitar. There is good news, though: the vocal performance is delicious. He is absolutely in control of each element of range, technique, volume and vibrato. It’s too bad the lyrics are so gayspirational, though, or, perhaps not gayspirational enough?

The album closes with the enigmatically titled “O,” built on a lovely sequence of piano arpeggios. The piano is played (and recorded) beautifully, and while it is deeply repetitive, it is surprising in its lazy circles: it feels like an organic process slowly unfolding. The arrival of the bass is a welcome grounding effect. The lyrics are dead simple but here take on an almost Japanese obliqueness of image and intent; there are large pauses between the phrases, reminding us that actually the piano is the point of the song. Martin’s voice is actually at its most beautiful here: controlled but fragile, with a warmth and openness that sits in loose counterpoint to the loneliness of the song.

Like I said, I’ve always liked this band. I thought that song “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall” was an absolute triumph, and “Reign of Love” is a thing of exquisite beauty. This album is texturally beautiful: they steal from the best. There is a small tragedy in the emotional anonymity of the lyrics, and in the uncommitted sonic landscape as it relates to acoustic instruments: is there not an additional shade to be found from a really turn’t-out string arrangement, or a little mechanism made from pointed flutes? When Martin is singing athletically — as opposed to from the couch in the TV room — he is in top form. It’s comfortable and confident: the voice of an old friend on the phone, a neighborhood bar, a question to which you already know the answer.

People — younger composers, particularly — have asked me what it was Like. It’s great, basically. There are four thousand external oppressive stressors that try to come and get in the way of progress, rather like a video game. One day it’ll be a sick singer on Facebook. Another day it’ll be a parent or my boyfriend making a silent point of not telling me how they’d read some bad-faith article in the paper, or somebody writing me an email like “congrats on that review!” or “sorry about [the same] review.” Another day, a schedule change that requires four against-the-rush-hour commutes around town. Another day, after we opened, a European opera dude invited himself to my house to tell me how much he disliked the production! Before noon! And I bought bagels! Actually my boyfriend bought bagels. But in the midst of all of this, some extraordinary, ravishing music-making, and all in the presence of the machine (and I use this word as a compliment) of the Met’s technical department. These people are wizards.

The secondary texts — the primary text being the score — of how to run the system of an opera are erotically fascinating: the codes that govern when the set moves, the codes that govern the fast costume change area in the back, the off-stage chorus, the electrician double-checking to make sure the video camera embedded in an onstage cumrag tissue box was still working. When things — as they do — go slightly wrong, there would be delicious, professional, investigations about how to not just get it wrong again, but indeed, how to make it better for the future of this production and other productions. There’s a memory bank, as it were, between shows at the Met that is, for me, as inspiring as the on-stage music making, which is pretty extraordinary itself.

The other thing that I think was unique to this piece and situation is that because it was the first Gelb-era commission, there was a huge matrix of expectations about it and what it Meant. When I was writing the piece, I knew it was going to be a specific and crazy piece. Craig and I designed it to tell that story well; the production is designed to be a delivery system for thatstory. It was not designed to solve a made-up crisis in classical music, it was not designed to attract more young people into the opera house (as if young people are moths, drawn towards a patio light). It was not designed to make any statements about the future of the genre, about the way opera “should” be commissioned or workshopped or not. It was not designed to be an argument for or against presenting work in large spaces or small spaces. It was just, I had hoped, a good show. And is it fair to ask a new piece to be anything other than good, on its own terms? Not to cause a revolution, not to solve the problems online crazypeople think need to be solved. One got the sense that many punters came to it with various other expectations in mind — particularly people In Or Near The Industry. I had to really control myself from asking the designers to project the huge, beautifully typeset phrase It’s Not About You before each act. What is is, indeed, about is a flawed romance between a 16 year-old boy and a 13 year-old boy, forensically analyzed by a woman in her 50’s. These three people circle around one another, opening up little hornets’-nests of online and offline violence and beauty. If I’ve told that story well, I am happy.

Then, I had to do an unreal amount of press. It was fucking insane. It never stopped. I wrote about this before when we did the show in London, although I’ve gotten more aggressive about it of late. My policy is twofold and strict: read nothing, say yes to everything. I will not read anything that’s written about the piece after it’s opened, which means no reviews, ever, at all — even the good ones, if not especially the good ones. The good ones sometimes seemed like people coming over your house for dinner and enthusiastically complimenting everything but the food. One finds, in good reviews, still the dangerous instinct to analyze trends rather than notes, imagined patterns rather than musical ones.

What used to be really difficult about my strategy was that I’d still read reviews of other people’s work, but not my own, which was hypocritical and also made avoiding just stuff about me into a slightly cartoon-like project. Now I just don’t mess with it at all, and you know why? Because nobody knows how to write about music, really. It’s, like, four people, maybe; certainly far fewer people know how to write about music than there are people who know how to write it. It’s a vile little human-centipede situation, reviews and previews, and you realize how silly it is when you listen to the questions people ask. I had a little running tally going, and of hundreds questions I’d be asked in an interview, very very few would be about the notes or the rhythms or even the piece itself. A few would talk about plot points as if we had invented them — as opposed to Reality, which itself had a strong creative input into the plot of the piece. The main focus of a lot of questions was: the Met, the future of opera, the merits of workshops, Peter Gelb, the Met, the Met, the future of opera, the future of the genre, elitism, Young People, ageing audience, all this horseshit buzzword wordsoup; one could almost hear the “think” piece writing itself, along with a subsequent review to reinforce whatever insightful conclusions might have been reached.

If you follow classical music at all, you know that the loudest noises are being made not by composers and musicians (as perhaps should be the case), but by a very special caste of people who like to go into the elevator the rest of us are working in, fart juicily, and then ask whahappen. When you hear their questions for advance press, you register that they’ve already made up their mind about how this two hour thing I wrote relates to a Big Narrative about the future of what essentially amounts to their livelihood. Really, I can’t blame them; if things are going well, if things are alright, if work exists on its own terms, who is going to pay the rent?

What I can do, though, is say yes to every request. I told the Met’s press people to just lay it on, because I trust them and I like them. Obviously, there’s a backlash — you start getting tweets screeching about how it’s such a huge failure that there is so much being written about a new opera, etc., but you have to just ignore (or tease) those people. You also have to ignore/tease the people who want to get all up in one’s grill about ticket sales. It’s like: do you want me to stand on the Lincoln Center Plaza with a sandwich board? I had one person who in one breath would celebrate an orchestra offering cheap seats for young people, and then in the next breath bemoan the fact that the Met had “deeply slashed ticket prices” or whatever because I suck and Peter Gelb Ooga Booga. Té in the wind. Chicopée. Writing about music reads like some combination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a Sarah Palin interview transcript: that combination of conspiracy theories, Chicken Little concern-trolling, deep hypocrisy, false alarms, made-up statistics, and what one imagines to be a pervasive domestic fug of cat feces, tea-stained vocal scores and dandruff-dusted cardigans. Internet people are insane. Read the comments here, just for fun.

(An aside: have we moved past that thing of articles about art appearing and then setting off an internet shitstorm and then the author being like, well, if it sparked conversation… then smugly smiling? I know I always bring it up but remember that completely vile Sasha Frere-Jones article about how indie rock wasn’t black enough, and then that nice boy Will from the Arcade Fire took him to school like six times with an apple for teacher and SFJ was like, *NPR smile* about “The conversation?” If the last two sentences of that thing I just linked to don’t make you want to put down what you’re doing, find him, and take away his internet, I don’t know what will.)

After the opera closed, I did all my dry-cleaning and discovered that everything I wore during the shows was like, fight-or-flight sweat damaged. It was so insanely fun and great and I would do it again in One Minute. I lost a scarf and a hat in the process somehow, so if you see them somewhere, send it to me at the office?

Other things that had happened: I wrote this review of the Beyoncé album that dropped in the middle of the night.

Do you want to talk about how beautiful the Orlando de Lassus “Alma Redemptoris Mater” is?
[audio:09almaredem]
Orlando de Lassus Alma redemptoris mater
The Tallis Scholars

Do you want to talk about how I finally got around to reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and that I totally loved it?

I’m doing another one of those Trips right now that started in New York, and somehow, over a fortnight and change, finds me in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Paris, Lyon, Paris, Lyon, and Paris again. In Los Angeles, I attended the premiere of a new piece I wrote for Anne-Sofie von Otter and Emanuel Ax: two childhood heroes, 2gether 4ever! What was extra cool about this concert was that they folded a new piece by me and a new piece by Missy inside a recital of Brahms songs and solo piano music. Anne-Sofie stayed on stage the whole time, hiding in a chair when she wasn’t needed, avoiding all those endless entrées classiques that take up time and break the mood. The LA Phil is great and cozy and familiar and professional and, really, when it’s 72° all year ‘round, how could they be anything but? Their program annotator somewhat cruelly wrote in my bio, “His opera Two Boys was widely discussed at its premieres in New York & London” which… you know. Jesus wept. One rather wants to have engraved cards made that read “Your mom, too, was widely discussed” and then on the other side “Yours in Christ, Nico xoxo,” but do you know how expensive engraved stationery is these days? Ok now I’m done talking about that. Shh.

I’ll be back in LA in April to play David Lang’s death speaks, and my goal for next time is to not be stuck in traffic the whole time and to take one (1) run whilst there. Missy and I drove out to Santa Monica to see some friends for dinner, and in the last mile before their house there were more glowing and satisfied-looking Cali runner people than there were cars. It was inspiring, in the way that feeling shameful about one’s own lumpen, black-clad avoirdupois always is.

Let me tell you a story about my phone. Four times in the last few years, it has made a certain series of Noises. My current theory is that the Noises are generated when a critical mass of gays text one another at the same time. The first time, it was when Michael Jackson died and I was in a fever-dream in St. Petersburg, Russia, having just interviewed the homeless-looking and possibly insane conductor Valery Gergiev. The second time, it was when Whitney died, and I was absurdly having gnocchi with certain friends and then other friends rang and we had to pull the whole evening over “to be together in this time of need.” The third time, it was when I got off a plane last week in Rome, and I thought to myself, “Girl, not Janet, not tonight.” It was a false alarm: it was just that English diver announcing that he was fuxing a man.

Then, last Thursday night, I was asleep in a very, very rural hotel in Iceland when the phone made the Noise again. I was almost too scared to check it, but then, in my benighted fumbling, my computer and iPad turned on, and they started making sonic ejaculations too, which they hadn’t made for Michael or Whitney. What is it, I thought, the President? My mother? Of course the answer was that the internet wanted to send me many gigabytes of Beyoncé’s new unannounced album and its attendant videos, and of course I moved heaven, earth, ice, and lava to have my computer in the one square metre of the hotel that could actually make this happen, because I am an homosexual and these Knowlesian dispatches are treated, by cultural necessity, as oracular and as gospel: gnomic, poetic, abstract, and very, very relevant.

At first I was anxious about the description of it as a “visual album,” because these days, which albums aren’t? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Lady Gaga video, but I know that her appeal — even to me, not ever having beheld her on purpose — is partially to do with her Visual Presentation. Beyoncé’s songs, on this album, connect to one another not just musically, but via a seemingly personal, almost Forrest Gump-like time-traveling woman’s journey through various eras and — I shudder to say the word — styles. It’s unbelievably ambitious and through-composed; where the music can feel unrelated from one song to the next, the video is especially and carefully elided, and where the video is stylistically at variance from one song to the next, the music itself creates an emulsion between all the various incarnations of Beyoncé, our tour-guide through heaven and hell. Her voice feels, here, stretched in all the best ways, and she is experimenting with various modes of vocal production, vibrato, enunciation, and textual stylization. She is relishing the individual words of her lyrics, and savoring the shapes of the phrases the songs demand of her. When she freaks, as is her wont, a bridge or a second chorus, it is an insane and welcome delight.

Can we start with the statement that I basically loved this album? And then I will go song by song and talk about what, for me, felt like a reinforcement of this love, and where, in places, my love was challenged? I am going to talk, interchangeably, about the music and the videos, as that is how this thing was presented to me, as well as to the poor taxed wi-fi of the rural hotel and its staff. So if you’ve only heard the music, you should probably watch the videos, and if you’ve only watched the videos, you’re probably fine?

“Pretty Hurts”
This is a beautiful song. On the video, there is a long introduction with piano and strings. Use real strings, please, Beyoncé. The piano might be real but it sounds like the most expensive fake piano on the market. One would love to think that this is a comment on the artificiality of beauty — we’ve become accustomed to an expensive fake in favor of the built-in and beautiful imperfections of reality — but I doubt that was the reason for this particular oversight. Bey: call me; you know where I stay. The beat is solid when it comes in: four on the floor and a fucked-up snare on two and four. Then, in the second part of the chorus, it splits into a gorge ’90s r&b beat. The effect is simultaneously modern and retro: we are clearly in the era when the beat does not have to be swung or jagged, but also we remember the empowerment discourses of the ’90s, from which these lyrics seem to have been derived. Is it just me, or did everybody else briefly flash back to a teary-eyed moment in the car listening to Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” back in the day?

There is one thing that I am going to add here, which is that in a lot of tableaux throughout this video (and indeed most of the videos here), Beyoncé is the most light-skinned woman of color in evidence; I only offer this because in the floral Koyaanisqatsi-like social media time-lapse bloom that accompanied this release, much of which was breathlessly sent to me in various formats, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of chatter about this. I think it is probably a good thing that issues of representation not just surrounding but also between women of color are boiling over such that they appear consistently across the dashboards of privileged, potentially indifferent, white men.

In this video, there is that famous black albino male model Shaun Ross, who is painfully beautiful, and whose video job it is literally to weigh in Beyoncé for her beauty pageant; it is entirely (and perhaps fully) possible that she knows precisely what she’s doing here and that she is punking these corners of the internet in advance of their objection to something over which she enjoys no control.

“Ghost”/”Haunted”
I live for this track. Je suis içi 4 this track. The intro is harmonically identical to the intro to the video of “Pretty Hurts” — again, I wish she had hired real strings. The video is affected and delicious. It’s like Pleats Please/Got Milk/boobies, ribs, ’n’ veiled abs. Her hair is layed like Michele Lamy in a nunnery, wearing the Shroud of Turin. I love everything about this. In the “Haunted” section, we get a wonderfully ghost-like, drugged, low-voiced Beyoncé articulating, “I know if I’m haunting you, you must be haunting me/It’s where we go, it’s where we’ll be/I know if I’m onto you, I’m onto you.” There is something textually quite forward-looking about the haunted being the haunter; it’s the hauntologies of Wide Sargasso Sea meets Ju-on: The Grudge, but all coming 2 pass in a sort of Belle-Époque Brooklyn or potentially New Orleans. Then, suddenly we are deep into something reminiscent of that frenetic and genius sequence in The Shining where suddenly all the ghosts are there blowing one another in furry suits, meets the “Justify My Love” video. It’s this wonderful musical trick where the verse of a song can have five notes in it, freeing up the chorus to have only three; it’s not right, really, but it’s more than okay. It makes a frantic, churned sauce, and relies not on the thrilling vocal acrobatics of Beyoncé’s Destiny’s Child years but rather on a form of manic solitaire: lonesome and brilliant.

“Drunk in Love”
Is this the GarageBand “trilling strings” patch? Is this the generic “Eastern Vocalist” patch? What’s going on here? In the video there is some strange monstrance or something? Then the beat come in! Thank God! There is nothing, in terms of frequency, between the processed belly-dancing nonsense and the bass pulse, which is the most satisfying thing in the world. Beyoncé seems almost compulsively driven to pronounce words both Southern and Not — we have drinkin’ and drankin’ within nanoseconds of one another, and “fingers” approaches a Delta-ish “fangers” if you listen closely.

Yes, this bridge! It feels conversational and stylised — she delivers “last thing I remember is our beautiful bodies grinding off in that club” almost like a robot at first and then the text obeys a fierce gravitational pull back into conversational English and then tips into a decidedly Northern AAVE pronunciation of “club,” truncated and Arabically stopped.

The dance moves for this video are essentially the only ones I know how to do in public or private, so this is, quite literally, my jam.

The version of the lyrics I have here claim that she says, “He sweat it out like washed rags,” which is all well and good, although I would posit that she says “wash-rags,” which is slightly more delicious. The way she says “surfboard” is absolutely out of control and not conversational.

DID JAY Z JUST SHOUT OUT TRINA TALMBOUT, THE BADDEST BITCH!? I really hope so. I don’t like that people have forgotten about Trina.

I have no ability to speak about what is or is not appropriate about the following snippet uttered by Jay Z: “Catch a charge I might, beat the box up like Mike/In ’97 I bite, I’m Ike Turner…” although I suspect it’s best left alone in these pages. Or not. I’m sorry, everybody; I just don’t know. Didn’t one of these cooter-exposing chanteuses say “beat up the pussy” about Drake on Twitter (more on her later) and then it turned out that she was in a dissociative fugue state? I don’t like the phrase, but perhaps it isn’t mine to dislike in the first place. Ike Turner: just saying. Mike Tyson: is his presence in an episode of SVU a form of penance?

“Blow”
I cannot wait until somebody remixes this for precisely 90 seconds in the gay bar. I think this song contains precisely 90 genius genius genius seconds up until, and including, when she clicks like a woodblock before the word “flavor.”

Also, I am culturally anxious about “Skittles” as a sexual reference, having spent the last year and a half on the internet, where Skittles, along with iced tea, have taken on an uncomfortable racist seat in which…

Wait, has the entire beat changed? Is she saying, “I want you to turn that cherry out?” Does she now have a permanent crimp? Are we in the “Purple Rain” video? Is this the best thing I’ve ever heard?

Oh wait, it’s over now, and it’s back to the part that will be remixed and played underneath “My Neck, My Back” in the gay bar, as is quite right; if any track needs a Xhosa tongue-click revitalization, it was that. I know I’m being selfish here, but I think I’m also evincing a certain generosity because this track is actually not the best, but there is real sideways potential here.

I will make you all a bet that more homosexicals than women will be using the phrase “turn that cherry out” before next weekend. In fact, the minute I file this piece I am going down to the bar to verify this.

“No Angel”
This is one of these songs where each syl la ble of the cho rus has its own note with a rest in be tween it and its neigh bors. More synth strings in this; I can’t bear it! Do we all agree that this track is a filler track, or am I grotesque and unfair?

“Yoncé”/”Partition”
I mean, this is the song of our times. This is great. Everything about this is great. Literally every sentient being in the universe is credited on this song, although it sounds to me like a Timbaland joint. I hope that the person who wrote the line “I sneezed on the beat and the beat got sicker” got paid many euros. The video is happening and it is great and retro. I myself have not performed (or, for that matter, received) fellatio in a limousine, so I will take her word for it that if Beyoncé herself were, indeed, performing it, it would require her going upon her knees, although it seems much simpler and, in point of fact, more discreet to simply lean over there and get to work. However, one has had the intelligence that her husband’s penis “could block the sun,” so she probably knows much better than anyone the logistical choreography required to get ‘r dunn in the back seat of any vehicle. Also: did everybody else know it was called the partition? I would have called it the divider, or perhaps the rood screen. And, further, the partition, I should think, was the entire dividing structure, whereas the thing she’s asking to be rolled up is just a window in the middle of it. It is also possible that limousine technology has improved since the last time I took one, which was two years ago in rural Québec. But this is neither here nor there; I was scared/excited when I saw in the track list that this song was going to be about Partition, as in, India/Pakistan, and that we would be treated to a mid-song rap by Gayatri Spivak herself, or like, chopped and screwed audio of Muhammad Ali Jinnah if Diplo already had Gayatri in the studio under some sort of exclusivity.

“Jealous”
Speaking as somebody in a relationship with Ambien, I have cooked naked, half-naked, sad, and angry. I have a variety of small oil spatter scars across my abdomen which only healed quickly enough to be replaced by others caused by more ambitious culinary efforts — have you ever pan-fried veal on an hypnotic? This song speaks to me, especially now that I have been taken off all drugs fitting this description. I usually wait for my man to be physically at home before I start cooking for him, and I would, perhaps, recommend the same for Beyoncé, because it is good to have somebody chop herbs fully clothed. I love this guitar sound. She has it basically doing fading pulses across an irregular number of beats, and it is the perfect musicalisation of anxiety that isn’t directed anywhere except into the atmosphere it inhabits. The trick, beloveds, with anxiety about where your man is at: you can’t be too mad, because there is always the off chance that he has been struck by a car and isn’t, in fact, creeping. This song really “gets” it, in that sense; it is anxious, but in a luxurious environment, which creates an additional anxiety. The urgency is a simmer rather than a boil.

In the strange video, Beyoncé walks out of her apartment past some Dickensian children who turn out to be paparazzi. There is a straight couple (of which the man is actually a gay I know from my gym) making out in what I presume to be TriBeCa. Then I can’t figure it out — it looks like she goes to meet a man in a hoodie on the Upper East Side, which can’t be true, because nobody would ever wear a hoodie on the Upper East Side. I love this song.

“Rocket”
This song is not for me. I am not here for this song, in the words of the entire internet about things they don’t particularly like. But I don’t dislike it; it’s just not my personal slow jam. There is too much instrumental information bashing around on the downbeats and the whole thing feels like it’s been the victim of an interior designer working desperately on commission. Has nobody heard those Prince jams where the instrumental genius is in how little there is going on? Are we not in the post-Yeezus landscape? The actual minimal places in “Rocket” are shabby-chicly overlaid with the sound of a record player hissing and fuzzing completely inappropriately, both musically and dramaturgically. In this video, I have seen more black and white silhouettes of Beyoncé’s mons pubis than I have seen of Antonio Sabato, Jr.’s adonis belt up in that Janet Jackson Herb Ritts video, which is saying something.

“Mine”
I feel like this song is going to speak really directly into the hearts and minds of a great many people. The video is beyond gorgeous — it’s like butoh/Pleats Please/Ann Demeulemeester and Anna Teresa De Keersmaker don’t sue anybody shhh. There are genuinely muscular men in sand — I mean thick dudes, not twinks from the dance belt with an Equinox membership. The various hooks in the song are fussy and overly busy. I still don’t 100% understand what Drake is doing in this song, but this clap sample sounds fucking amazing. I will also add that Drake looks really great and pansexually sexy in a kind of dun-coloured oversized t-shirt, but then there is a really ill-advised and not-in-keeping-with-the-choreography black… tank top, I suppose, that reminds me of the “Un-Break My Heart” video, and not in a necessarily good way; one imagines a rather expensive course of waxing and manscaping to achieve that Beyonçaise level of pellicular smoothness on the shoulders.

“XO”
We are dealing with a sort of overstuffed situation here. I love The-Dream with every fibre of my body but it feels here like perhaps there were too many cooks in the kitchen? It feels like they should have taken off one accessory before going to the club, just for practical reasons like it might get caught on a speaker cable or under-bar coathook or something. The video, evidently by Terry Richards, looks a bit anonymous. I love the pulsed synth that underlies this song, and I love Beyoncé’s enormous smile throughout the video. This feels like it belongs to the gravitational pull on Beyoncé’s world (and indeed, Solange’s) to that of the 718’s other major export: so-called indie rock. This can, I think, only represent a good and productive alliance. I would perhaps add that while I appreciate the slow pronunciation shift between “lights out” and “xo” (calling our ear back to the “onto you/haunting you” game from before), the line “love me like xo” seems strange; how many of us know people who sign off on emails to us with “xo,” whose necks we would literally wring if we could climb through the laptop screen? Indeed, “xo” is my most poisonously deployed written closing. A lot of people love me like “xo” but frightfully few take it to the next level. Beyoncé, you have my number. Je t’attendz.

“Bow Down”/”***Flawless”
I am a little confused about the ***s before the title of this song, so I will just offer you my own reading of the glyphs, which is a form of scare quotes or inverted commas designed to make us actually really think about it what it is/means/could mean when a woman is described as being flawless. I like it. This song is great. It is genuinely felt, but also almost too fast, like a medical emergency or hypomanic episode. When the beat gets fast, it feels almost out of control, as if somebody’s crept into the control room and sped up the track overnight. The video, by Jake Nava, is perfection. The spoken bit, by Nigerian feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, feels, I would say, almost perfectly placed in the mix, with one small danger, which is that it feels more like a texture with substance rather than substance with texture. I am going to leave it to other commentators to debate whether or not the definition of feminist spoken here (“a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes”) aligns with the visions (social, political, or economic) of this album, but I will say that I am overjoyed by the tentacular internet argument that is spiralling out of this album and the questions it has posed. I have spent time today with an essay called “The Problem with BeyHive Bottom Bitch Feminism” — people are actively and aggressively thinking about this.

“Superpower”
I could live the entire rest of my life without remembering this song. It is an insult to all the talent involved here to not be using a real string section with a gorgeous arrangement. I am really happy that Michelle and Kelly got to sing on this track. If somebody had dug up, like, four extra thousand dollars, they could have had a really 3-D string arrangement and gone for it and I could have been bumping and grinding in my elevator.

“Heaven”
The sadness of this song comes from its composition and not, necessarily, from its production. The simplicity of the vocal production is much welcome here, though, and Beyoncé’s voice against the single drum is elegant and gorgeous. Some keening electronics carry us heavenwards towards a shout on the word “no,” sampled and allowed to echo over the climax. This is such insane and precise vocal production, and we should all be paying attention to how this works for future reference. What we do not need to be paying attention to is this piano playing. My fear is that even if this is a real piano, it is a very, very clean and perhaps Japanese one; the few mechanical noises (the soft, subtle brush of the felt against the strings) have been sterilized and hidden. The touch of the player is overly forceful and, I would argue, a few milliseconds ahead of the beat; the effect is less reverentially ecclesiastical and more those dudes banging around in the basement of Guitar Center. For a sense of the exact opposite approach, listen to the piano on the Sigur Rós track “All Alright,” where it is muffled, textured, and appropriately at odds with wherever the “click” might be — it gives the song lift, and a focussed attention to the ways in which grief is more of an amplified vacancy of sound than a fistful of notes. The austerity of Beyoncé’s song, compositionally, and, indeed, much of the track deserves a more nuanced touch.

“Blue”
This song itself is really satisfying; I sort of wish the production and the song were slightly divorced. Again, there is a huge missed opportunity for real instruments — the credits, tellingly, reveal a “violin” arranger; but surely this is a woman whose voice requires not just violins, but violas, cellos, basses, violas da gamba, trombones, zithers, hurdies-gurdy, the works! Every sound in this mix feels in focus here, in the unfortunate way of an animated film where each blade of grass is in slightly too perfect detail. I know that many people love this kind of music mix, and I feel churlish even pointing it out, and it is really masterfully done, and it’s no more a criticism than an observation.

Beyoncé is so fun and great and major. I am going to spend, I am sure, the rest of my life listening to six or seven of these tracks a few times a year. I am so happy she released it the way she did; I think that had she and her PR or whatever futuristic PR thing Beyoncé has made a traditional campaign around this, we’d have all been too distracted with other things to properly deal with it. By releasing it in the middle of the night, it feels unexpected and magical.

Originally posted on talkhouse.

As a chorister, I always looked forward to singing Tavener’s Hymn to the Mother of God. It’s a simply constructed piece: the choir is split up into two parts. The left side sings identical music to the right, but slightly delayed. The brilliance of the construction is that the chords, no matter how consonant, rub up against their twins lagging behind, creating a thick and sacred texture. It is delicious to hear, and even more toothsome to sing. Much of Tavener’s music – including the longer and sonically more complicated works – is constructed in “visible” ways: the skeleton of the compositional structure is part of the listener’s interface with the piece. This is ecclesiastical architecture at its best and most sublime, where the structure soars and reassures at the same time.

To study Tavener’s music is to immerse oneself in the subtle vocabulary of stillness and slow change. I’ve always found a connection between the deliberate simplicity of his melodic sensibilities and the melancholic strophes of Vaughan Williams’s coronation motet O Taste and See, which never quite commits to a tonal focal point as much as to a horizon line towards which the listener glides. Similarly, in Tavener’s wonderful Song for Athene, pastoral melodies in various modes unfold over a single drone on the note F; there is less of a sense of melodic development and more of a sense of an organic holding pattern: birds circling in the distance. At a certain point, the camera zooms in, and an inexorable and slow crescendo points us towards an inversion of the drone – the floor is now the ceiling – and a shimmering climax. The trick only works because of his skill in deploying it.

It is difficult to overstate the effect Tavener’s music has had on younger generations. There is much to be learned compositionally from careful study of his patience and surprise revelations, but I am more interested in how singing his music has enabled a generation of musicians to really enjoy stillness and circular structures. Much of the modern Anglican choral tradition is built on glorious, directional phrases that coddle the text. Tavener’s music usually insists on simpler textures: a drone, and an economy of one or two notes per syllable (or, in more extreme examples, one syllable stretched over many, many, many notes). To sing this music is to learn how to resist romantic phrase-shaping, and to make the beauty in expression more to do with what is withheld than with what is presented. This kind of music-making creates thoughtful musicians. It is difficult to imagine that the choristers of Durham Cathedral who had to figure out what to do with Tavener’s 11-minute Ikon of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne didn’t then return to their diet of Byrd and Tallis with a heightened sense of how to achieve maximum impact through understatement.

I met John Tavener once, a few years ago, at London’s Barbican. He had been unwell, so it was solemnly exciting to see him make his way gingerly down the shallow and wide stairs. Along with six or seven other composers, we’d been asked to reinterpret various works by Handel. As is typical of these variety shows, we all made these fussy pastiche things, except for Tavener, who wrote a very simple piece called Little Reliquary for G.F.H. A simple melody in the voice, imitated, if my memory serves, by an oboe: a personal, generous, and gorgeously oblique tribute to what makes Handel’s own music so luminous. The rest of us had skittered about the surface of Handel’s originals, but Tavener had plunged directly into the cold and honest stream that feeds the pond.

His death at 69 is a sad shock. After his most recent illness, it seemed as if his compositional output had entirely stopped – he described it in the press as a crisis of faith, as a sort of emptiness and silence. He wrote his way out of it, though, creating a series of works in a relatively short time. I happened upon the score to one of these later pieces in my publishers’ offices in London last year. It was scored for voices and three string quartets. It didn’t seem, as is the way with some composers’ late-period works, like a sacred relic or a death-mask. Instead, it seemed like a transparent and honest piece of work heralding the beginning of another decade of innovation, clarification, and sacred simplicity. In writing this, I realise how much he has given us both as composers and interpreters; I mourn the music he left unwritten, but am so happy to have grown up with so much of it.

Nico Muhly is a graduate of Columbia and Juillard, and he has worked with Phillip Glass, Björk, and Grizzly Bear, to name a few. His opera Two Boys tells the story of an online relationship between two young boys and the circumstances surrounding an ensuing murder. It premiered at the English National Opera in June 2011, opened at the Metropolitan Opera on October 21st, 2013, and is now ending its run on November the 14th. He chatted with us via email initially, then expounded further on the phone.

I have seen a handful of operas —Carmen, The Tales of Hoffman, Phillip Glass’ Kepler (which was crazy), and also Anna Nicole. I’m not unfamiliar with opera, but it also isn’t effortless for me. What do you think is the role of opera contemporarily? As a form, how do you think it fits in to the cultural landscape? How important do you think is it to have operas with modern themes?

These are really good questions and they are very big questions. Fortunately, I can answer very personally about all of them. I love going to the opera: just as a piece of theater, it’s a miraculous thing to hear all these voices and the orchestra and the machinery of the set and all of that. I have no idea what “the cultural landscape” is, but it sounds terrifying. Is it like that thing that exists outside of the house in Beetlejuice with the sand worms?

Did you feel any pressure that your opera was pushed to grab a wide audience? Or that the stakes were elevated because of the high-profile struggles of the City Opera?

No. And I want to be really emphatic about this: no. Opera is a very slow moving ship. I don’t know when Mark-Anthony was commissioned to do Anna Nicole, but this piece was commissioned from me in 2007. City Opera and the Met have entirely different metabolic processes; the Met is thinking about 2019-2020-2021 now—there is a very ugly misconception that there is some craven think-tank sitting in the back of the opera house being like “How do we LURE young people in?”; it’s like some grotesque Hänsel & Gretel situation. The super ugly element of it for me is when people ask me questions implying that I wrote the piece thinking about getting a different kind of audience. That’s a terrible accusation for me, and one that feels like a result of disingenuous press-think. If you follow the money trail, I think you’ll find that most people in the press who carp on about the aging of the audience and this weird demographic ballet are straight married to “arts consultants” who get paid U.S. American Dollars to swoop in and tell organizations how to fix their demographic problems. It’s a mob shake-down by another name.

An interesting area to me is what people are calling digital duality. This idea that our online world and offline world are totally separated. Certain scholars are working to combat that notion, embracing a more holistic view, where online and offline life converge and cross and intersect seamlessly—the idea being that you can’t just “hide” online, or that you are either online inside or offline outside. Where do you sit on that? What Two Boys does very specifically is address a case where a “harmless” online flirtation boils over the pot, and you end up with a real-life scalding burn. A lot of online scams are arguably victimless, like cancer hoaxers who are just in it for sympathy, which is technically free. Other hoaxes, like the Manti Te’o thing, are emotionally involved and then get exposed when it gets too complicated to maintain the lie. The world that Two Boys inhabits, also, is one before we had mobile phones with the internet on, so the idea is that you have to sort of address yourself to this oracle in the house to plug in. In that sense it’s dated, but deliberately so…

I see many thematic similarities between Anna Nicole and Two Boys, in that Anna Nicole Smith kind of developed during this early stage of the internet and its explosion as an information vessel. In many ways, she lived separate lives, the one on television/online and the one in private. At a certain point those were indistinguishable and she merged into some kind of weird extra-human american invention. So I saw Anna Nicole in London. I like Mark-Anthony’s music so much. I liked the production. I don’t necessarily buy the form of humor that assumes that America is this giant trashy glitzy fake-festival; a lot of your country-ass cousins in the north of England fucked up too. And also, I followed the last days of Anna Nicole really closely, and it was legitimately tragic, I thought, not campy tragic. I think Mark-Anthony’s score allowed for both interpretations, which is great, but I couldn’t quite shake, at least in London, the sense that the audience was thinking something more along the lines of “she had it coming for being so trashy.” As you point out, the intersection between public and private with her was blurred, in a really beautiful (at first) and then ultimately ugly way. I thought the music really “got” the nuance of that, but I thought the production chose to focus on the ugliness, vis-à-vis those cameras on the heads? But I liked it. I really love Mark-Anthony.

You noted how you couldn’t really shake the feeling of uncertainty about where the jokes are coming from, whose expense they were at, and how complicit we were in it… Yeah. Again, this shouldn’t reflect on the creators really, but it’s just complicated. Because when you make a piece of art whose job it is essentially to call attention to the difficult and tragic life of a woman, and especially not a woman who comes from a lot of money nor is particularly well educated, you find yourself having to make some kind of unfortunate decisions about what is funny about that. Do you know what I mean? I would say that I think it is amazing that it got made, because opera is miraculous no matter how you slice it. I wonder if in a different production there was a way to make you feel for her a little more in the first act. But whatever—this is also so nitpicky.

The way that I rationalized that was, at the beginning there is that “I want to blow…I want to blow…I want to blow you all a kiss” line that gets a big laugh. And then she says it again at the end… And there’s no laugh. And what the opera does is then you feel bad for having been complicit in this mockery. And quite correctly—you should question. Anyway, it’s complicated…and it’s extra complicated because she’s not a woman of means.

What were you thinking of and concerned with regarding Two Boys and something like achieving that kind of tonal balance—especially here when you’re talking about technology and youth culture, which can be delicate… I’ve found that the less you worry about how things are gonna specifically land, the better they will land. There’s a way that you can over think these things and it will end up feeling deliberate in a way that will take away from the potential emotional power of the piece. So I tried very hard to avoid ever saying that there’s a moral of the story and Craig [Lucas] the librettist was very good at keeping everything afloat and vague about what exactly it is that we’re saying. And I think that’s what you want in an opera. You don’t want to make it too clear. It’s not a fable. It’s a kind of structure through which more questions are asked.

With Two Boys, because it’s not on film, there’s gap in terms of presentation—it isn’t straight representation. What technology did you look to in order to aestheticize it in terms of the production? Well, this is not necessarily something of which I am the author. I wrote the music from which everything else comes. The designers I worked with—the set designer and the video team—there’s a very long and in-depth article in The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer which might answer more specifically than even I can. But we wanted it to be rooted in two different systems of online communication. One is very literal where it’s like you see people chatting with each other so they had to design a very simple old-fashioned chat interface—just an avatar and a name. But the second level of it is this kind of larger and more freeform poetic discourse where you have multiple people talking to each other at the same time and you get this sense of infinite numbers of voices. So that’s the less abstract—more systems of grids, meshwork, vague architectures. But do check out Rob’s piece. It’s very, very thorough. And he spoke with all of the designers as well, so they are much more eloquent about their own work than I could be.

For someone who doesn’t know the intricacies of the pre-production or development or creation of opera, what considerations go into what you do when you’re composing the music for the story—of which you kind of have the loose framework for your idea—and how does that play out? I think it’s hard for a lot of people to even conceptualize “Well, I have this idea and I am going to express it in music, and the other parts will follow at a later time with the right people involved…” Well, that’s a very good question and I’ll rephrase the question for you, which is essentially: how much of the work is done by the score versus how much of the work is done by the libretto versus how much of the work is done by the acting versus the production. And that’s a very complicated question. What I always like to think about opera is that the music needs to be the thing that triggers everything else. So the score should contain, if not fully formed elements of the entire emotional and dramatic content of the piece, it should contain clues about how to realize it.

A good example is this: if someone is singing and saying just saying practical stuff like “I get up, I go to school,” and there’s a little detail in the orchestra, a little shimmer, that shimmer tells the director and the cue indicates to the director “Oh, okay, this is a clue.” Something is being deployed here. And because of that the director knows that he can tell the actors to mark it or ignore it. So that can become a decision. And he can say to the designer “Well, I think in this scene we need to see more of the faces,” so there’s lighting changes. Or he can say “We need to keep this room really neutral so that we’re really paying attention to this detail.” So, it starts with the score, but the score doesn’t have to do everything. The score can just give a little question mark and that can turn into a much bigger idea.

The complexity is that in a lot of cases, the director is the interpreter of the work and the work is the score. And when you’re dealing with older operas and when the composer is dead, it becomes the directors show in a slightly more concrete way. Whereas when you’re alive—so I knew that I was working with a really smart director Bartlett Sher, and I also knew that also he would react best if I talked him through the score halfway. Basically, I didn’t want to sit down and do a lecture of how very, very clever I am. But I also wanted be like “Here are the kinds of things I do occasionally that give clues or that create texture or whatever.”

Are there particular sounds that you tried to integrate into the score that you associate with the internet or modern technology in general? I made a decision very quickly in the process to not use any electronic instruments or sounds and to do the whole thing with the orchestra. So, that becomes a kind of complicated challenge. And what that translated to was that I had to be very smart about when to use which instruments and when to focus on certain sounds and not others. You’ll see when you hear it—the chorus always sings in a really specific way where there’s a chord and they’re all given the notes to sing but the text that they say is all either improvised or a choose-your-own adventure type from a list of like 50 possible things, and each individual person in the chorus does it at a different speed. So what you’re left with is a kind of lambent shimmer rather than this is a chorus of talented people singing about selling eggs, or whatever. So those things are poetic simulations of electronic music but made entirely acoustically.

And they’re all for a little bit of randomness and unpredictability that isn’t truly present in electronic music…. Right. They’re all for randomness and unpredictability in the same way that, like, sparkling water is random. It’s obviously water but there’s this element of movement inside this substance.

This is a broader question, but, film and particularly television, and that type of storytelling, have such a broad reach. I’m wondering how ideally you think opera fits in and what place you would like it to have in a larger setting? I wish I had a better answer for you. The good news about my life is that I actually don’t have to worry about that too much. I just have to write the thing. It’s hard because it’s something—I’m not sure that it’s the job of people who make the thing to worry about how it fits into what we think people want. I think it’s good to worry about it at the extremes—like if for some reason no one ever liked a single thing you’ve ever made ever in any context, that’s worth worrying about. But opera is such a bizarre, herculean process.

I’ll say a couple things. I have a lot of friends come to this as their first opera. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be anyone’s last. I’ve had the luxury of very longtime opera goers being very positive about this. And they go to the opera like four nights a week. And I’ve also had like total first-timers. I had someone who had never been to New York before, which is amazing. So, I feel like it’s less about “How is this genre of making art going to fit into culture or whatever,” and more like “Are people making good work?” And if the work is good, I think it’ll be communicative and attractive. I hope.

Opera, perhaps even to audiences in the historical past, has always been kind of crazy and different and unique and complicated. Opera is weird and I don’t get it, you know? But it’s always been this way… You know what’s weird? Monster trucks. That’s weird. I literally don’t understand what is going on.

Like watching NASCAR…. You can’t see their faces! It’s weird. I think these things go in cycles a bit. The gorgeous thing about opera is if you’ve seen one, you are kind of intrigued…usually. I don’t know many people who’ve seen their first opera and been like “Yeah, you know what? That sucks. Never again.”

It sticks with you regardless. Even if it’s weird and crazy. Sometimes especially if it’s weird and crazy.

I saw that Phillip Glass thing, as a freshman in college, falling in and out of sleep, all in German. It was insane. But I have some very vivid memories or hallucinations of it. This was Kepler? I loved that show. And the other weird thing about opera is that the piece and the production are two different things. So with Phillip’s work, it’s even more interesting because sometimes he’ll write a piece and it’ll get like four productions. So the communicative ability of it is complicated. He did one thing and there’s all this other stuff that loosely attendant to it.

We kind of addressed this question of the challenges considering the audience when composing a work. When you are working, you’re not necessarily thinking explicitly about maybe petty concerns with regard to appeasing an audience or attracting a new audience, are you? Here’s the thing. I’m of two simultaneous minds about it. Obviously you want people to come to your show. On just a very base level, I want people to be there. But there’s not much I can do about that. The one thing I know I can do is make good work. That’s in my control. But when I’m making it I can’t be like, “Are people gonna come?” That feels like wasted time. So you have to sort of have a duality about it because you don’t want to—it’s not saying “Fuck the audience.” It’s saying that my understanding of the contract that we have is that I’m gonna do the best that I can and maybe you’ll come.

I was born in 1990, so I have very distinct memories of the introduction of personal computing and the early internet, as well as my experiments and encounters with it. You are a bit older, and presumably could have observed the shift more, or at least differently. What was your experience of technology growing up? Do you have any early memories of your first encounter? What about with the internet? Personal experiences with chat rooms or lurid websites or internet-only friends? I’m 10 years older than you are, and that’s a big difference in terms of just what we had access too. I grew up in a situation where there was one computer for everyone in my household and it was a dial-up situation, so what that meant is that there really wasn’t that much time to get into that much trouble. But instead I found myself developing—I went to music camp in the summer, and then you’d stay in touch with those people that you would almost never care to do over the phone. But you could stay in touch with these weird ICQ chat clients and stuff. And you find yourself having more emotional intimacy with people on the internet who you’d spend two weeks with than you did with people you saw every day. And I felt that shift happen. Where you’d be like “Oh, I cant wait to go home and gossip with my friends in California.” The emotional anticipation of an online rendezvous weirdly became more exciting than an offline one.

I felt that happen really specifically when I was like 16. So that was interesting. And also by the time I was 21 or 20, by then everything stared picking up. And people were starting to really be able to manipulate the technology a lot better. Because before all they had was just text, so you couldn’t really send a picture that easily, and it was complicated. So I would say I was of average perversion online. It certainly wasn’t anything like what these kids get up to.

They’ve got more at the disposal. But it’s interesting now when you think about how parents teach their kids Netiquette or whatever—when I was a kid it was just don’t talk to strangers and don’t get into the car with anyone you don’t know. Whereas now you have to teach a whole different set of behavioral things, right?

There’s a lot more to police.

There’s a lot more to police. And what I think changed is that it used to be that parents would tell their children advice that made sense because the parents themselves would’ve gone through it and learned from their mistakes. People have been abducting kids since forever so don’t get into cars. Whereas what was interesting for my generation and probably also for yours, and I assume it’s getting even more intense now, is that the parents are finding themselves in the position of having to enforce rules over something they themselves didn’t have. I mean, I just got an email from mother in all caps with no spaces because the spacebar is broken so it’s just periods between. So it’s like, then to have that person telling me when I can and cannot – that’s strange.

And now, it’s even crazier. I have a friend who has an 11-year-old and she’s got a cell phone – it’s one of those iPhone color whatever – and she can get into any manner of trouble. And her dad has a Blackberry and has no idea what is going on. He has no idea how fast it is to get into serious emotional bonds. You shouldn’t get up from the table and go hide in the stairwell for 15 seconds and get really into it. All that’s new and all that’s changing. And it’s not necessarily always bad, by the way. I always think about how despite that we’re all really plugged in, there’s still sad gay kids who grew up in the South and just need to get the hell out of there. And that ability to just take a breath and feel like you are somewhere is amazing.

And thinking about digital duality, and conceptions of online and offline, there’s space for a diverse range of possibilities and realities. It’s more about sort of traversing or transitioning—where you start to acknowledge that these things are seamlessly integrated into the fabric of our lives, and our lives are now always online and offline simultaneously and that way of living is beginning to extend to different facets of life, and with that extension comes new and different challenges… Exactly. It’s the same old drug just a different needle.

This was great. How about some obligatory Gothamist gabbing? How long have you lived in New York? Since 1999. I’ve been on the Lower East Side since 2005. I’m more sort of the Chinatown end of things.

What kind of changes have you noticed? I have to say that’s not a thing that gives me great anxiety. And Chinatown is relatively slow to change. I’ve been going to the same vegetable stand since before I even moved down here. It’s funny because there were a couple storefronts that have been like for a minute. It was a hipster café of this variety and then it closed and then reopened as a another thing. I’m one of those weird people who sort of likes the way in which Manhattan is a sort of a breathing ecosystem where stuff fails and stuff comes back and stuff doesn’t work. I think we’re in a good place right now. My neighborhood is in a constant state of community beautification. I live across from a community garden and every morning at 8 o’clock there’s five women doing marital arts and they are all in their 90s. There’s an amazing garden over there. It feels sort of timelessly Lower East Side. I’m lucky though that I don’t live in one of those blocks where every 5 seconds is a new club or something.

It’s interesting how Chinatown sort of is insulated and insulates itself… I’ve met a lot of sensible people who are like “Oh, I could never live down there. It’s so chaotic.” And that makes me happy, because I thrive on that. I thrive on the two old women beating each other down with tongs for ginkgo nuts they’re harvesting. I live for that. And then those people who say, “I could never,” move to like Murray Hill. And that’s good. We want this. They can totally have Murray Hill. I had to go up there the other day. I don’t think I have ever for any reason been to 3rd Avenue and 25th street. And I had to go there to see a friend. And I was just like—what is this neighborhood? Am I in New York? And I love that. I love that I can still be surprised by something a mile from my house.

A couple years ago I had some time to kill and I was seeing a board member of this opera company who lives by the U.N. And I was like “I’m gonna go sit at a bar by the U.N. and see what that is like.” What is that tram going across the river? And you put Gristedes in the bridge? In the base of the Manhattan Bridge, there’s a women selling frogs out of a bucket.

Somebody asked: What is it like working with the Met on Two Boys? They have been hyping it so much, it must be great to be in the center of it all. Do you have any sense of having “made it” with this opera?

I wrote:

The thing about this is — and this is important — the hype is the one thing about this opera of which I am not the author. I can’t control how people talk about it in the press, or what people say online. The only thing I can do is make the piece as great as I can. So I’m focused right now on getting the orchestration crystal clear, the singers’ emotions in good relationship to their technique, etc. What I can tell you, though, is that the met is on top of their shit in a way that very few other arts organizations are. If you think their PR is impressive, you should see the stage management team, or the stagehands, or the carpenters, or the set painters. These are all people who take enormous pride in what they do, and they are the best at it. It’s humbling to come into rehearsal and realize that the crew has been there since before dawn, zhooshing the muslin on the set and simultaneously doing this to four other operas. It is literally amazing.

To follow up: it’s a real mistake to confuse a commission with having written a great piece. The two things are entirely different. It’s a further mistake to confuse “an article in the paper” with having written a good piece. I always get anxious when I get a commission — it’s not a celebration — because I know it’s going to represent a huge amount of work. An article appearing is great, kind of, but it opens up the doors for random crazies to come and write mean and hateful things. So all of these things are secondary and tertiary to actually having made an okay thing and having had that thing go well (whatever that means).

Somebody else asked about John Adams’ bizarre showing here, about which I wrote:

It felt like I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky.
But also can I just add that we should all leave him alone. He stepped in it, but remember that it’s the paper and the paper is lies, or like, decontextualized things, and also that if anybody really thinks that way, that they have to wake up every day thinking that way, which must be REALLY exhausting. Plus whatever. I love him the most. I was looking at the ceiling & then I saw, like, Klinghoffer, Shaker Loops, El Niño, Naïve and Sentimental Music, and a whole constellation of glorious music.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Another question — and this is something I get asked about a ton so I thought it would be good to go more into depth…

whats the best way to make it into the industry? I go to a tiny little school with honestly not much of a music program, what would be the best way for me to find internships/entry level jobs in the industry because I doubt I will get many from my school. I offered:

What you should do is write for your friends. If you’re in a tiny little school in the middle of nowhere, there will still be an awesome violist or clarinet player and you should be her best friend and write endless things for her. that relationship will be the most important one, and way more important than worrying about “the industry,” which itself doesn’t exist. “The industry” is really a collection of people who are deeply invested in music. If you want to do film scoring, the best thing is to score one, though! Even if it’s your sister’s child birthing tape or something, you will learn a lot.

I want to add here that this is a really hard question to answer because it’s really seventeen questions at once. There is a way in which classical music is a really specifically closed castle, and unless you have the right secret knocks or whatever, you can’t come in. Or at least there is a perception of that. But the trick actually is that “the industry” really is made up of very nice individual human beings who are working very, very hard to make the world a better place through the arts. I’m always inspired — and sometimes really blown away by — the people who run arts organizations in what can seem like random towns: Kennesaw, GA, and Columbus, GA being two great examples. Austin, TX has a lady who is going to take over the world someday who used to work in Richmond, VA: none of these places is New York or London. In fact, it’s a dude who runs that performing arts center in Kennesaw who is like a really intense cross between Jeremy Geffen from Carnegie and, like, Peter O’Toole. I can think of a few people who worked in Minneapolis or even stranger places who ended up being quite influential in the mysterious world of “The Industry.” I know that I had it relatively easy by starting off right in New York, but for many years it was me writing for friends and performing in weird places — in fact, it’s kind of still that. As classical music, whatever that is, becomes less centralized, it’s going to be more possible for high schoolers to share their music online and start feeling more included in a larger community of likeminded people. I’m seeing this happen even with people in my online penumbra suddenly becoming IRL friends and writing for one another etc.

Other projects are strangely landing all around at the same time. BU did a production of Dark Sisters, my chamber opera; I couldn’t go to a single rehearsal or performance or anything. The Philadelphia Orchestra & Westminster College Choir, under the delicious and bite-sized Yannick N-S, commissioned and performed an orchestrated version of Bright Mass with Canons to open their season. A film I scored, Kill Your Darlings opened in New York and a few other cities. It’s a thick time, a busy time, and an anxious and exciting time.