Nico
Muhly,

Happy Pentecost, everybody. I love Pentecost. Four years ago, I wrote the following on this space, which I think sums up my whole feelings about the holiday:

Happy Pentecost, everybody. Pentecost is a really exciting moment in the year because it is all about language. Liturgically, what’s going on is a mirror to the Tower of Babel: a moment of linguistic comprehension through confusion, a bright flash. In the Hebrew Bible, all of the people on earth speaking the same language is an affront to God; in the New Testament, foreign (in the corporeal sense) languages become a temporary point of connection between strangers.

One of my all-time favorite Pentecost motets is Thomas Tallis’s Loquebantur Variis Linguis. I’m including a recording here, as well as a link to a piece I wrote (called So to Speak ) that uses the same theme.

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Thomas Tallis’s Loquebantur Variis Linguis
The Cambridge Singers / Rutter
Buy the whole album here

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Nico Muhly So to Speak
The Juilliard Orchestra / Milarsky

The thing that excites me so much about this Tallis are these little licks at the end of the phrases; when done right, you really get the effect of flaming tongues. I tried to get at the same grammatical hysteria in So to Speak. I once rode on a plane to Grand Rapids, MI, next to a girl about my age who was just getting back from missionary work in Nigeria, where she claimed to have engaged in True Spiritual Warfare (her emphases), and also claimed to have spoken in tongues, at that time. What was touching and beautiful about her story wasn’t the fact that it was totally crazy but was instead that she articulated that her glossolalia was her profound and only connection to other people of faith (who were missionaries from places where English is not spoken). I will add here that in addition to the gift of tongues, she got some pretty awesome braids.

Okay now flash forward to today, Pentecost 2011! I went, this morning, to Westminster Abbey to hear them get their tongues united. They did Loquebantur Variis Linguis as part of a complicated procession around the space, so, one heard the voices without seeing the bodies. Delicious. Then, the anthem was Bach’s Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf which is a big imitative counterpoint back-and-forth crazyspace for the first bit, and then it resolves into the most gorgeous and simple chorale. I love this piece so much particularly because I have about nine recordings of it, each one in a totally different tempo. Fabulous.

We are ten days from the premiere of Two Boys. There was a fun little thing: it’s a YouTube video here, and a sassy little retort here. There’s a microsite here. There’s me being in a debate about the nature of things here. There’s a half an hour of me and Craig Lucas talking about everything under the sun. Go nuts!

I’m having a slightly fun time reading all the advance press in anticipation of not being able to read the reviews; it’s just too awful to think about. I think for my sanity I need to wait until it’s all done to really get involved, if at all. While I’m usually ambivalent about this stuff, I observed something that is almost universally true in England. When I ask somebody, “oh, how was Simon Boccanegra,” the answer was never to that question, but instead, “It got 3 stars!” or “It got 4 stars” or “The critics hated it.” It’s outrageous! That’s not what I asked! This happens, though, across the board with people involved in the arts, and it’s a curious business because obviously I could have googled the reviews. Instead, I ask because I wanted to know what you, nice lady, or you, kind sir, your own self thought when you went there. How were the notes, how were the rhythms, how was the singing, how was the story, did it work for you, did you have a nice night at the theater? I want details: I want to know what the production set out to do and whether or not it did it. I want to know how the cor anglais solo was in the Faust (excellent, apparently!) and I want to know if the lighting was generous to the mouth. I feel like that’s a much healthier way to see any art. You go in with a kind and generous mind, and try to figure out what the thing is trying to do and whether or not it did it well. Really, it’s not unlike a restaurant in that way.

For me, the worst thing anybody can say about anything is that it’s overrated or underrated, because what that implies is that the rating has anything to do with the thing itself. Yelp is filled with this kind of skewed logic, where essentially what’s not being discussed is the food, the texture, the mouthfeel, the drinks, but instead, some imagined disparity between press/buzz/hype and the bibimbap itself (have you noticed, also, that yelp reviews always begin, “my fiancée and I went here the other night”?) The other direction is worse, too, where you say that so-and-so is such an underrated cook or composer or guitarist. The problem is that it very quickly bestows a sort of moral probity on not being in the press, or not being known by many people. The worst example of this is indie rock, I would say, and it has been endlessly ridiculed. It comes up in classical music, too, though, where a lot of people are obsessed with talking about the fact of John Luther Adams’s press or lack thereof, rather than taking that time to really listen to his (unbelievably gorgeous & powerful) music.

So! Check out Two Boys if you’re in London. A lot of people have worked very, very hard to make this thing come alive, and it’s humbling and obscurely touching to me to see how herculean a task making an opera is. I’ve just come back from the Coliseum, where the sets are being reconstructed after we left our rehearsal studio; there were eleven men wrestling this giant tower into place and another six or seven off to the side with buckets of paint and giant pieces of metal. In the north of the city, the video and projection designers are editing hours of footage; I’m gnawing my teeth in Villiers-Street in anticipation of the first sitzprobe in 12 hours. I love this civic vision: everybody doing what they ought to be doing in the right place, all in service of this giant piece of theater. So you’ll come!

This has been a scarily exciting past two weeks. I’m still in London, still doing preparations for Two Boys, which becomes more real every day. There are posters for it in the trains! That’s something I’m kind of not quite used to. . This poster was the result of many weeks of haggling about fonts and images and blah blah blah; even still, looking at it gives such a strange impression of what making an opera is. There are hugely important people left off of this image: the librettist, most importantly, but also, the conductor, the cast, the assistant conductor, the designers: all people who, much more than I, have been living and breathing almost exclusively this piece for the past years, months, and weeks. All of this in addition to the people from the Met and the ENO who have been supporting the project from the sides and from its interior for years! The poster is the tiniest framed window into the world that contains hundreds of people all working very hard to make this piece come alive. I’m also a little unsure, on second glance, about the idea of “secret online world,” because surely it’s the opposite of that: deceptively public. But whatever. I’m a noodge. It’s a nice image and I’ve been really happy to see it in the tube and around town.

The process — which will be obvious to those of you who make operas all the time but which is new to me — is very fugued at this point. In one corner of London, the director and the singers & actors (we have thirty non-singing actors shuffling about the stage) are going through the piece scene by scene, interrogating the text, interrogating the notes. In another neighborhood, the orchestra rehearses with no singers, figuring out any scary mistakes I’ve made (did you know that despite having proof-read this thing thrice, I still had an entire section in the 2nd clarinet placed five bars early?) and negotiating a quick change to contrabassoon or tenor drum. Elsewhere entirely, the chorus is memorizing all the hocketed text at the top of the second act. It’s either very easy or very hard. I have observed one thing that I’d like to correct in a major way. Nobody in England knows who Meredith Monk is. There is a roaring lacuna where her music should be, and not just her music but her techniques; it’s a relatively common reference in my universe and one I’ve found to be completely lost on a lot of otherwise very up-2-d8 people here. So, here’s a starter package – one old, and one relatively new:

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Meredith Monk Memory Song from Do You Be?

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Meredith Monk from Facing North

Okay so, Meredith Monk. I think Hocket should be a required piece for all singers. Grab your friend and git r done. Composers in school, I will point out, have to perform a lot of exercises that don’t always engage with what our future music will sound like — twelve-tone pieces with fully serialised dynamics, piece for solo ratchet. Any sort of stylistic extension, though, will make the muscles stronger, and who knows; in ten years when some crazy gay from New York is begging you “More rhythmic! Think Meredith Monk! Relaxed but Intense!” you’ll remember that hellish week when you and your homegirl learned Hocket. Yes ma’am. Composers: do you ever feel like you want to make a little mix-tape of “necessary list’nin’” before people sing or play your work? One thing I always think is interesting is how crucial Wagner is to play Adams…? Maybe he’d disagree, but I feel like the tropical storm section from Nixon requires a stylistic awareness of Glass’s Satyagraha that slowly morphs into Das Rheingold.

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John Adams Tropical Storm from Nixon in China

I think most composers have these kinds of strange connections that resist their normal press narratives or, for that matter, the oppressive linearity of the way musical history is taught. There’s this idea that you can draw straight lines like, Schönberg -> Babbitt -> Carter -> Jonathan Dawe or whatever, but the reality is always going to be much more complicated. Like a big messy family, influence skips generations and comes, oftentimes, through surrogates: oftentimes one has less to do with one’s biological auntie than with one’s friend’s older, wacky sister, for instance.

The other big exciting thing this month is that Seeing is Believing, the Aurora Orchestra‘s wonderful album featuring my music, has been released in the UK. It’s coming later this month to the US so I’ll remind you all again about that one. I’m enormously proud of this release; the playing is superb, the programming of the disc is elegant, and the Byrd and Gibbons arrangements make me happy in a way that only music by other composers can! And yet, I get to feel involved.

Here is a video of me talking about it. Something is gefuckd with my ability to embed YouTube onto my site right now; I’ll try to get this fixed and then will repost here.

Here is the product page on Decca.

Here is a picture I took at sparrow’s fart o’clock in the morning at Aldeburgh, by where we were staying. Working in Britten-land, and having John Rutter produce this album that has so very much to do with English choral music was one of the highlights of my professional life. Also I saw sea-birds.

Another treat: on the Sunday after the premiere of Two Boys, Jamie McVinnie and I are going to play a four-hands organ recital at Westminster Abbey for about forty-five minutes, and we will be joined by Nadia Sirota. Info here, but what more information do you need? It’s in the Lord’s House, just after tea.

I’m doing a huge pile of press about this opera, which has been actually sort of fun this round. The one vexing thing I always get asked is how closely the story in the opera relates to “real life.” I like this question because it reveals so much about the interviewer’s relationship to “real life” and also, to a certain extent, to art as something distinct from “real life.” The other funny thing here is that I don’t think they have Law and Order: SVU in the +44, which, for me, is the gold standard of having a thing be loosely based on something from “real life,” but stylize it intensively enough (and set it all in Manhattan) so you end up with something that is, and is not, about real life. Another slightly more poetic variation on the same is Salman Rushdie’s Shame, which is, and is not, simultaneously about Pakistan. He offers “Peccavistan” as a complicated pun-on-a-pun (Sir Charles Napier messaged London the word “Peccavi,” meaning “I have sinned,” here, though, a homonym for “I have Sind.”) There is also a very alarming amount of legal fussy fuss about the relationship of the story that we will see on stage in Two Boys and, again, “reality” as a distinct space from theater; the fussy fuss is different in America and one wonders if it would be different again in, say, France, or Russia, or South Africa. Or Pakistan.

So, our first week of putting together Two Boys in London is over, sort of, and the whole thing has been surreal and wonderful. I’m still unaccustomed to the number of people working behind the scenes on a production like this: there are a few dozen in the rehearsal room and then another few dozen back at headquarters all basically putting together a piece of music I started sketching on a Delta Shuttle tray table three years ago. It’s weird to go from that to this:

or, stranger yet, to go from a little scribble that says “chorus enters?” to:

It’s very moving! And that’s just a third of them! I am trying to be avuncular rather than mommie dearest with this project, so I’m coming in for a bit of the day and spending the rest of the time hiding out. I have observed something about singers which I would love to have some feedback about: they seem really freaked out about making mistakes in front of “the composer.” I don’t know many musicians who feel this way; in fact, most people I know — and I include myself in this — prefer to present the composer a semi-molded thing, warts and all, that then, with collaboration, becomes something more polished.  Singers seem to want to take it a little bit farther, and definitely under no circumstances want to sight-read in front of the composer.  Any thoughts on this?

Last night, I went to the opening night of the ENO’s new production of Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream. You guys, I loved it so much.  I love this opera anyway (read my somewhat complicated discourse about it from a few years ago, which, if you can bear my screed at the top, yields some lovely performance practice examples at the bottom) but this production was something very severe, rigorous, and special.  The director, Christopher Alden, has imposed (or, rather, teased out) an additional narrative from the opera (which itself is a simplification of Shakespeare’s original).  This additional narrative is, essentially, that Oberon is a paedophile schoolmaster, and that Puck, who had once been his favorite, is being eclipsed by the Indian Boy/Changeling.  The staging makes a few things very explicit and allows other things to be registrally hidden; in one moment, Puck is essentially trying to regain Oberon’s affections in a twisted, 14 year-old way that’s simultaneously ragingly emotional, sexual, and very sad.  It’s a failed embrace met with absolute coldness by Oberon’s unforgiving countertenor, and I found myself chilled and incredibly moved.  An additional layer implies that Theseus himself — who observes the entire opera, loosely, grimacing and making assorted moues as he watches Puck — was himself subject to this same attention from Oberon in the past.  The programme the ENO provides makes this more explicit, quoting at great length this article from 2001 (without counting words, it seems like they quoted about 95% of it, leaving out a few choice tidbits like, “I hated the taste of his semen,” which I suppose is for the best, but I do enjoy the image of a dutiful ENO employee expurgating the original article with a razor blade and a loupe or something), as well as a slightly more nuanced article by John Bridcut, whose 2006 book Britten’s Children is a fabulous (and just the right length) exploration of Benjamin Britten’s own relationships with teenage boys from when he was himself one through his death.

The reviews have been exactly as you might imagine, and my conversations with people about it have been absolutely as you might imagine; there is a kind of great review of it that I basically agree with entirely except for the point of it, which I suppose I almost, to a certain extent share; a beautiful moment happens when we realize that Theseus is, in a sense, grown-up Puck, and that before he marries Hippolyta he has to confront his having been passed-over by Oberon; this is something with huge resonances in Britten’s Children and I think everybody should just go buy it and read it right now anyway.  The other point this review brings up is the severity of the production to  completely deny us the restorative and playful benediction of the ending.  May I confess that I have always found the last few bars of Midsummer to be a little bit “That’s all, folks?”  This production went against the grain of the text(s), but lord hammercy, to hear this angry boy read these lines:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
[...]
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

…after all the innuendo, cardigan brokebacking, and that heartstoppingly amazing final chorus with the boys and the countertenor and Tytania’s toe-curling descant, I kind of didn’t mind how off it was, or at least different from the nine thousand versions we’ve seen of it before. Insert aside here about authorial intent…but really, there is a home in the world for “traditional” readings of this work (both the Shakespeare and the Britten, and I own, have seen, and will see many, many more of them), and this production doesn’t imply that its reading is the correct one; it’s just a beautiful, moving, severe interpretation.  It’s been a long time since an opera has arrested me in that way, and I’d like to think that when I’m dead, somebody could use something of mine to make a similarly powerful gesture.

Another kind of funny aside was that one good friend, whom I will not name because I adore him, began his litany of complains against the production with the fact that it had started in two minutes of silence as Theseus prowled across the stage.  Something that I find especially strange about the English opera world — and let it be said that I actually know nothing about this, this is more of a general impression from my limited experience — is that even the smallest, like, Tesco-wrapped, overly-curated galangal root of European, regie-ass production is still too spicy for some of these people.  Straight theater-goers (and fans of new music) in London seem way ahead of the curve, where it’s like, Sarah Kane 4.48 Psychosis every two seconds and Black Wartch and really kind of outrageous Shakespeare productions and all the Gerald Barry you can shake a scepter at but then two minutes of silence at the head of the opera is offensive? The point is, it seemed odd that a little silence with a prowling Theseus ruffled the feathers; I hesitated to tell my friend that I, in college, provided incidental music for a production of the Shakespeare Midsummer in which all of the court’s proceedings were conducted in Medieval Korean, the faeries were suspended in sex slings the entire time, and the audience was gender-segregated into groomsmen and bridesmaids (and do not think for a moment that this reinforcement of the gender binary was not mise en evidence by several theatergoers).  

The other great thing about last night was Sir Willard White, holy shit. He was so amazing as Bottom, I was losing my mind. During his transformation, he removes his shirt, which is technically fascinating because we got to watch exactly how it is that he controls his diaphragm. It’s something extraordinary; the flesh is suspended over the muscles in a very revealing way. I’d urge any singers out there to do more work shirtless, or videotape yourselves and get involved. It was like watching a Mark Morris rehearsal on his abs. Also does everybody remember how great Willard White is in El Niño? There’s a little three-minute nugget in the first part that I steal every two seconds; this business with the low low piccolo is really perfect at doing stillness with potential energy.

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John Adams El Niño
Se Habla de Gabriel

WW starts a minute or so in. Listen to how good those string drones are!

Hey guess what? I moved to London again; this time for a few months for a few reasons. One reason is that my first opera, Two Boys, is going into production at the English National Opera next week. Then, the delicious Aurora Orchestra is releasing a bunch of my chamber orchestra music on Decca, including some arrangements of Byrd and Gibbons. So, Aurora did a mini-residency at King’s Place, and generated two nights’ worth of music, and made this gorgeous programme for it which was, in part, inspired by Nick’s genius design of this very website. We had an album release party afterwards, at which my new friend Luke Ritchie played, as well as Puzzle Muteson, whose album is coming out Imminently. As is mine, for that matter — UK people can pre-order it here and I think the rest on Amazon. Then the next day, I had the enormous privilege to introduce David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion at LSO St. Luke’s, and then I made a little introduction to Owen Pallett at the Barbican, and played a series of polyrhythms with the Clogs. My fingers are getting tired of finding all these hyperlinks! It was hyper-linked: a free-wheeling, exhausting weekend, and the attendance at the Reich Marathon (as well as, I should add, my own competing Saturday night concert — a heartbreaking scheduling problem for all involved because I wanted more than anything to hear 2×5 live; as I’ve mentioned, on the CD it sounds like something has gone awry in a later, possibly hidden, world in MarioKart) is a testament to the hunger London audiences have for not just Reich’s music but for the music that has come out of it in a variety of iterations. It was great. London people were mad appreciative.

I was delighted to be able to see Proverb live, which I haven’t seen in maybe ten years. It is such a gorgeous and personal piece; it starts with a lovely tune, and makes a canon around it, and then a Reichean texture of hocketed mallets comes in. But then! The tenors sing a stylized figure straight out of the 13th century composer Pérotin. These elements work with, and against, one another in a satisfying, loosely erotic ballet, and Reich, at the end, adds a cryptic but so fucking satisfying coda. It drives me nuts how gorgeous this piece is, and how personal, and how committed to its style. The three do not always go hand-in-hand; Reich’s music is so fully devoted to itself, in the best way; watching his music live can put me in a historical or anthropological space, like watching an obscurely compelling Balinese ritual. Simultaneously, and more personally, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to write non-religious music with that level of commitment to process and style; I always bank on a capriciousness (a natural one, but you know what I mean), and listening to Reich’s music live, and David Lang’s music, for that matter, is always humbling and cause for many days of reflection, self-doubt, and remembered delight.

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Paul Hillier/Theater of Voices

Wait you guys how come there is only one recording of this piece! ¡Escándalo! Everybody should record this ahora mismo and send me mp3′s; it’s nothing wrong with this recording, this recording is beautiful, but I’m shocked!

At the Decca/Aurora lovefest, by the way, I got interviewed by this unexpected magician called Neil — it was approximately four thousand degrees, so you can see me looking hot, but not as hot as this rabbit must have been:

Notice, by the way, the cool buttons on the top. That’s an amazing result of collaboration between three organizations who would not necessarily always be on the same page about cross-promoting things. I know very little about how classical music PR works but my sense is that this is the way to do it — always reference the next thing, even (especially?) if that thing is in a different venue or context. It feels more fluid and less random.

Also somebody needs to tell England about this old trick. If your venue is freezing cold before people come in, do not adjust the thermostat. This is good. When people come and start drinking, they will make it hot in there, and then you will wonder why it is so hot. It’s very much like resting steak. It seems counterintuitive (“I want hot meat!”) but everybody knows that you have to do it, except sometimes people don’t, and wonder why everybody thinks they steak is fucked up. The same applies to the Temperature up in here almost universally. My flat has an aircon unit and fans and a system of windows and shades; anybody who wants to come over and see how it do is welcome at The Campari and Dubonnet Masterclass in Ventilation and Temperature Regulation, weekdays, from 6:45 to 7:30, in my heezy. Closed on bank holidays, and for four random days on either side of the bank holidays, with auto-responders put on all forms of communication.

Now that all of that over, I have about four days before the opera really kicks into gear. I am dealing with the usual circular litany of miseries surrounding the gas bill one does not have being the obstacle preventing getting a proper (rather than a Terrorlicious Pay-As-U-Go) phone, as well as a bank account, in various combinations of inconvenience. Today, a man at the phone shop suggested that I move to a house in which my name was, indeed, on the gas bill! I sort of like the idea that one’s real estate choices would be informed, or even dictated, by wanting an iPhone on contract; it feels very now.

A highlight of my life was that 8th blackbird Bang on a Can played, together, Reich’s recent Double Sextet. It was ravishing; all the players figured out exactly how to control the vibrato to keep the sound alive but without sacrificing the principles behind Reich’s austere but ecstatic vision. Speaking of austere visions, I’ve objected before to people insanely not capitalizing the names of their music or ensembles or whatever. And as you all know I think Match Gurl Pash is the best thing in the history of time. But David, strangely, presents it without capitals. And you know what happened? People fucked up, because it’s confusing, and ended up capitalizing the piece but not capitalizing one of the textual sources, namely Saint Matthew, or, as they rendered it, Saint matthew. Everybody just quit it. It drives everybody nuts and makes any paragraph in which it appears look off-balance — not in any obvious way, but in that way that somebody who has done something a little bit too ambitious to the eyebrows always looks a touch off-center.

Some good news in the English food front: Tesco sells Hollow Vegetable!!! Ung CHOI! Xiàncài ??? ! I nearly peed:

In other, more alarming, retail news, look at the design of this substance meant to be used to hand-warsh one’s delicates:

St John restaurant has now opened up a third branch, a Hotel! It’s early days still, but I’ve now been a few times and the restaurant is heaven, as is the bar. The original bar at St John, which is absolutely the most gorgeous non-ecclesiastical space in London, if not the world (and, it should be said, photographs terribly, as the height and simplicity of the big shapes commingling in the head with the details of the small irregularities of texture can never come through in a photograph; it’s rather like Reich’s music in that way, where a simultaneous and real-time awareness of big shapes and small textures is the key to unlocking the vast emotional possibilities of what would otherwise seem like a severe, almost punitive space), wouldn’t work in a hotel, I don’t think, so instead they have gone for a nautical effect which works very well, especially because they stay open until loosely 2. Check out these lamb’s sweetbreads and a fennel, carrot, and barley thing in the background:

I am flying home right now from Kennesaw, GA, where I had a new piece played by the combined forces of the women’s choir at KSU and eighth blackbird. Funbags! Obviously, I’d known of/about them for years and years — I reminsced onstage that the first time I saw them was in a sprawling piece of Paul Moravec at the MET museum in what must have been 2004 — but we’d never worked together. 8bb (I can’t bring myself to write out their name at a beginning of a sentence as apparently one is contractually obliged not to capitalize) are outrageously virtuosic, for starters, but are also people who care deeply about programming new music. It’s one of those amazing organizations that, weirdly, seems like it shouldn’t work but somehow totally works; getting six people to agree on anything is insane, viz. bands.

One of the first things I thought about when writing them a piece was this balance between virtuosity and what I would call Slower Thinking. I realized that I didn’t have a virtuosic piece in me for them, and that I needed to do was find a text that required slow, thoughtful gestures with a focus on intent & affect. The trick was also to combine them with a choir; in this case, the sopranos and altos of Kennesaw State University, who did such an amazing job learning the odd music I wrote for them. I am always deeply moved when people learn something I’ve written in a sort of memorized or almost-memorized way (that’s, surely, the difference between playing and learning?).

The 8bb kids are the most best at After the Concert. Isn’t group dining the worst thing in the universe? I have blogged about this before, but nothing fills me with more terror than the strange pageant of dietary problems, parsimoniousness, and that eternal thing where the waitress is there shouting “who ordered the tacos” nearly burning her hand on the plate and isn’t it always the same hoes who ordered the tacos who are yammering on in their conversation without fessing up to having ordered those tacos!? But! 8bb are the most fun. We devoured all the nachos and wings in the world:

An aside: everybody read this thing a few weeks ago at the Awl? (on the Awl? in the Awl?) entitled How Gays Split a Check in a Restaurant? The money quote:

Gay: “Give me that check, it is my turn!”

Other Gay: “That is crazy talk, you paid three weeks ago at [name of other equally wonderful spot]! Please, please let me!”

Third Gay: “Oh, you guys, that means it’s my turn, give it here!”

Fourth Gay: [Secretly has already handed plum-colored American Express card to server ten minutes ago, and now all the gays realized that the check that has just been delivered is merely waiting for a signature, not a card.]

All Gays: “You guys!”

The end. Exeunt gays. Everyone hugs repeatedly!

I have found this to be basically true, at least in my own experience. One of my greatest pleasures in making any money is thinking about the meals that everybody I know can participate in; when I was a student, the only ways I experienced the insane joys of places like Café Luxembourg or Balthazar or whatever was through the generosity of others; now, my usual M.O. is when people are in town from elsewhere, to subsidize adventures at Blue Ribbon or similar places that they don’t have in London/York/Kent.

I had the weird experience with 8bb of knowing their work much better than I knew them, but also, knowing their kind of online presence (complete with, it should be said, a minor scandal) without knowing them. Like all ensembles, it’s really a sum of its parts, and they are, I was so happy to learn, individually good in their own ways. And only one vegetarian who is, in fact, rather good at incorporating into a crowd of carnivores and not in the least bit parsimonious at the end of the night.

Can we talk about something here, because we’re family? Anybody who reads this space knows that I am fully on team Steve Reich. He is one of the first living composers whose music I really “loved” in the sense of a full-body abandon. I used to have a walkman with one cassette on it, which was the Reich Sextet on side A and as much of Adams’s Harmonium as I could fit on the second side. (Question: does one italicize Sextet? It’s a description rather than a title?) Anyway, I love Steve Reich the hardest. And his new piece! Double Sextet, which won the Pulitzer Prize right after my most b-loved David Lang’s Li’l Match Gurl Pash, is a gorgeous, great thing. And he also wrote, as some might know, this thing 2×5 for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, with the noticeable addition of Bryce Dessner. It’s like, piano, bass, 2 guitars, drums, all doubled by a pre-recorded version of their own selves. It’s a good piece! It’s Reich doing good Reich stuff. I have a weird worry about it, though. Actually two. Double Sextet and 2×5 were released together. The first worry is, Double Sextet won the Pulitzer prize and we had to wait, like 18 months to hear the fucker unless we had the good fortune to be in town when it was happening. So that’s problematic. But the pairing is acoustically problematic, too. Listen to the end of Double Sextet and then the beginning of 2×5.

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The problem here is that 2×5 is a balls-out amplified-instruments piece and somehow it sounds quieter than the acoustic piece! Most of Reich’s work is for amplified acoustic instruments, but surely going into the world of guitars, bass, drumset, etc., warrants the speakers to be blown out with an insistent, primal drive? I thought at first it was my recording, but I bought a hard-copy and played it in every possible venue: a car, my house, my momma house, my friend’s house, her momma house…it still sounds like weird Nintendo sounds. Has anybody else ever felt a divorce between the quality of music and the sound quality of the recording? The performance sounds quite nuanced and precise, but either the production or the mastering is…awkward here? Everybody buy it. It’s good. And then let’s all think about it.

What’s funny about this whole thing is that I normally would never listen to an album in sequence; maybe on the first time out, but I’m a very picky listener and usually listen to something in a completely weird colimaçon based on my own caprices and anxieties. With Reich, though, I am so addicted to the rush I got when I first listened to Different Trains and Electric Counterpoint in order that I make it almost a tradition to experience his music in album-sequence.

Moral of story: <3 Reich. <3 8bb. <3 Bang on a Can All-Stars. Am curious what people think about this pairing and about the transition from instruments not-plugged-in to instruments-plugged-in when experienced in sequence.

One final little plug. I worked on an album for this boy Puzzle Muteson, whom I randomly discovered on MySpace a zillion years ago, for Bedroom Community. It is, outrageously, being given away for free here, and everybody should get involved. It’s a gorgeous album; Valgeir produced it and it sounds great.

This post, I should confess up front, is actually two posts combined into one enormously tardy one. A combination of overworking, a very strange palsy in my right arm (now cured; turns out it was a muscle spasm) and ambitious travel plans have precluded any serious blogging.

I’ve taken a sort of aggressive mental & physical health tactic over the last few weeks. The first strategy was to purchase an outrageously expensive juicer; into which I have been introducing countless bundles (is it?) of kale, bushels (I think that’s right) of apples, alarming amounts of celery, little chaotic parcels of beet tops, as well as the merest slivers of the beetroot flesh it requires to turn the entire project into the art department for a crime scene reënactment. The secret, I have found, is to chuck in enormous amounts of ginger during various stages of the juicing, which ensures that the result, even if it looks like graveslime, will have a firm, medicinal interface with the body. I have subsisted on these juices until sundown, at which point I’ve been eating like normal. I think that this is a compromised step in the right direction. I was delighted to find, then, that all of this is possible in London, too. A pop-up juice cart on Earlham-Street (manned by one of these laser-precisely and sculpted bearded Turkish men whose recreation seems to consist entirely of scrolling through the possible ringtones on his mobile) in combination with the food court in what appears to be a Thai massage parlor just north of St Martin’s Lane…I think it’s going to be fine.

I am planning on being in London for about three months this spring and summer, all leading up to the premiere of Two Boys at the English National Opera on June 24. I have rented a claustrophobic aerie in Villiers-Street just next to Charing Cross Station (and, I’m told, the nightclub Heaven; I’ve not yet been, but have been told many tales by my friend B—, who, despite not having had alcohol in nine months, insisted on being erotically hand-fed a gherkin at table the other night). I had a magical two hours free the other day, and managed to perform serious neighborhood reconnaissance: the dry-cleaner, the disreputable wine-bar, the upscale hotel bar, the coffee shop, the in-a-pinch sushi fast-food, the chemist. I love that procedure: trying to map out future mornings’ itineraries, imagining the route home by the wineshop and greengrocer, or an afternoon of trying to compel friends to bring supplies for an evening up the narrow stairs.

Now, I’m back from London, and after a frantic but mercifully focused week in New York, I’m on my first real Vacation in some time, in Wyoming. I’ve only brought five pieces of manuscript paper — one for each day — so I will be physically forbidden to go crazy writing. The advantage of this is that I can think about distant-future projects, or theoretical projects, or projects I know I will never get to do but are fun to think about.

For instance, I’d love to score a procession for St Lucia’s day in Sweden:

I’d love to write music for this woman:

I’d love to write music for Natural History cabinets of curiosities:

from nicolas-lamas.blogspot.com

Wyoming! It’s wild. I’ve never been to the Mountainous West, save for a fortnight in Littleton, CO, a few years ago, and it is outrageously gorgeous. Yesterday, we went on a sort of wildlife tour and beheld:

10 Moose
Hundreds of Female Elk
A Half-Dozen Male Elk
A Badger atop his House
Two Great Grey Owls
Two Bald Eagles (I tried to convince them to hold still and pose with one tear coming off of one eye in front of the American flag but they were uncooperative)
Several Longhorn Sheep
A Mountain Blue Jay

I’d volunteer pictures of the same, but it doesn’t do it justice, but I can offer this view from the porch:

I’ve been meaning, for several years, to go know more about Buddhism as a political reality — as in, when one goes to, say, Angkor, there is a lot written about the very long-lasting clashes between Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, and even as Buddhism is practiced in the West, there are doctrinal schisms; I’m not planning on becoming Buddhist. So it is with great displeasure that I have found a relative dearth of books handily available that offer a political history of it. I took my woes to Twitter, and was roundly recommended Buddhism: A Concise Introduction by Huston Smith and Philip Novak. The text begins:

Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire with his message and kings themselves were bowing before him, people came to him and even as they were to come to Jesus asking what he was. How many people have provoked this question—not “Who are you?” with respect to name, origin, or ancestry, but “What are you? What order of being do you belong to? What species do you represent.” Not Caesar, certainly. Not Napoleon, or even Socrates. Only two: Jesus and Buddha.

Well, shit, y’all. I can’t work with this. Leaving aside the completely insane grammar in the second sentence, are these people tripping? Later, they say, “It is impossible to read the accounts of that life without emerging with the impression that one has been in touch with one of the greatest personalities of all time.” Ugh. What I want is a thorough overview of, like, iconography in border areas; I want the same kind of fabulous political histories you can read about Crusade-era Christianity or Islam in Spain. If anybody has any suggestions, leave them in the comments or @nicomuhly or anywhere. Also if one more person says “The Land of Snows” I don’t know what I’m gonna do.

So! I’ve done a ton of things in the last few months – some writing, some playing. All of this is loosely the result of 2010 being an insanely prolific year; I’m not sure what I think about this. After many years of obeying the academic/concert calendar (which loosely starts in September and ends after Pentecost), I’m finally really strictly aware of the big gestures of the calendar year. By the end of January 2010 I had written an enormous amount of music, some of which will see the light in 2011, and some in 2012. I think that in retrospect, it was a little bit too much; I found myself being stressed out by little things that cling to projects rather than by the projects themselves. Projects are stressful! I understand that maybe younger composers might read this blog; in that hope, let me tell you something about projects.

Projects that bear your name are inevitably complicated, multi-faceted things of which you are perceived to be the sole author. Small issues of sound balance, graphic design, binding preference, and schedule will be presumed to be Of Your Making, despite your actual involvement in such a making. What I have learned rather the hard way is to figure out a way to get involved with all of the above. If somebody wants a spiral-bound part, figure out a way to have it made. If somebody wants a Trapper Keeper with a three-hole punch, make it happen. I am enormously lucky to have a very tall assistant called Fritz who can be impressed upon to make these things; before the Era of Fritz, I was still up at god-knows-what time in the morning binding things at the Kinko’s on Spring Street. In high school, I spent so many early morning hours at the Kinko’s near Thayer Street in Providence, I cannot even begin to describe this to you. Ask players how they’d like to see their music! Sometimes binding is the answer but sometimes it’s the problem. Ask conductors if they want a C-score or a transposed score! Hire a producer to take some of the nitty-gritty away from you, but don’t expect total radio silence from the smaller issues.

Sometimes, in the middle of this thoughtful process, people will stress you out, and you will stress your own self out. I have a copyist who is, arguably, one of the best in the world, and he hates C-scores.

Note for non-musicians: this is an insane relic of printed music. Some instruments, such as clarinets and horns see one note and play another. Some people like to see a score as the musicians see it, with this weird slight-of-hand required of you while you read it. Others prefer to see a score loosely as the instruments will sound. If you think too hard about this, your head will explode).

He says conductors who like them are basically stupid. A conductor emails, saying that only C-scores make sense and that people who don’t like them are stupid. The ensemble will disagree with the math behind the number of rehearsal hours versus performance hours. It turns out that Thai nipple gongs cost a shit-ton of money to rent, and you’ve only written one e-flat, which in point of fact adds two hundred dollars to the rental fees. Is it worth it for that one note? Emails about these will appear in your inbox. Somebody’s name will be misspelled in the program; this will be the same person who turns out, despite all efforts, to be woefully underpaid. Another group of people will be omitted from the program despite my — and four others — having checked it thrice. A co-writer on a song will not be invited to the curtain call because of an oversight but might take it rather seriously indeed! The computer will fart mercilessly. There will be unexpected feedback on the stage, or near the stage, or off the stage. A vocal mic will mysteriously favor a plosive. A friend will have her email hacked by somebody “in London” asking immediately for five thousand pounds, please! A long-lost friend will email, announcing an imminent arrival in Brooklyn and restaurant recommendations, please! An estranged friend will become pregnant, another will lose the baby. A review of Project will come out that does not acknowledge the sixty teenagers who have memorized an hour of contemporary music. An email will arrive mysteriously bearing “Priority Stamping” with Three Exclamation Points. !!! You will compose an email to the sender, explaining that !!! !!! !!! is a surefire way to get that email read last, but you don’t send this mail. These things will drive you mad. The trick is to somehow keep it together.

I have a piece of advice though, that’s nerdspeak. If you’re working with MIDI, make good, but not great, demos. You want it to sound actively fake; for a film or an opera, it’s slightly different; in my experience, film directors/producers will cling onto MIDI sounds and then become sad when real instruments turn up. In opera, I’m coming up against people hearing the strange Nintendo emotionally-dead pacing of MIDI and calling or asking, “is that how you want it to go!?” I was like AHHHH. Also: AHHH. AHHHH. But for real. Don’t let the demo have anything in it they’d want later, and make sure everybody knows it’s so wrong. MIDI is to real nature like that green sushi grass is to the lawn.

I totally wrote a week-long diary for the Paris Review! Part One! Part Two! Please check it out, and comment! The comments are mailed directly to my inbox, including the haters, with their entire email addresses and everything. I think I’ve converted one particular hater, who objected to my phrase:

10:15 A.M. While I slept, iTunes seems to have downloaded the complete collected works of MNDR. I must have gone on a pre-ordering binge, because it also is trying to download the film of Never Let Me Go. I’m listening to “I go away,” from the MNDR track. I like electronic-based slowish tracks; I loved that Capslock track off the MIA album whose title I dare not reproduce here. I kind of wish there were a more poetic way to express that which is expressed by the lyric, “tick tock.” It’s also awkward, I think, for white people to render out those T’s in song (to say nothing of the [ä] sound in tock); the result is always a lot more Dominican-accented than the surrounding lyrics. I’m looking at this queue: yet more SVU and the new Top Chef are coming! I fly tonight back to New York so maybe I can sneak one of these in on the plane.

The bit in italics up there was my original, which, in the printed edition, ends just after “tick tock” and doesn’t get into the issue about white people and their T’s in performance. My interlocutor’s objection, though was to the fact that:

These recent diary entries are mere catalogs of cultural minutia, lacking in insight or nuance. I specifically dislike the ‘iTunes download spree’ motif, which carelessly points to the disposability and mechanization of art, though it seems that the author intended it as deliriously adorable.

So I wrote back:

Thanks for reading that culture diary thing. I’m sorry it disappointed. Strangely, all of your comments in my inbox; I didn’t know if that was your intention. I travel so much that the only way I can get music, save for live performances, which I try to get to as much as possible, is through downloading. I don’t think it points towards anything being disposable; surely my being able to access Malian music from a car in Iceland is nothing but a good thing for everybody. If it’s any consolation re: the mechanization of art, I still write all my scores with a pencil and paper. Perhaps I can interest you in listening to some of it? While it might be adorable, it is not disposable.

And he wrote:

No, I did not intend to write directly to you. Because your writing was posted on a public website, I intended my criticism to be public (and certainly not an ad hominem attack). As you have taken the time to reply, I will respond. Your point regarding the accessibility of music through technology is well taken and the subject itself is worthy of much study and debate. I was reacting more specifically to the phrase “iTunes seems to have downloaded” which I read as tendentiously passive, almost implying an aristocratic detachment from the technology, which strikes me as false. To judge a totality of meaning based on a single phrase can sometimes be spurious, but my reaction was honest. In any case, reading your diary has reawakened my desire to know the music of John Adams, one composer I have always been interested in but never investigated. I’ve always lumped him in with Reich and Glass. I would be highly interested to hear your compositions as well.

See, isn’t this nice? I’m learning a lot about him; and about the ways in which talking about one’s library can actually sound like an aristocratic detachment. My final response was:

Ah! This is the problem with having a multiple-user household. My boyfriend can order stuff and it will turn up on my computer; similarly, the computer will decide that we collectively want something based on each others’ histories; if you click “go,” sometimes the time difference will result in something weird turning up on the wrong computer. I kind of encourage this; I like to be surprised. Please accept this download of an album the Los Angeles Master Chorale made of my choral music; with the exception of the Whitman settings, they are all sacred and were written for a variety of churches in the US and the UK. I hope you enjoy them; they are very, very old-fashioned, and despite the digital delivery, I hope, to your liking. Link below. Best, Nico

So, let’s hope I’ve made a new friend and a convert to my detached (but engaged, once the delivery is over) way of getting music! After all, he gets a free CD for having been mean on the internet!

Things I love:

Tall designers:

Dyed poodles at Isaac Mizrahi Sprang Summer:

The genius music-cake that somebody at the genius Brooklyn Youth Chorus made for our reception:

I live for this chorus. I cannot tell you how great they did at this show we did last week. I wrote music for them, as did Bryce, Sam, and Bishi. Major, memorized, epic effort from them and their conductor, Dianne Berkun, as well as from our whole team, and sound dudes (what’s up Dan Bora & Paul Corley) and Beth Morrison and St. Ann’s. This was the epitome of the worthwhile stressful project. Putting it together was one of these insane things that you think can never work and somehow…it happened.

An outfit one can only wear at Whole Foods:

The dog, curious as to when people were planning on walking & feeding him.

I also like that I’m up at 6 AM, still up from the night before, really, editing these string parts for Dark Sisters, (I know, I know, we are fixing the website), and the morning’s early-birdies are starting to cheep at me both digitally and actually! Good morning, Mr. New York Times Delivery Person; Bonjour, Mme. Hopping Bird on the Balcony; Ça fait longtemps, Scott Rudin’s office! I love this time of day.

So this coming weekend, I’m doing this giant crazy concert with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sam Amidon, Bishi, Bryce Dessner, and ACME. It is wildly exciting. In short: it’s a dozen pieces for youth chorus and ensemble. Loosely, it’s all to do with travel, and the ecstatic alienation attendant thereunto. It’s an excuse for me to work with Sam, Bishi, and Bryce, which is always fun, and, finally, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who are an amazing group of young adults whose collective musicianship puts all of the rest of us to shame. So, the short version of this blog post, and the message you should take away is, come see this thing! It’s Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.

We’ve been rehearsing it for a few days now, but the choir has been at it for months! I went to visit them the other day and look at this phonics lesson:

I like this list of words; Bryce is a fancy Francophone and has words like Pendant in his piece; I’m not sure what it says about me that I asked Mary HK Choi to write some text for this and she delivered an analect all to do with Kenzo.

There are a ton of gongs:

Everybody come!

Last week, I was the happy composer-in-residence at the Storioni festival in Eindhoven; the festival is named after the piano trio who act as artists-in-residence and programmers. I contributed two new works to the festival: a triple concerto for the trio and the string section of the wonderful Britten Sinfonia, and a new piece for the impish Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, which we played together. I also had the pleasure of playing an older work, Clear Music, and the trio played a relatively recent piece, Common Ground. Chamber music! So much fun. I miss the strange birdsong of walking down a long corridor lined with practice rooms cacophonously shimmering with fragments of Dvo?ák, Bartók, Brahms, and of course, hearing a cellist shed one’s own passagework is uniquely satisfying.

Last week, I played at a rather different kind of chamber music festival: the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York City. Organized by my friend Judd, this festival is a sort of Polaroid wall of what’s going on in various communities of relatively young people involved in making music in and near New York. I got roped, loosely, into doing a predictably awkward question-and-answer session at the Apple Store that occupies the space formerly inhabited by the Victoria’s Secret on the Upper West Side. May I take this opportunity to say that single ladies should report to the events managers of Apple Stores; having dealt with a few now in the last year, they are uniformly handsome str8 dudes with a good attitude and access to the internet. Get on it. In any event, I think I had done that day wrong; I either got up too early or too late, ate at an inopportune digestive moment, or something, but near the end, a slightly crazy-looking (but not full-tang chamber music tunafish sandwich crazy) man stood up (warning bells went off) and asked the assembled company, “do you make a distinction between a proper composer who went to conservatory and some kid who can just get an iPod and…” I sort of lost my mind at that moment; he may have finished his sentence but I was already on him. This was, I think, one of the most horrifying things I have heard uttered in public in a very long time. Let’s get into it.

For starters, it was a wedgey question to begin with. Of the six of us on the stage, most came from a place in between what this question was outlining. I think I was the only one who went to conservatory, but there were people from Columbia, Yale, Princeton. Then there was my friend Valgeir Sigurðsson, who did not go to, I don’t think, college in the traditional sense of the word. Dan Deacon went to school but resisted it or whatever; nobody really fit either side of the sentence. So, problem (and answer?) right there. But also, what an ugly question to ask. The loaded term “proper” starts it off nastily; what I tried to do in my angry reply was to refocus this man on what his experience as a listener could be, with a slight attitude adjustment. It’s really the same thing as food, I tried to argue; going to cooking school does not mean you can cook. It’s a slightly false analogy, but Anthony Bourdain has been a fierce witness to the fact that most “proper” cooking in America is done by Salvadorian illegal immigrants who certainly did not go to the Culinary Institute of America. Sometimes, having a country grandma is the first step; I’m not making a folksy wisdom versus the academy point here, but the question I wanted to make this man answer is: is anybody, as a listener, concerned with that kind of pedigree?

I think about this a lot, because when one navigates the waters of, say, indie rock, you can run across the particular boulders of specific anti-intellectualism: “I don’t want to know how to read music; it stifles creativity,” or, “going to school just boxes you in.” I’ve always felt that a bit of school helps with, say, arranging music, because voice-leading, like sauce-making, is a subtle and easy-to-fuck-up art. School helps you with that; even two weeks of second species counterpoint can grease the wheels of some problematic fifths and octaves. I also have long advocated for singers/songwriters to get more involved in the notation of arrangements, particularly if they intend on having complicated instrumental elements either recorded or live. Because the manuscript and the parts are the first way players will experience the music, it can be useful to know your way around an oboe part, even just as an observer. Having the vocabulary — however simple — of basic instrumental functions is a time/lifesaver in the studio and on the stage. Similarly and conversely, as many of my conservatory-trained friends could tell you, a knowledge of basic song form is not something that comes up all that often in school; surely verse/chorus/bridge functions should, among musicians who are going to end up in Broadway pits and in the studio, be as understood as Sonata Allegro form?

(Another sub-narrative that I wish we could all abandon is the whole “the music I wrote in school was too real for school; the teachers O. Pressed Me, etc. That is, fortunately, a fight that our elders have fought for us, and we can all relax about it. Besides, Light Oppression of one’s Teenage Style Goals is a really useful thing to be encouraged; you have to slice that shit against the grain to see what it’s made of).

An aside: I’ve heard, in the obviously insane and not-a-great-example world of New York, a growing use of culinary terms among children recently. A few months ago, I was at Il Buco in the East Village and a 10 year-old boy behind me commented to his mother that his octopus was over-braised. The other day, uptown, I heard a precocious little girl ask, while multi-tasking on her iPad, if her mother’s duck had been “sous-vided!”

The other thing that drove me nuts about that guy’s question was the way he used the word “can.” I might be reading into it too much, but “can” implies that there’s some kind of scam for fame and fortune being run by people who, instead of putting in six years at Curtis, “can just” go and buy some gadget, plug it in, run their fingers over it, and scamper to the bank to cash the check. The “can” denotes a vertical structure to success that I can’t deal with at all; you see it sometimes pop up amongst composers and it is really a terrible, ugly way to think about things.

It’s in that spirit that I was reading the horror show of Tony Tommasini’s Top Ten Composers Ever From Monteverdi Onwards or whatever the requirements were. While it’s cute that it happened, and nice for the Times that they successfully drew the ordeal out over several weeks and across various media, it unearthed a whole bunch of nasty earwigs in the closet of the way people think about classical music. Did y’all read the comments section on those blogs? The thing about a list like this is that immediately two things happen. The first is that dead composers are pitted against each other: Britten is shoving aside Mahler; you can have Bartók or Stravinsky but not both. It’s maybe fine for people who are dead, but the idea of this way of thinking gets really gross if you imagine in six months’ time suddenly opening the paper to read “Top 10 Living Composers” or whatever. The second is, of course, tunafish people come out in full force, too, writing in talmbout “I made my list last Saturday and it remains unchanged by these comments.” If you’re picturing the vast expanse of a relish-stained khaki FUPA pooched over the edge of a console desk, a wheezing Dell with its proprietary power supply curled in a dark corner of the hutch, you’re probably halfway to the truth of the matter.

I think last week must have just been a weird week for bad attitudes; something perhaps to do with the new astrological signs? I was waiting for Sibelius to “optimize staff spacing” and decided to investigate a suspicion I’ve long had that there’s a continuity error in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (too complicated and sodomy-specific to go into here) and came across somebody’s blog, the first line of which was, “I decided not to read this when it came out.” What. Why would you take the time to write that you, on purpose, didn’t read something? What a strange impulse, and a strange thing to admit to; maybe it’s something in my makeup but it seems only polite to listen to every goddamn thing and read everything and don’t stop listening and reading and looking until you keel over in a pile of Belgian schmattas and headphones, and until that time, feel terribly guilty about not having read, listened, seen. I have a page on my phone that is devoted to things I need to read, things people have recommended to me. The principle is to go into everything wanting to like it. I read those Dan Brown books! The only reason I could see not to would be to make a terrible autobiographical point, and reading things with hatred in the heart is the opposite of fun, so I found a way in that felt like making the best of an airport bistro. But I wish there were a way to convince people that bragging about Not Reading Jonathan Franzen is real dumb.

Can we talk about how good Hollinghurst is at sentences? Every time I come to Benelux, I re-read The Folding Star. In this, our hero arrives in a small Belgian town:

There was no one else in the street that led up to the church, no one in the shabby square that its tower overhung. St Vaast: an ugly old hulk, with a porch tacked on, all curlicues and dropping yellow stucco, with a nest-littered pediment above. It was locked, of course: no last light glimmering from a vestry window–no choral society meeting after work to rehearse their director’s own Te Deum or some minatory Flemish motets. I went on with a shiver.

Everybody should totally read this, plus also The Line of Beauty all the time.

Language notes! I’ve written about my up and down relationship with the Dutch language before; one of the pleasures of my ongoing relationship with the Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven is watching the town slowly reshape itself; stuff that was under construction last time is finished; a formerly dangerous piazza is pedestrianized, and the good restaurant has developed a relationship with the sunchoke! One thing that I’ve looked on with a small amount of worry is the now-ubiquitous use of English in all names of stores. There’s something kind of Engrish about it. Look at this shopping center:

So somebody in some design office somewhere was like, you know what? I think we should just throw any old words in a strange order; nouns, verbs, whatever. Spent, Pump, you know, anything. Weird. Also behold:

Rambam, ahead of the jean scene. I’m not entirely sure who benefits from this. The shop? The customers? Also a curious piece of words and design:

I sort of like this one, actually.

This one…I could do without.

How about “Feel Good Stuff ‘n’ Food”

And the real coup de grâce:

What could they even mean!?