Nico
Muhly,

I am just saying goodbye to my last houseguest for the week, and have about an hour in the apartment to myself. Action taken: floor swept, litter changed, couch pillows de-linted (and by lint I mean cat hair), stamps found, volume pedal dusted, fans cleaned, vitamins organized. Last night, Valgeir, Nadia, Abby, Caleb, Chris, Helgi Hrafn, Thomas and I played a show at Merkin Hall. Last week, Valgeir and Sam and I all played on East Village radio and there is footage of it:

There is something very satisfying about having had so many people staying in the apartment this last week, with stuff on every surface, and then cleaning it off — which isn’t to say it’s not great to have a full house (in fact, it is my favorite thing in the universe), but more that I am very pleased that our apartment can accommodate such a wide variety of situations. We had a rehearsal here, conducted with scores in laps while sitting around the kitchen/dining/only table — I ordered guacamole and chips.

The day after a concert is always exhausting. We all joined up with the New Amsterdam Records after-party downtown, which was sort of weird and totally great (”How was your concert?” “Great! How was yours?” “Great! Cheers!”). Today, it is pouring rain, insanely cold, the cats are despondent and I am laying low.

Reprinted from The Guardian’s Friday, May 2, 2008 Issue. Original Here. I am going to try to do more writing of this style, just little thoughts/opinions about the nature of things. Whereas a lot of composers spend time in their teens and 20’s thinking about the Way Music Goes, I somehow got caught in a wormhole of Anglican choral music, Stravinsky, and now I’m happy to have the luxury of being asked to think about things again.

A couple of years ago, there was a song by Sigur Rós that seemed inescapable - I heard it on every mixtape, student film soundtrack and college radio station. It is the third track from the band’s untitled album (the one that’s sometimes written down as “()”) from 2002. The song is sometimes titled Samskeyti, which can be variously translated from the Icelandic as juncture, joint or seam. There are no words, just five chords repeated without pause for six minutes. As the chords get louder and louder, a piano arpeggiates above them, ecstatically jumping up an octave at the climax. The song is undoubtedly very effective, but also seems to explicitly resist referencing any traditional episteme through its strange titling, lack of lyrics and solidly ambiguous textures. It is a winning formula; other songs on the album similarly resist meaning: the lyrics are almost entirely in an invented language and sung in an inscrutable falsetto.
What, then, to make of a younger generation of musicians who seem to be eager to link up their music with larger patterns of “meaning”, specifically religious structures? A few weeks ago, I got a CD called At War With Walls and Mazes by a young American composer going by the name of Son Lux. Immediately, my ecclesiastical bells starting ringing faintly; both those words have buried religious code. In addition to a Prologue and an Epilogue, there are nine tracks called Break, Weapons, Betray, Stay, Raise, Tell, Wither, Stand, and War. “All right!” I thought, “here are some patterns for me to sink my teeth into.” We have two violent bookends, and then six pretty explicitly, religiously charged keywords. The 30-second prologue begins with a ghostly pair of voices intoning: “Put down all your weapons/ Let me in through your open wounds.” This melody becomes a sort of ur-melody for the entire album, reappearing many times as a chant, always in the same key. It also quite explicitly points to various places in the Bible - both New and Old Testaments - notably: “And with his stripes we are healed” from Isaiah, or the moment where Jesus has Thomas stick his finger in his gash to prove that it is, indeed, Him. Salvation ensues, via the open wound.

Like the Sigur Rós song, the Son Lux song Betray is an endless cycle of hymn-like chords that we have heard before - they are familiarly cyclical. A compressed bass plays little jagged 1970s licks over a clean funk beat on distressed-sounding drums. Woodwinds trill between chords, making a halo around the sound. It is gorgeous. A voice intones: “You will betray me, baby, and I will be true/ I only ask, ‘May I share dinner with you?’” This is explicitly from Mark 14:18: “And as they sat and did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, One of you which eateth with me shall betray me.”

However, is this not, in a sense, a universal emotion? You have that last dinner, no matter how high the stakes or fraught the relationship. It’s unclear if the shuffly beat modernises the story or if the lyrics historicise the beat; in either case it is a beautiful moment that spans the profane and the secular to the detriment of neither. What I find exciting about this is the way that people my age are beginning to unironically use biblical sources without the intent to offend or provoke. In a more general sense, it speaks to a greater honesty about using one set of sources to create another: it’s like knowing where all your food comes from.

I think that it’s a pretty brave move to use unmanipulated references either from literature or the Bible; it speaks to a growing awareness of the power of orthodoxy and a greater facility to pay attention both in creators and audiences. The fact that an album such as At War With Walls and Mazes can exist is, to me, representative of our movement away from the ironies of indie emotions and the emotionally blasted landscapes of, for instance, Marilyn Manson. There is something satisfyingly one-to-one about this album in its simple and uncomplicated references and cycles.

I know I would just plotz if Ian Bostridge ever had my name in his mouth. He just wrote this very nice article in the Times of London in which he expands on some of the ideas in Alex Ross’s amazing The Rest is Noise. Something I like about Alex’s book is that everybody has her own sense of what the “heart of the book” is. For some, like Bostridge, the “moral tale about music and power, occupy the central chapters of the book and inform much of the rest of it,” for others, like me, it’s all about Benjamin Britten!

How great are English people’s biographies when they include names like “Lucasta Miller” and “Julius Drake?”

When I was a teenager, I saw this portrait of Bostridge and thought to myself, maybe someday, I will dress like that. Look how good that scarf is! And I love the texture of that jacket.

Here he is, singing Ivor Gurney’s delicious song Sleep, from the English Songbook CD. Click here to see Gurney’s really beautifully engraved gravestone.

Ian Bostridge & Julius Drake
Ivor Gurney Sleep from The English Songbook

Sleep, from Five Elizabethan Songs
John Fletcher (1579-1625)
Come, Sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving
Lock me in delight awhile;
Let some pleasing dream beguile
All my fancies; that from thence
I may feel an influence
All my powers of care bereaving!

Though but a shadow, but a sliding,
Let me know some little joy!
We that suffer long annoy
Are contented with a thought
Through an idle fancy wrought:
O let my joys have some abiding
O let my joys have some abiding.

Lesbos called and they would like their intellectual property back. “The Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece could not be reached for comment” is also my favorite thing. What did they do, send them a mass mailing?

So, I went a whole bunch of times to see Satyagraha at the Met. Last Tuesday, they asked me to be interviewed on Sirius Radio Intermission Broadcast Spectacular or whatever that thing is, and it was super fun! This woman Margaret Juntwait had some of the best questions about music I’ve heard on the radio in a long time. Maybe there is something to this sattelite business after all.

A few scattered thoughts about this production:

1. Every time I went into the lobby, somebody was looking giddy. I heard more than one person say, “I can’t believe we’re at the Met!” This is a good thing.
2. If at any point during the production I thought to myself, “these tempos sure are a little slow,” the last eight minutes were all the sweeter as a result of the waiting. I made a mental note not to rush things.
3. This opera is one of Philip’s first pokes outside of his own ensemble. He sticks an electric organ in the pit as a sort of a security blanket, and also as a way to cover up some of the complicated breathing required to sustain the endless arpeggios. I will say, at the risk of getting in trouble, that while the orchestra generally sounded awesome, there was a major Piccolo Situation that verged on the aggressive: even if you don’t like the music and if it is very very very hard and very very fast, you don’t have to chip the top of every arpeggio. It reminded me of somebody being told to set the table and slamming down the fork and the knife and the plate and the dessert spoon. Chill it out. Also: turn up the organ! I want those arpeggios up in my grill.
4. Love that Richard Croft!

I was online this morning trying to see how financially reasonable it would be to design my friend a t-shirt for his birthday (very!), and in so doing, I uncovered some pretty amazing font choices. Check it out:

Under the sub-heading “Foreign:”

Excuse me?

But then, even better, weirdly found under the sub-heading “Scary,”

Where are we, the Temple of Doom? It’s pretty intense to think that even the web coder dude didn’t flag this as “completely insane.” What’s scary about Devanagari? How is that any more or less scary than “Alfred Drake” or, for that matter, “China Town?” Anyway, moving on to another delight from “Scary:”

Ahahahahah! And then finally, my favorite:

HOLLA! Try getting a racist font named after your ass’s opera, Chuckles! I totally beheld him again at George Steel’s awesome Stravinsky show at the Park Avenue Armory last week. I totally seen the Pope’s Car beforehand! Plus Wuorinen and Stravinsky Religious Music! A Glut of Orthodoxy! Difficult Iconz on the Upper East Side! Nadia and I got stuck in a barricade for about ten minutes. She had her viola on her back, so we thought that maybe we could convince the police officers to let us through on account of “she has to play a concert” (which wasn’t true). The best was the guy next to us with his giant Eli’s bag overflowing with the makings for tsimmes taking pictures of the motorcade with his iPhone. I went home and listened to the Mass about sixteen thousand times as well as Wuorinen “The Winds” CD, which has those genius Bassoon Variations on it (a beautiful piece for harp, timpani, and bassoon).

I think I can really confidently say that there is no piece of non-Anglican music that has had such a profound influence on me than the Kyrie from the Stravinsky Mass. There are about sixteen things that for me, contain a hugely erotic charge:

1. The first note
2. In the third iteration of the first gesture (as in, the third big phrase), the lego-brick wind octaves expand out into chords that I steal on a daily basis
3. The ends of the phrases feel like tying shoes: you don’t get how it works, but it is really elegant and quick.

Listen here:

Kyrie from Stravinsky’s Mass
Leonard Bernstein on DG

When I am Old White People, I seriously hope I never have insane and loud coughing fits during Satyagraha. That is all.

Before I get into it about Satyagraha and the Stravinsky Mass, and also how I totally saw the back of the Pope’s head yesterday, can we briefly discuss the quote, below, from the Wikipedia article on Cannibalism? It’s gross, so if you’ve come here looking for recipes for bok choy or, like, adorable choral music, check back tomorrow.

Prior to 1931, New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, allegedly in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed by accident, and cooked and ate it. He reported that, “It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable.”

Well, that’s exciting research for you. The quality of journalism really has gone downhill. Now, all we have is Mark Bittman talking about a “Hangtown Fry” and lengthy exposés on how Robert Downey, Jr. is sober now. PS, Seabrook is totally fascinating. I am going to read all his stuff. You have to love when his bio contains the sentence, “Due to his alcoholism and sadist practices they divorced in 1941.”

PS, everybody in New York needs to go see Satyagraha in a major way.

I have been meaning to write for a couple of days, but I have been living in a house with No Internet, which is actually pretty amazing. When is that last time that’s been the case?

An Observation about British Food. I think, you guys, that we are over the hump with this. Now, it’s easier to eat well than it is to eat badly. Jaffer and I have eaten basically nothing but excellent, excellent food for the last seven days, which is a real triumph. Of course, the trick is to make as many meals as possible happen at either St John or St John Bread and Wine. I went the other night and ate Cuttlefish in Her Owne Inke, Pig’s Ear and Sorrel, Ox Heart Salad, and an epic, delicious Steamed Lemon Sponge. I salivate now just at the thought. Also, the variety of bacons available for purchase in the market is inspiring and wonderful. Also: the video player at St John Restaurant is amazing and you all need to go right now.

An Observation about my Visual Proclivities. I had to meet a friend at the National Gallery, but arrived very early, as is my wont, and wandered around the 16th century Italian art galleries for twenty minutes. I went to the gift store afterwards and saw the following postcards:

My first thought to myself was, “Ooh, that’s a handsome G!” And so I marched up to the lady and was like, “How much for that G?” and she said, “Sir, those are just the letters to tell you the names of the artists reproduced on the cards. They are not for sale, I am sorry to inform you.”

It is a handsome G, though.

Some Observations about Chronic Mispronunciation in England and among the Elderly. I was walking down the street and noticed a series of ads for the wonderful LastMinute.com, the copy of which reads, “This Weekend, Go Somewhere You Can’t Spell:”

Now, of course, England People and America People and basically Anywhere People have their own pronunciation preferences and I’m not going to get into a whole conversation about that here. What I wanted to talk about is this completely insane English practice of re-accenting foreign words.

I have a friend who came to visit me in New York just after he and his family had come from the Vèneto. See that accent there? That’s where the accent goes. Now, in Italian, you can print the accent or not, but everybody there would certainly pronounce it as I have just rendered it. My friend went to about as fancy a sequence of schools as money can buy, and is generally well-read and -travelled. So, what is it that would compel him to say Venèto? He wasn’t hesitating, either, it was like, Venèto this and Venèto that. What instinct governs this rule?

More jarringly, a few weeks ago, an English artist friend of mine - my age! - was talking about other artists’ use of color and referenced the Spanish artist Joan Miró. Now, I think in basically all contexts, the accent on that Ó is both printed and pronounced. Homegirl, similarly, has had as posh a schooling as is available on this Island, and he was saying it not once, twice or thrice but like four million times with the accent on the first i. Míro. Now seriously, you guys? What is this about?

I was thinking about this in the context of some other weird interviews I’ve had recently, where people – usually around my parents’ ages – have seemingly deliberately mispronounced the names of other artists – sticking H’s up in Antony’s name, rendering the J in Björk’s, even pronouncing my own name Nicko, despite the IPA guide I put at the end of my bio (”His name is pronounced [ˈni ko] [ˈmju: li]).” Nobody is asking for people to render Sigurðsson or Hrafnhildur with native perfection, but, where does the tongue twister leave and general politeness take over?

[A note to my Webmistress. Is there a way to have a style sheet for single letters as themselves? As in "it was a U-shaped road" – aren't you meant to make that U a special sans-serif deal? I know Jenny has blogged about this most cleverly, but I can't seem to dig up the entry...]

When I was growing up, my father would chronically mispronounce my friends’ names if they were remotely not New or Old Testament; he too is well-travelled and read, and is not what could be described as culturally insensitive. I think what it does is establishes the Mispronouncer as the linguistically dominant party in a conversation, as if somehow the introduction of a foreign word is an offense to the sovereignty of his knowledge (not to offend him, a loyal reader of this space! Perhaps “offense” is too harsh a word: a grain of sand in the espadrille of his knowledge?). I know that I engage in a lot of this kind of play to reinforce that language is there to be played with - replacing w’s with v’s, older pronunciations, older spellings, and I know that what it does it shines the light of my own life on the sentence that I’m speaking; it’s on purpose. I do tend to try to leave people’s names out of it, preferring an aggressive nickname to an aggressive mispronunciation, because at the end of the day, your name is your whole joint, you know?

The other advantage of a deliberate mispronunciation is that it can be subtly dismissive of a topic that you, the Mispronouncer, are somehow ashamed to admit to knowing too much about. One time I have caught myself doing this is with the artist M.I.A., whom everybody had been talking about in, like, 2003. So as not to appear deliberately branché (BRAHN-shay) about her music, I caught myself talking about her like, “Oh, I was just listening to…how do you say it, is it Miyya? Emm Eye Ay?” and of course, it’s an asshole move, and it slows the pace of conversation. I heard myself do it, and vowed never to do it again.

Anyway, this sort of deliberate mispronunciation of foreign words can, I think, be culturally useful in Island places; in a sense, it nativizes and neutralizes the intense – and debatably problematic – amount of foreign influence in an otherwise closed culture. It says, your word has been transformed by its introduction to this conversation, house, location, culture. It’s a fascinating move; I just wonder what Miró and the good inhabitants of the Vèneto have to say about it. Maybe they don’t mind. I have found that people with, for instance, the Icelandic name “Daníel” (which is a spikey, three-three syllable affair) will readily introduce themselves as “DAN-yell” in non-Ice contexts; similarly, when in France I will spondee-out “Nico” as is the native custom.

This is not to say, however, that I’m proposing that everybody be super NPR about pronunciation or that anybody should ever rock out a fully rolled “Croissant” up in the Dunkin’ Donuts (has anybody ever tried to render the word Croissan’wich in this fashion?). NPR is the worst, when they play that racist-ass generic third world background noise (goats, chickens, children weeping) and then say that they are reporting live from Baghdad, rendered like بغغغ-ضاااااااض or God forbid, somewhere in the Quechuaphone world.

I adore David Lang. I am so, so, glad that he won the Pulitzer! Listen to his piece here (also good job to Carnegie for streaming it, very important!) David Lang is a composer whose music is so awesome I hesitate to even stream any of it here, because I feel like it’s all too long to really excerpt properly, and too megabyte intensive for me to upload at this basement Starbucks.

So instead, everybody go buy some David Lang off of iTunes!

Anybody who doesn’t wish to listen to my diatribe should navigate away from this page at this time.

We need to briefly discuss that this abortion of an article also won a Pulitzer. First of all, everybody I know emailed it to me when it first came out. Second of all, the comments attendant to this article on the Washington Post were unreal; I don’t know where they are now. Anyway, the basic premise is that Joshua Bell, who is, like, young and talented and handsome, went into a subway station in our nation’s capital and played a little recital during the morning rush. Nobody paid any attention because they were too busy on their iPods or whatever. Not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. However, this article! It drove me to madness! I hope that everybody reads this thing and proves me wrong, that it’s not through-and-through offensive.

I’m re-reading it now and my heart is racing. The writing is as appalling as The Da Winci Code but somehow striving for more. Check it:

Mark Leithauser has held in his hands more great works of art than any king or Pope or Medici ever did.

Hot Grammar, right? Or:

“I had a time crunch,” recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. “I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement.”

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

Whyyyyyyyyyy is that two sentences? What is this weird halting style? This method of writing? This jerking? It continueth:

There’s nothing wrong with Myint’s hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

Oh. Was he? Listening? To his iPod? What? What is the question. What does that mean? Jerky Jerky.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences.

Gross.

“I didn’t think nothing of it,” Tillman says, “just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks.” Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.

When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.

“Is he ever going to play around here again?”

“Yeah, but you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him.”

“Damn.”

Tillman didn’t win the lottery, either.

What are we supposed to make of this little parable? Also whose voice is, “you’re going to have to pay a lot to hear him?” What drives me crazy about this whole experiment is that it is designed to fail and then give some random guy the opportunity to quietly pontificate (quoting KANT!) up in the Post. The tone is “elevated,” the same way people change their discourse when they say grace before a meal. The writer feels free to talk about how “we” as Americans rush around, his prime example being that we rush around during rush hour. There is something additionally nasty, I think, about subjecting the Chaconne, which is so divine, to this treatment. It’s chamber music, not public art. I have many times stopped in Times Square for the nine seconds it takes to quickly appreciate the Lichtenstein murals, or the Jones/Ginzel eye mosaics in the old World Trade Center stop: all examples of good public art making “us” do what “we” should: take a minute. Not fourteen minutes, are you crazy?

I’ve learned how to deal with London, I think; the basic strategy is the inverse of dealing with New York. In New York, you make as many appointments as humanly possible, run around like a crazy lady, and then descend into a fog at the end of the day. In London, you make one appointment per half-day, and Keep Calm and Carry On. The city does not reward those who rush! It punishes you with thirst, confusion, and apologies! I managed to avoid the guaranteed litany of apologies attendant to flying into the busted-ass Terminal 5 by calling up the airline and using miles to (a) change airlines to what they lingo-erotically called “My Codeshare” and (b) get myself bumped up into American Airlines’s new Chiropractorally-informed Business Class, where my chair reclined nearly flat and where I ill-advisedly watched the first nine minutes of a Nic Cage movie (National Treasure: Book of Secrets? Something something? Benjamin Franklin something something) before switching it to Júnó, which was actually kind of great. My doctor is suspicious of me, so, I am attempting to achieve international travel without Ambien; perhaps National Treasure is meant to be the multimedia equivalent?

I am reading, as is my wont, a whole new pile of mass-market books about autism. I think I have read most available novels that feature autism in any fashion, and am now working through all the available memoirs. There’s a new one out in England, called A Friend Like Henry by a woman called Nuala Gardner. While I don’t recommend it per se, it does have many many chapters of what it’s like to be British and try to navigate the healthcare system to get a diagnosis of autism. Good train reading.

I ate last night in what from the outside looked exactly like the restaurant Dressler in New York. It then later turned out to be sort of my vision of what happens if you give gay people £1,000,000, put them in an office chair, get them drunk, and spin them around until they’re dizzy. Then say, “decorate a restaurant!” Let’s just say that there was a statue with a boa on it, shirtless men on the business cards, and a surprisingly decadent burger. Highly recommended, if you go in for that sort of thing.

Housekeeping! I have noticed that literally nann person has commented on my post about programming new music. Click here and read it and get sassy!

This post was written at the kind request of the good people at the National Performing Arts Convention 2008. It will be posted in conjunction with ArtsJournal here, where presumably you should leave all of your comments. I am turning off my comments section here to encourage all of you to leave comments there to keep the discussion going.

Repertoire Building Is The Only Adventure
(Otherwise it’s just Girls Gone Wild)

Talking about programming new music is one of these paradoxical things; I feel like I, as a composer, shouldn’t have to say anything about it because it goes without saying that I am in favor. Similarly, for presenting organizations – both ensembles and venues – if you need to be told about it, it may already be too late. With the exception of Jordi Savall, Masaaki Suzuki, and, like, four other people, it is the responsibility of every musician and group of musicians to program – and champion (an important emphasis) new music. (In fact, Jordi, call me, I have an idea: it’s like Sephardic Judaism meets gamelan, you know you love it.)

A few weeks ago, I went to hear a dress rehearsal of Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra playing Mason Bates’s (who is roughly my age, slightly older, though, slightly older) Liquid Interface, which is an ambitious commission for Slatkin; it features a very difficult interaction between the orchestra’s tricky passages and the live electronics (which Bates controls). So: that’s what I would consider, in a rough sense, to be somebody championing new music and really owning the fact of a new piece: put it on a truck and bring it to Carnegie Hall, don’t hide it in that weird room between La Mer and the Emperor concerto.

Now, I would take a bullet for Mason, and I adore his music and particularly Liquid Interface, but I want to ask the slightly provocative question which is: would the National Symphony accept something from him that they had to play every year, or every two years? I can’t imagine that they are going to be happy to schlep out the hi-fi and cart Mason in from Berkeley if, for instance, Leonard Slatkin isn’t there to make it happen. So, is that commission an adventure for the orchestra, or just for the conductor and the composer? As far as I’m concerned, an adventure is a journey that is in some way transformative for the acting party or parties; a piece of music that enters into the repertoire, into the cycle, is more likely to be transformative than one that happens for just one night.

I am always suspicious when an orchestra commissions one new piece a season and it’s some facacta Michael Torke + Tap Dancing situation like how Detroit did that one time. Michael Torke: knows how to write a piece for orchestra. The Detroit Symphony: needs some new orchestra music that it can claim for its own. More people are going to be embarrassed than excited about the tap dancing thing. Not to put words up in MT’s mouth, but if Michael Torke srsly wanted to do a piece with tap dancer, I’m sure he’d figure it out without a major symphony’s help. (Did that piece ever even end up happening?) This is not to say, however, that we (here, meaning composers in general) don’t love a funny commission; I’ve been the happy recipient of many strange collaborative commissions. I guess my point is that I wouldn’t call those things “adventurous” as much as “random” in the literal sense of the world: a blip, a way to spend (or make) some money and have a nice evening.

The times I have been the most honored by a commission have been when an ensemble – established or not – asks me to add something to the pile of music written for that collection of forces. When a string quartet says, “we’d like a new string quartet, written by you,” to me, that is itself more adventurous and touching than when people want a string quartet + electronics, or a string quartet + Inuit throat-singing, or a string quartet + liturgical acrobatics. If I wanted to do that, I’d do it my own self, in the D.I.Y. fashion to which I am accustomed (as I write this, I am applying Neosporin™ to a wound I received while lifting a three hundred-pound fiberglass stallion covered in hair, on whose back I stuck a folk singer, all in collaboration with an Icelandic sculptress in West Chelsea last weekend; I have that kind of adventure under control).

Adventurous commissioning is simple, ungimmicky programming of new works: a new violin concerto to join the pantheon, a new symphony, a new clarinet quintet. I feel like people in my generation deserve to be able to have it both ways: we should be able to be composer-performers, scrappily organizing concerts with our friends, and also, larger organizations should be actively involved in commissioning larger – and lasting – works. The stodginess and/or petulance of the 60’s happily behind us, pursuing alternate means of getting our work heard is just that: an alternate route, a way to drive every other day to avoid the monotony of our daily commute. My concern, though, is that there is a lot of “adventurous” institutional programming that is actually just a mess, in a sort of “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” type way. One night of synthesized bass and a thumping beat do not an adventurous season make. Just as an exciting life is one that happens every day, not just on vacation, an adventurous season is one that contains a commitment to always buying that unknown vegetable, and learning how to cook it as a technique, not just as a way to spice up supper. One-offs are fun, but the adventure soon comes to an end.