Nico
Muhly,

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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!?

So, I know it’s not polite or good form to go after critics, but I feel like we, as a community, need to rally together against Mark Swed’s recent weird hangups. Some sample paragraphs, the first from here:

The hipster in the bunch is Nadia Serota, who plays solo viola music by fashionable young New York composers on “First Things First.” The disc is on New Amsterdam Records. At least I think they are fashionable young New Yorkers. There are no program notes, which are considered passé in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn new music clubs these days. The drink menu is thought the place for description and intellectual rigor.

Notice a few things: Nadia Sirota’s last name is misspelled. There is questionable grammar. What does “Fashionable” mean? He introduces this idea of new music clubs. Does he mean LPR? He introduces the idea of a drink menu.

Now, we have this horseshit:

Brooklyn is hopping with bopping young composers who play a mix of new music and pop that often winds up being static sugar-coated minimalism suitable mainly for chilling out or dancing in clubs that serve high-caloric cocktails. Missy Mazzoli stands out in this scene as something more.

What? Has this dude ever been to New York? What’s insane about this whole thing is the understandable Los Angeles-Versus-New York cultural “war” or whatever. But surely the way to perpetuate such a thing is to write in this stupid way? It’s that old thing: if you think it’s a competition it becomes one. Also if it’s hopping, why not name names? Also, what would he rather we, as New York composers (I, for my part, don’t live in Brooklyn), do?

I should point out that it gives me great delight to defend my friends against stupid critics, but in the interest of full disclosure, Swed has given me what I think amounts to a positive review, although it contains some similar bizarre LA/NY attitude problems and a big error about music technology that I don’t need to get into here.

But y’all? It’s not a competition.

So I totally lost my mind the other day. I had about seven thousand things going on; I had written more music in 2 months than I had in the previous year, my mother was moving to town for a month, there was mild puppy-related chaos in the home, and I had a mild sleep disorder. Magically, a weekend opened up, and I booked a flight and a hotel in Las Vegas. Goals: recharging the batteries through cultural vapidity. Going to a place with a million empty signifiers is always enormously relaxing for me; CNN, RAI1, Univision, wall-to-wall carpeting, buffets: it’s all very soothing. So! Off to Vegas I went. I decided, because it seemed meet and right so to do, to see the Cirque du Soleil show called Kà that was directed by Robert Lepage, who did the new Ring cycle at the Met, which I really liked (at least the Rhinegold, which is the only one open at this time.)

Now, Kà has, like, a $2579 million budget or something crazy, and they serve 32 oz. margaritas right there, with cupholders, so I was like, table for two! Girl. This show is amazing. Acrobatics, flying, falling, this unbelievable stage, the sense of infinity below a stage, which is really hard to achieve. But you will never, in your entire life, hear worse music ever. This shit is like, racist, fucked up, synthesized, terribly mixed, disastrous. It’s like those Québecois munchkins from Willow got a beta version of Garage Band, drank some maple schnapps, and went to town while watching Tampopo. I was shock. There was, on stage, a plot-element wherein some kind of children had a flute which they played, and the flute itself was synthesized! And not just synthesized; we’re talking 1992 General MIDI shakuhachi, and one thinks to oneself, for however many millions of dollars, you can’t do better than this? Send me $2,000 and I promise you, I will fix at least that part of it in 72 hours. It was really galling given how gorgeously rendered the stagecraft was; I don’t think I have ever seen any technology so elegantly merged with moving bodies on a stage, but then to have this pan flute from digital hell…

The other thing I saw recently, in the department of giant spectacles, was the penultim8 Harry Potter movie, which was totally great. Fun, loud, big, IMAX, etc. I went in the middle of the day which is so great. Pretty cool score. The thing that I still have yet to figure out is how these writers and directors haven’t figured out that while it’s great that it’s the UN of races scampering around these films, it’s no gay people and it’s completely stupid. English boarding school is where they make gay people from scratch – 4get nature/nurture — and while I am delighted to see hella black people (who are terribly color corrected, by the way) and Indians (albeit with their cobra-phobias, which I will leave alone), and those deeliteful Jamaican shrunken heads (?) everybody is completely crazy because it should be wild faggots up in those films, awesome at magic and deftly translating those dreadful French peoples’ prattle.

I should also say, though, that there is this amazing film-within-a-film in Harry Potter that tells an important story that is, I think, the most gorgeous thing I have seen on a screen in a while. It’s paper shadow-puppetry, but not Indonesian; it feels quite European in its shapes, and folksy without being Kuntry Kitchen, and completely appropriate for the film while maintaining a really tactile and individual profile. It’s made by a firm called Framestore whose logo and website are too awful for me to properly continue exploring who they might be, but I think they might be Swiss? I mean, really, how can you make so beautiful a video and have that be your logo? What is this, a ransom note? People are crazy.

Whatever. I’m going to listen to Russian Orthodox Music and pretend it’s all fine.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Thou Art Blessed, O Lord
Chesnokov 2nd Requiem
Cantus Sacred Music Ensemble

This last two months has been, without any doubt, the most productive — just in terms of the physical number of minutes of music written — such period in my life. It’s been exciting! I took on a few projects with very quick turnaround times, which is to say, not planning three concert seasons in advance. There are those things too, but it was fun to work on things that will be played in the same month of their completion. I wrote a Christmas carol for Tewkesbury Abbey, a piece for eighth blackbird with voices up in it, and an Advent carol for the combined choirs of Jesus College, Cambridge. Very satisfying. One of the best ways to combat all the yammering about the War on Christmas is by reminding everybody that it is, in fact, Advent, which, liturgically, is an infinitely more exciting period than the 12-day long thing that Christmas actually is. In this spirit, I wrote a set of seven organ preludes for Westminster Abbey based on the great “O” Antiphons for Advent. They are happening Sunday; everybody go.

eighth blackbird are so good, I love them so much. But it makes me insane the lower-case-ness. Why are people still on this? Where does it end? I hosted a show on Q2 for the New York Philharmonic’s CONTACT! series, and between the title of the series, and every other piece having nonsensical lowercase letters, I was in a serious typographical crisis by the end of the day. Was I meant to point out the fact that things were lower-case? Does it matter? Composers: can we call a halt to the lowercase titles?

What a week, what a month, what a year! I am reeling. The other night, I went with A to see Peaches Christ Superstar, which is, exactly as promised, Peaches, singing the entire score to Jesus Christ Superstar. Here is what I learned:

Jesus Christ Superstar has one of the best opening songs ever.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Jesus Christ Superstar has a really good counting song, just like all good modern operas:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Also. Peaches? If you don’t know her; she’s amazing. But she also went ahead and did the entire thing from memory, all the parts, all the voices. Everybody needs to calm down — especially opera singers — about memorizing. If I try hard enough to write music as awesome as this score, will you relax about the prompter?

A caveat. This is, mysteriously, the only thing of its nature that Andrew Lloyd Weber ever wrote. Everything after this makes me totally insane. I can’t bear Phantom or Cats or any of that, but there is something so fiendishly exciting about Superstar to me. I know every word, every weird accompaniment gesture. I think about it often and with a great big open heart; there are not many pieces about which I feel the same kind of excitement.

Well, that was surreal. I am flying home to New York after a four week absence during which I engaged in every conceivable form of musical activity. The most surprising one, though, was this last weekend in Ghent, where there is an annual film festival with an especial focus on film music. I had won (but due, ironically, to film scoring commitments, couldn’t attend) an award last year for the “discovery” of 2009 for my score to The Reader, and as is tradition at this festival, was invited back this year to play a suite from the same film. What I hadn’t quite realized is that every other film composer in the universe was there: Angelo Badalamenti, Howard Shore, Stephen Warbeck, Frédéric Devreese, Alexandre Desplat (could somebody please just figure out how he wants his last name pronounced? Even Francophone Belgians were doing it nine different ways), Gustavo Santoalolla, Bruno Coulais, Elliot Goldenthal, I mean, it was really intense. Gabriel Yared! All these people played their music with the Brussels Philharmonic in a big old exposition hall reminiscent of the Grand Palais in Paris.

Composing in any context is a lonesome business inasmuch as your collaborators tend to be musicians, but not other composers. I can’t imagine the last time I’ve been in the presence of nine other composers since school. The funniest thing in the world was Angelo Badalamenti, who is, among other things, known for being David Lynch’s longtime collaborator. I should say here that I have never enjoyed David Lynch; it’s surreal and trippy for people who didn’t grow up in surreal or trippy ways; in the visual lexicon of my childhood and young adulthood, a dwarf dancing in a red velour room isn’t really that outrageous. Anyway, the music! The music! Angelo Badalamenti, in my head, would be a kind of wiry, philosophically inclined Siennese chain-smoker living in Los Angeles. Not so: he is like, the kindest, most affable and gregarious grandpa this side of Federal Hill; he’s in Jersey, he is the kindest person ever. The idea of him working on Mulholland Drive is itself a surreal decision, so maybe I wasn’t giving DL enough credit. Badalamenti writes tunes in the old-fashioned sense, and it’s enormously satisfying to see that sort of craft still in action. He is a proper ham, too, at the piano, which is a skill and a way to be that I see very infrequently outside of the most decadent organ improvisations.

There was a documentary screening about Maurice Jarre, who wrote the soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia; the documentary was in French and I don’t quite recall the phrasing, but there was a moment with an interview with Omar Sherif where I started laughing uncontrollably — he was saying that it was outrageous to finance “un film avec que des Arabes qui traversent l’écran…” — “a film of just Arabs crossing the screen either from the left or from the right.” There is something incredibly efficient about the French “que,” that I wish we had in English; it is funny, sort of dismissive, and almost always an exaggeration (“I went there and it was only Germans” or “you should have seen this menu, it was only lentils.”) Also this documentary reminded me the extent to which I need to watch L. of Arabia again as soon as physically possible. I’ma schedule nine hours or however long it is, turn the lights down lo, and put out cigarettes on my hand or something. Il y aurait que la perversité.

I’ma also need to go ahead and rent a proper DVD of that Julie Taymor joint Titus and turn up the speakers. The score is really, really delicious. Really good tuba writing. At the end of the movie — which is the bit we heard — Goldenthal uses a tone constellation I love love love, which is similar to the one found in the second part of John Adams’s Harmonium and one with which I enjoy very strong emotional associations. The penultimate piece in the concert — the last being Stephen Warbeck’s Shakespeare in Love score which has a lot of great secret marimba — was Gustavo Santoalolla playing from The Motorcycle Diaries and Brokeback Mountain, and of course they took it right up to the point where he sniffs those clothes but didn’t actually show it. That clothes sniffing is so outrageous.

Check out that deelish Titus:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Elliot Goldenthal, Titus Finale (excerpt)

And then the Adams:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

John Adams Harmonium, Part II (excerpt)

I had another strange emotional moment the previous week. Aurora Orchestra, who are made up of young, London-based musicians, are recording an album centered around an electric violin concerto I wrote a few years ago called Seeing is Believing, alongside some other chamber orchestra music as well as five arrangements of Gibbons and Byrd for large ensemble. Through a series of complicated and very English manoeuvres, it came to pass that John Rutter, the composer, conductor and producer, was going to produce this album at Snape Maltings, the recording studio and concert hall in Snape that is part of Benjamin Britten’s legacy’s umbrella. This was shocking probably most intensely to me; Rutter is a gentle titan, someone whose choral output seems to keep the entire music publishing industry afloat. Despite having written approximately nine billion pieces of choral music, some successful and others puddin’-sweet even to a 10 year old, one of the most fabulous things about Rutter is that he, under the auspices of his own record label Collegium, recorded and released gorgeous versions of much of the 16th and 17th century music I love dearly, as well as much of the 20th century British choral repertoire. His choir is made of mixed voices, which is to say, female sopranos and altos, and is for that and for other reasons free from a lot of the more intense restrictions of performance practice having to do with early music.

An aside: Early Music People need, like many academics, half a reason to fight each other to the death. I once witnessed Dutch people nearly come to blows over something to do with bow speed in Flemish viol fantasia. Even lay listeners approach fierce levels of loyalty to having the music sung by people of a certain gender, or not, or with a certain amount of vibrato, or nann vibrato, or only cheating vibrato in the sense that British Airways has a scheme wherein one is encouraged to “Raid the Larder;” vibrato here being the 4bidden cheese straw and its attendant whiskey enjoyed once in the flight and really only during Laetare Sunday but don’t tell.)

In any event, for a while, in America at least, the Rutter/Cambridge Singer versions of these pieces were the only ones I could get my hands on: an emergency trip to the Tower Records in Boston. This is, of course, before Amazon, before iTunes, so you’re dealing with literally saving up your money and going with your body up into the record shoppe and into the glassed-off porn/classical room and finding the cassette of Byrd motets. That was how I first heard recorded versions of Bow Thine Ear, the Byrd motet that is essentially the groundwork for emotional content in my music and life. So last week, I found myself in a makeshift control room, with John Rutter, recording orchestral arrangements of Bow Thine Ear and Miserere Mei with a sort of strange regressive delight — I didn’t know where to put my hands, I didn’t know if I should take two minutes and gush and babble which I think English people find really inappropriate (gushing and babbling is meant to occur only after several pints of beer; doing it before that time they either think you are insane or trying to get into their pants). I was also mortified and secretly delighted by the weirdness of the arrangements: they have a lot of secret little pokes and prods and interjections that are meant to represent the small electrical tics of the keen chorister’s brain while singing them; they are personal matters but, with any luck, radiate a certain twitchy love for the music.

Here is Rutter’s recording of Bow Thine Ear,

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Byrd Bow Thine Ear
John Rutter + the Cambridge Sangers

And here is my arrangement for Aurora; this is a live recording from a few years ago.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sion is wasted, is wa-a-a-asted + brought low. Also, still to this day when I have to void a check I am tempted to write “Desolate + Void” on it.

I am completely freaking out about how beautiful these Alfred Deller recordings are on Vanguard. The Bitter Withy! I had forgotten about this particular nugget from the Apocrypha – in it, Jesus as a boy tries to play ball with three rich boys, and they mock him for being poor, and then he basically tricks them into drowning. This recording is just 2 delish:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Alfred Deller The Bitter Withy

It’s also 200% a precursor to that amazing moment from Eddie Murphy:

I’d get my ice cream and I didn’t eat it; just sing for a little while. You know how kids are. “I have some ice cream, I have some ice cream, and I’m gonna eat it all, I’m gonna eat it all…” The ice cream be running down your arm and shit: “You don’t have no ice cream! You didn’t get none ! You didn’t get none! “‘cos you are on the welfare, you can’t afford it.” Other kids would join in: “You can’t afford it, and his father is an alcoholic !”

Either I’m losing my mind or the Netherlands are not really a pedestrian-friendly country. I am plagued, here, by the perpetual sense that somebody is trying to overtake me with a different mode of transit — a bike from behind, a tram from any direction, a combination bike-pushing-a-wheelbarrow-of-children. I always feel in the way; sidewalks are nonexistent because everybody has parked their bikes and empty child-barrows there. Add to this the fact that the all the plazas in front of the train stations (or at least the three I had to deal with this trip: Haarlem, Den Haag, and Amsterdam) are being ripped up and repaved; the whole thing is a mess to walk in. Something I like about being a pedestrian is the feeling that, despite reality, you own the street. New Yorkers are notoriously this way; in the Netherlands, even on a park trail, if you bend down to look at a flower, you’ve bent over a bike lane and a sanctimonious graphic design lady with great hair and a bad attitude is pinging her bell at the back of your head. I guess what I find irritating about it is that we are not talking about the chaos of Rome or Bangkok with mixed mode transit sharing the same seventy-five lane highway including grandma walking across the skreet with a bag of fennel, or, for that matter, a cortege of elephants. This is designed and tested, market-researched and paid for by the government. If you look at an overhead view of what the process is to be a pedestrian trying to get from anywhere near it to Centraal Station in Amsterdam, it’s a total joke. It involves stopping, with presumably all your bags, on a corner with a zillion people, and then walking across six or seven weirdly-timed mini-lights, stopping on median strips to avoid the slow-moving trams and fast-moving bikes. Next time I come here for longer than a week I am going to rent a scooter and get all Ben-Hur on these people.

Another weird/funny thing: the coffee store next to my hotel, which is sort of like Dutch Starbucks inasmuch as they are on every third corner, didn’t have lids for medium or large coffee cups for over a week. Not, in the scale of things, the end of the world, but strange nonetheless. A week! No lids. Does that not strike anybody else as odd?

We had a great time, though, at the ballet: Benjamin Millepied outdid himself with this new piece, which is exciting, fragile, and atmospheric. I tried to write him a very French, very turn-of-the-last-century mood with motors hidden in the chinoiserie. I think it worked out very well; the Holland Symphonia were great and good sports about it. I always forget that ballet orchestras never see a single step of the ballets they’re playing underneath, so asking them to tease certain nuances out to fit the movement better is always a blind act of faith.

I would pay anything to always have the internet everywhere. I cannot tell you how much more work I can get done with, say, 15 minutes with the fast internet. It’s one of those things where I could not imagine putting a price on being able to get somewhere, quickly shower and deal with my Person, and be online for a quarter of an hour at full tilt. Yesterday, on re-arriving in London, I had one of those near meltdowns as I had attempted to simultaneously Arrive at 7:30, consolidate three different currencies in my wallet, perform a costume change, throw out a bunch of shit from my bag, including the wrapping attendant to a loaf of cod roe — all of this in the subway, which resulted in my being absolutely That Crazy Lady with way too many clothes holding a fishy-smelling plastic bag muttering to myself about “why isn’t it trash cans.”