A co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Two Boys has been years in the planning. Hype has been intelligently fostered not only by the articulate figurehead of 29-year-old Muhly himself, but also in a multimedia assault of website and viral YouTube video. At last, a contemporary opera not only talking the digital talk, but tweeting it too.

Developing his interest in narrative opera, Muhly has taken the legacy of Britten and Berg and created a police procedural. Shocking crime, love interest, alcoholic loner detective, are all in the places allotted by countless episodes of Prime Suspect; even the dialogue of Craig Lucas’ libretto is the lumpen vernacular of text-speak and casual profanity of daily life, never allowing itself to get seduced into prose let alone poetry.

Yet somewhere in the background of this familiar drama – and always the background – is a new element: music. All the action must travel at operatic pace, must contend with the conventions of aria, duet, ensemble that make up the genre. Muhly’s answer too often is to attempt to wriggle around these, to transform a love duet into a “private chat”, musically fragmented and insubstantial, to deny closure in his Act I and II finales until even a passacaglia feels unfinished, inconclusive.

Muhly’s brand of muscular minimalism owes much to Philip Glass and more to John Adams, whose textures as well as whose techniques animate the writing. Yet while Adams will occasionally surrender to the lyric impulse, will use his musical processes to shape as well as reflect the drama, here music seems oddly incidental, a sort of over-promoted soundtrack to Bartlett Sher’s efficient production that coaxes where it should commandAt its best in the yearning strings of Brian’s (Nicky Spence) ode to the internet and in the poignant Britten-inspired writing for treble voice (precociously delivered by the captivating Joseph Beesley), it exposes itself at the moment of impact, the stabbing itself. Here surely is the drama to compel a composer, to force descriptive music into action; but just as John Adams’ Dr Atomic surrendered to sound-effect at the moment of nuclear explosion (a collapse earned, and sustained by the opera as a whole), so here Muhly refuses the challenge in orchestral writing that barely acknowledges the event.

Like the sinister, faceless cousins of Peter Grimes’ Borough, the chorus are central to Muhly’s drama – a multiplicity of voices, a web of aleatory polyphony that seethes and pulses with the life of the internet. Framed in the aura of glowing laptop screens it is their music that cocoons the drama, embracing and dissolving it into their digital Babel. Their music is staged by the exquisite animations and projections of 59 Productions, which fill the extremes of the Coliseum stage space with fluid worlds of codeless patterns.

If challenged by the music’s refusal to acknowledge character, ENO’s magnificent cast of singers didn’t show it. Nicky Spence outdid all expectation in the vocal authority and shading of teenager assailant Brian, matched for quality of tone by Mary Bevan’s pouting schoolgirl Rebecca. After an unusually uncertain start Susan Bickley stepped up to the crucial role of Anne Strawson, her dramatic experience serving her well through the rather thankless task she is set.

There is a contradiction at the core of all minimalist opera. Its anti-dramatic drama chafes against the memory of Wagner’s Gesamkunstwerk, and one must surrender to this tension if any understanding or enjoyment is to be had. In pitting narrative at its most urgent – the detective drama – against determinedly non-narrative music Muhly achieves an extraordinary feat, fostering genuine tension in his listener, calibrating his climax with mastery. Yet all goes for naught if he cannot, or will not, force the moment to its musical crisis.

The opera tackles the great themes of our age: the internet, youth corruptibility, sexual coming of age. And while Muhly’s music deals with these with a humanity and wisdom that opens many more emotional and intellectual doors than Prime Suspect could, its most basic building blocks are those of a well-structured ITV crime drama. The plot centres on a real-life attempted murder case. One suicidal teenage internet-obsessive conjures up a fantasy world and persuades another to meet him and to kill him. The opera follows detective Anne (Susan Bickley) as she tries to figure out who did what to whom.

That many of us knew most of the ins and outs of this bizarre story and yet still were hooked to every twist and turn shows the quality of much of screenwriter Craig Lucas’s plotting and Muhly’s musical setting. For make no mistake, Muhly’s score absolutely lives up to the media hype. Neither evading nor aping its Minimalist roots (there are carefully chosen quotes from teacher Philip Glass rather than heavy fingerprints), the score sets out on its own distinct, economical but powerful path.

Forbidding dark oceans of sound (punctuated by great booming eruptions from timpani or tuba) orbit the story like journeying whales, conjuring up the bottomless vastness of the internet, and echoing the sounds of the sea in Grimes. These give way to shallower pools of sound that allow for the music to move at a faster pace and engage in the more frenetic online activity, not least a bit of masturbation. This dramatic shape-shifting, mirrored by Lucas’s energetic plotting which ping-pongs back and forth in time, is aided by a remarkably fluid (if a little drab and bitty) set from Michael Yeargan.

It’s remarkable how the production and story conjure up this feeling of discombobulation without leaving you completely adrift. The glue is no doubt in the music: both in its recurring patterns and forms and its melody. Muhly writes quite beautifully for the voice. And every singer repays him handsomely. Heather Shipp and her glassy tones were mesmerising in the service of the mysterious internet intercessor Fiona. Mary Bevan was strong as the horny schoolgirl Rebecca. Jonathan McGovern delivered some exceptional singing as Jake.

What was especially fine about the central triumvirate, however, was the acting. Susan Bickley’s Detective, Anne, was like watching vintage Helen Mirren. Nicky Spence (Brian) may not have been a believable teenager to look at but more than made up for that in his irascible delivery. And then there was sweet little Joseph Beesley, the heartbreakingly damaged schoolboy mastermind of all this madness. His negotiation of the vocal and emotional terrain was simply incredible.

Stealing the show, however, and somewhat overshadowing the prosaics of Bartlett Sher’s production and direction (a good effort but uninspirational) were the graphics from Fifty Nine Productions and the way they worked their projections out over the choral writing. One breathtaking scene saw screen-saver geometry explode like fireworks over a veiled chorus of online chatterers, intermittently illuminating them and their computers. Their unsynchronised psalmody (in chatroom speak) resembled the ravishingly ragged feel of a Russian Orthodox congregation.

Muhly’s writing was full of powerfully resonant moments like these, which seemed to bore straight to an emotional core. I loved all the writing for massed voices. I loved the way he refused to end each part on a full stop. I loved the tuba-menaced quintet of the end of the first act. The heart stopped in the final passacaglia. Was there too much explanation of what the opera was about? No doubt. There were problems with the libretto (a number of weak lines here and there). But overall this was a terrific evening of opera. Muhly’s first entry to this genre – a long overdue operatic assessment of one of the great game-changers of our times: the Manichaean reality that is the internet – proves beyond doubt that he is a composer to be reckoned with. Do we have an heir to John Adams? Very possibly.

Now it’s the English National Opera’s turn, with a dark and undoubtedly controversial probe into the cyberworld and the murkier depths of the internet.
And, after the recent much-publicised arrest of a reclusive Essex teenager accused of hacking into Government websites, there is an eerie prescience about this extraordinary world premiere.

The young American composer Nico Muhly’s complex and often compelling new opera was inspired by a real-life internet crime in Manchester, where two boys were convicted of attempted murder and incitement to murder after the discovery of an elaborate series of chatroom dialogues.
Muhly’s opera – with a subtly idiomatic libretto by playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas – chillingly follows a woman detective’s investigation after a teenage boy is stabbed.
Is it attempted murder – or a weird internet pact? Agatha Christie it ain’t. ENO had warned that the work was unsuitable for under-16s, containing scenes of graphic sex and language that might offend.

Well, yes, there’s a fair amount of sexual content, including scenes of masturbation. But it’s never gratuitous and always dramatically credible.
Perhaps the real shock (for this internet-innocent, at least) is the insidious lure of the virtual world — a realm of fantasy, duplicity and obsession.
Director Bartlett Sher’s assured staging — a co-production with New York’s Met — claustrophobically captures this geeky, multi-faceted cyberworld with minimalist sets and brilliant video projections.

But the real revelation of the evening is Muhly’s score. It’s his first opera, and the vocal and orchestral writing is rich and accessible.
There are certainly hints of his mentor, Philip Glass, but the choral interludes are strangely reminiscent of Benjamin Britten.

It’s persuasively played under conductor Rumon Gamba, and a fine cast is led convincingly by Susan Bickley’s bemused detective and Nicky Spence as the teenage suspect, Brian.
The evening sometimes — perhaps inevitably — seems a little static. But it’s undoubtedly an opera for our time. I shall be reading my e-mails rather more closely in future.

Enter the young composer Nico Muhly’s opera “Two Boys,” which had its world premiere at the English National Opera here last week in advance of its arrival at the Metropolitan Opera, which commissioned it, during the 2013-14 season.

Here, finally, is not merely the music on the Internet, but the music of the Internet: a babble of overlapping fragments, texting as supertitles — “hey,” “i thought i lost u,” “r u there?”— that’s gorgeous and frustrating, transparent and impenetrable. It may just be a chorus singing it on a stage, each member’s face illuminated by his or her own laptop. But it’s also a vision of what our immense social networks might sound like if we could get outside of them and listen.

On Wednesday, at the third performance of the production, directed by Bartlett Sher, it was clear that Mr. Muhly, at 29, writing his first full-length opera, has done just that: been inside and outside, both an active participant in our culture and a detached observer of it. It is the delicate balance of every great piece of art, and “Two Boys” is Mr. Muhly’s best work yet.

Based on events that occurred in Manchester, England, in 2003, the opera’s libretto, by the playwright Craig Lucas, has the propulsion of a police procedural. The obligatory seen-it-all officer is Detective Inspector Anne Strawson, who is investigating an attempted murder: a teenager has stabbed a slightly younger boy.

In the course of her investigation, it becomes clear that things are — cue the “Law & Order” deadbolt clang — more complicated than they seemed. The credulous, well-meaning older boy, Brian, says he committed the assault under orders from shadowy figures with whom he would chat on the Internet.

Strangely enough, he is telling the truth, but it is gradually revealed that the whole thing has actually been orchestrated by the younger boy, Jake, who played the entire cast of goading characters, seducing and maddening Brian to incite his own murder. Jake wanted, it seems, the same things people have always wanted from the Internet: sexual excitement, a cure for loneliness, to experiment with different personalities. “To be loved,” the chorus adds at the end. “To be remembered.”

Without using electronic instruments, Mr. Muhly has created a world immersed in technology; his sound palette is Britten, not “Tron.” There are softly chiming gongs and ethereal winds, lyrical and sinuous strings and sympathetic, Romantic orchestral surges. The second act starts with an eerie, suspended calm punctured by string flourishes that develop into something almost folksy. There are foreboding minor-key arpeggios throughout, but Mr. Muhly ventures far beyond stock Minimalism. He even creates a new setting for part of the Anglican service; the sound of church music, dense yet floating, permeates the opera.

Indeed, the choral writing is the work’s most successful element. Touches of old-fashioned ornamentation have been added to Strawson’s straightforward lines to emphasize how technologically primitive she is. (“What’s a server?” she asks at one point.) Brian is given to excited exhortations.

But the solo lines in general blend together, highlighting the cipherish aspect of the opera’s characterizations. Strawson is stereotypically hard-bitten and secretly lonely; Brian is resolutely, utterly ordinary. The plot unfolds, but no one really learns anything or changes. Despite a committed cast (with standout performances by Susan Bickley as Strawson and Nicky Spence as Brian), it is the plot that sweeps us forward, not the characters. The opera’s resistance to neat, redemptive arcs is brave, but something is missing. We know the fact of Jake’s desperate loneliness, for instance, but we never feel its, or his, individuality.

This is partly a result of Mr. Sher’s efficient but faceless production. The scenes shift with cinematic ease: a conversation that begins in Brian’s bedroom might end seamlessly in Strawson’s office.

The projections on the looming walls, which help create spaces both real and abstract, are sometimes thrilling, with heart-pounding use of the “footage” from the crime scene. But the choral interludes are illustrated by images out of an AT&T commercial, networks of light forming and disintegrating. Giant blowups of computer printouts blur and recede risibly during Strawson’s detective work. And Mr. Sher has those stylized projections awkwardly share space with realistic furniture that actors are continually required to move.

Mr. Sher’s production is at its weakest in one of the opera’s crucial scenes, in which Jake arrives in Brian’s bedroom to proposition him. The blocking is dull and uncertain, with much of the action obscured by a desk. Since the scene’s complex mix of emotions — disgust, shame, love — motivates the climax of the opera, our lack of a clear sense of what has happened lessens the work’s eventual impact and our sense of these characters as people.

That so much emotion remains is largely because of Mr. Muhly, whose music is suffused with feeling and free of moral judgments. It is odd that the English National Opera has billed “Two Boys” as a “cautionary tale” about the Internet, when the opera represents online life more ambiguously, as a space of utter possibility, and Jake’s plot as a creative act. He plans to die, hoping that “everyone will say what a beautiful voice I had.”

That is the wish of any artist. In his program biography Mr. Muhly describes himself as “a former boy chorister”; it can’t be coincidence that Jake, too, is a choirboy and, like Mr. Muhly, a prodigy who loves to interact on his computer. Jake’s mother could be referring to Mr. Muhly when she describes her son: “He’s more grown-up than anyone I know.”

The opera derives much of its power from this intensely personal quality. “Two Boys” has much to do with being an artist — an individual — and the way society makes it possible (and impossible) to create, showing the disturbing roads creativity can travel. Its characters could perhaps be more vividly drawn, its production clearer, but it richly fulfills the promise of opera: an entertainment of ideas. For once, you leave the theater talking not about whether the soprano has hit her high notes but about a work’s themes, its relevance to our lives.

Serious and radiant, “Two Boys” is a landmark in the career of an important artist. Confidently staking his claim to the operatic tradition, Mr. Muhly has added to it a work of dark beauty.

Since late last year, it seems that the personable and obviously multi-talented Muhly has been (pardon the allusion) pushed down our throats from every media-angle, and by too many London hacks anxious to maintain their street-cred in Twitter-land. This kind of media blitz is obviously a two-edged sledgehammer: if the show bombs then everybody looks somewhat foolish, if it achieves critical and/or box-office success (I suspect the latter in this case) then we’ll probably get bombarded again all too soon with the next wonder-kid of modern music. Ah well.

Mary Bevan

At the world premiere of Two Boys last night, (cleverly being opened here and not at its co-pro alma mater of the Met) you would have been forgiven for thinking that you had missed the date and wandered into London Fashion Week. Everyone who had read all the supplements, all the tweets, all the blogs and listened to the podcasts — or even just came on spec because everyone else said they should — was there. It was achingly hip. Never mind — we all want opera extending its audience so why not? It probably swelled the coffers of the ENO champagne bar.

So how was it? Well, perhaps one should score it in TV Talent Show style and take it from there:
Story: 6/10, Music: 6/10, Production: 6/10……..you get the idea I expect. Singers? Definitely 8/10, if only for commitment to the work, vocal characterisation, and damn good acting within the limits of the production.

Craig Lucas has written a libretto that is based on a true news story of some years ago about two boys, internet chat rooms, assumed identities and attempted murder and this story — slight as it is in dramatic terms — worked to a point. What was lacking was any depth of characterisation, any motivations or emotional developments to give the piece structure. Maybe that was part of the plan: certainly the waves of music that swirled and pulsed and counterpointed the long articulated lines of speech/song didn’t suggest much in the way of dramatic development or journey. Muhly’s work is difficult to describe; his music is like high-class mood-music, or perhaps those compositions carefully constructed and “written to picture” for an expensive nature documentary. It doesn’t challenge the listener, nor does it repel — but I doubt it delighted or surprised many either.

Susan Bickley and Nicky Spence

The singers were universally good: the core of the story lies with the investigating police officer played by Susan Bickley (does she ever disappoint?) who has demons of her own to confront as a stranger in the strange land of her suspect’s virtual world of net friends. Her diction was excellent and character well-drawn. That suspect, who we know as “Brian”, is sung by young tenor Nicky Spence with a tremendous empathy for this pathetic, unintelligent, bullied young man who’s flashes of desperate anger at his uncomprehending parents just reinforce his weakness and lack of self esteem.

That excellent work was matched by the amazingly confident performance of boy treble Joseph Beesley — one just hopes that the calculated evil inherent in his character doesn’t leave too much of a shadow. The many supporting roles were equally well presented and sung without a single unhappy choice — and singers and orchestra (under Rumon Gamba) seemed well-rehearsed and remarkably slick considering this was a first night of an entirely new work.

On the production side, a few good ideas were made much of but could have been given more emphasis — the video backdrops of world-wide internet “chatting” — words repeating, and reappearing, and often mirroring the actual sung words. Some of the best dramatic moments came with the chorus spread around and above the stage suggesting the vast numbers of internet chatters communicating endlessly and pointlessly from their sad individual bedrooms. The graphic video work was good — but again could have been so much more; in fact the whole production just felt as if it were treading far too carefully, too “nicely” and was afraid of upsetting anyone. All a bit anodyne, in essence. Perhaps they will push the boat out a bit more for its New York premiere? Somehow, I doubt it.

Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but being trialled by English National Opera, the opera unfolds the whole rather pathetic tale in flashback, through the eyes and ears of Anne Strawson, the whisky-drinking detective investigating the case of Brian, aged 16, accused of stabbing Jake, aged 13. To find the causes of this seemingly inexplicable crime Strawson has to immerse herself in the world of chatrooms and internet role play, and then separate fact from fantasy in the story that Brian tells her.

If all that sounds like a plot from a run-of-the-mill British TV detective series with a female protagonist (Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect perhaps), then that is unfortunately what all too much of the opera seems to be, with the rather leaden text sung rather than spoken, and Muhly’s music provdiing the tasteful backdrop. The first of two acts unfolds as a frieze-like series of short stories, with little overall dramatic shape or focus; in the second, the pace may be a bit more urgent, but very little more convincing: always more documentary rather than drama, and a bland mid-Atlantic compromise at that.

Musically it unfolds far too sedately, with vocal declamation over smoothly contoured orchestral ostinatos, pitched somewhere between recent Philip Glass and the John Adams of The Death of Klinghoffer, as the default musical idiom. Just occasionally the music reveals what might have been – in the aleatoric choral writing depicting the cyber-babble of the chatrooms, the multi-layered chorus with which the work ends, or some of the wonderfully voiced orchestral textures, such as the poignant string lines that underpin the aria in which Brian attempts to describe the importance of the internet in his life. But balance between pit and stage is a regular problem, and too many vocal lines get swamped by the orchestral textures.

That’s when the Muhly one recognises from his previous orchestral and vocal works snaps into focus; but they are fleeting moments in what is, alas, a plodding and amorphous work. There is two hours of music, but it seems far longer, mostly because none of the characters – not Susan Bickley’s overworked Strawson, Nicky Spence’s rather two-dimensional Brian, or Jonathan McGovern’s Jake, let alone the sketched-in gallery of smaller roles – is given enough the dramatic presence to engage any sympathy.

Rumon Gamba’s conducting is as efficiently functional as Bartlett Sher’s production, in which video projections (computer graphics, cctv footage, chatroom exchanges) by 59 Productions provides most of the visual interest. There’s nothing really arresting, though, nothing to lift the general sense of disappointment that pervades the whole evening.

The story, loosely based on real events which took place in a Northern British industrial city, sees two boys become intertwined in a dark web world of chat rooms and shrouded identities. The story is presented via the investigating detective – a single, hard-edged, whisky-drinking policewoman (a stalwart character of too many crime dramas perhaps to feel entirely fresh to UK audiences), and through the online ‘conversations’ as experienced by the older of the two boys.

It’s an impressive debut in the genre from a composer, still not 30 years old, who has garnered much attention – not to mention a Decca deal – in the past few years. But what I want to reflect on here is the setting of speech, and what that means when ‘speech’ is something very different from the eloquent oration of a Mozartian hero.

For sustained sections of the opera Muhly takes the frenetic brevity of teenagers’ online exchanges, and sets them to music, and in so doing lends these truncated stabs at socialisation a humanity that only really exists in the eyes of the protagonist. But, we’re invited to consider, does it make them any less real, or meaningful, to those involved? Setting speech to music can elevate words above the the clumsy, earthy rhythms of language – it’s what makes opera such a powerful art-form.

And so in lending eloquence to these chat-room utterances, as Muhly does, he creates an almost painful parody of conversation – it hints, with pathos, at what web communication could and should be, but here isn’t. The story reveals that the exchanges of acronyms and abbreviations so often dismissed as txt spk by most of us, have a genuine importance, an almost hyper-reality, for those involved – tragically so in this case. It’s a reality given to them by Muhly’s music, and becomes one we can no longer avoid.

Muhly’s writing owes much to John Adams and Philip Glass, which is not to imply any sense of unoriginality – it’s a language that he’s absorbed as just one part of his own musical voice. Where his voice really shines however is in the epic, aleatoric choral moments, which Muhly describes as “a highly stylized, abstracted representation of chatter, a representation of the multiplicity of what’s on the internet”. Juxtaposed with the depravity and desperation of the words and images conveyed, it becomes not a shock chorus but a powerful and haunting expression of emptiness, at once sublime and desperately sad, an elegy to wasted possibilities.

These sections are enhanced by some beautiful visual imagery from 59 Productions, which captures the vastness and interconnectivity of the online world. Incidentally, the music here (not the text of course!) brought to mind some of the most inspired moments on Muhly’s disc of Anglican choral music, ‘A Good Understanding’: you can read a recent interview with Muhly (http://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/interviews/drinking- the-air-before-him-–-nico-muhly) by Gramophone’s James Jolly about this recording.

While the medium of the web may be new, human nature never is of course: both boys are ultimately victims of themselves, and history tells us that’s an old story. As the detective’s elderly mother reminds us when her daughter bemoans the youth of today, her generation was just the same. And despite the opera’s bleak analysis of the dark byways of the digital universe, Muhly, we might conclude from his blog (http://nicomuhly.com/) , sees much good in computers too. And if you’re reading this, I can assume you do as well.

We must just be grateful then that in Muhly’s youth, his computer presumably spent more time running Sibelius notation software than logged in to chat rooms.

Loosely based on a true story, Two Boys is about a 14-year-old computer geek, Jake, who invents a virtual world inhabited by entirely convincing international spies and murderers. It’s all part of a fantasy to draw the 15-year-old Brian, with whom he is infatuated, into his orbit; ultimately he persuades Brian to attempt to kill him.

That’s where the opera starts and the preceding events are unravelled by a female detective, Anne Strawson, who bears a generic resemblance to Sarah Lund of The Killing. Lucas’s intricate plotting is neatly done, weaving together past and present, reality and unreality seamlessly yet lucidly.

The projections and animations by 59 Productions – with striking use of computer- generated graphics – together with Michael Yeargan’s sets for Bartlett Sher’s production, are a tour de force and the twists and turns of the drama are edge-of-seat stuff.

All of which makes it so unfortunate that Muhly’s score isn’t more substantial. It’s eclectic to a fault – John Adams-style driving rhythms, Anglican chant and neo-Romanticism nestle together in almost indecent intimacy – and easy enough on the ear. The orchestration is often imaginative and it’s true that the music harmonises well with the drama in all its multi-faceted fluidity. But too little of it has real identity or force, depriving the experience of the extra dimension great art affords. Ultimately it all seemed as transient as, well, a chatroom conversation.

Susan Bickley ably explores the tensions underlying the creation of Anne Strawson. Nicky Spence is fresh-voiced as Brian, betraying alike his somewhat gullible parents and himself with his lapses of conscience. Mary Bevan and Joseph Beesley make fine contributions as Rebecca and Jake. Rumon Gamba is the accomplished conductor.

Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera as part of its program matching opera creatives with legit-world collaborators, “Two Boys,” bound for the Met’s 2013-14 season, is loosely based on a true crime that happened in Manchester in 2003.

Everything revolves around Brian (Nicky Spence), a 15-year-old who has been arrested. Having lived almost exclusively on the Internet in his bedroom, he claims to have been lured into a bizarre conspiracy and, ultimately, a murder. All of this is uncovered — rather too slowly — by a tired police detective Anne Strawson (tireless Susan Bickley; think the Tyne Daly half of “Cagney and Lacey”) who is skeptical of Brian’s story of being the victim but concedes that “even the most senseless crimes sometime make sense.”

Using the method beloved of police procedurals, playwright Craig Lucas’ libretto has Brian recounting events under questioning. The downside of this is the opera’s reliance upon only intermittently engaging expositional scenes. We watch Brian meet flirtatious Rebecca (Mary Bevan) in a chatroom, but just as tension between them begins to rise, she is suddenly murdered, possibly by the British Security Services MI5, leaving behind her vulnerable brother Jake (Jonathan McGovern).

The more bizarre Brian’s story grows, the more intrigued Anne becomes. In the swifter-paced, more dramatic second act, the piece moves more strongly into drama which is confrontational both in terms of action and its impact on audiences who are presented with scenes of masturbation and unconventional sexual longing.

In the work’s huge plot twist, both Anne and the audience realize that the facelessness of Internet “personal connection” allows true identity can be completely disguised to massively manipulative effect. And if that sounds vague, it’s because it is to Lucas’ credit that he and Muhly have arguably fashioned the first opera in which you do not wish to give away the plot. Better yet, the climactic revelation of identity is dramatized musically with the perpetrator’s twin identities sung by two singers whose voices finally overlap.

That none of the singers have much difficulty being audible attests to Muhly’s handling of a large orchestra. There a prevailing somber sonority to his colorful orchestration and he generates unease with repeated short phrases above often rich, slow-moving textures that create identifiable aural shapes.

The work’s other two major strengths are also musical. Firstly, the writing never descends into tiresome contemporary opera cliche of portraying angst by having singers shrieking at stratospheric pitch at which text is inaudible. And Muhly’s immersion in the Anglican choral tradition shows in his writing a key role for a boy treble (astonishingly assured Joseph Beesley).

Still, individual vocal lines, though easy on the ear, lack individuality. Paradoxically, the nearest the piece gets to achieving a wholly distinctive voice is in cascading chorus passages delivering multitudinous internet voices lit by the glow of hundreds of laptops. These scenes, with the entire stage flooded with video imagery, are the opera’s strongest.

Elsewhere, although Sher’s direction of the singers is precise, his grip on momentum is weak and his response to the text drably over-literal. That’s evident in Michael Yeargan’s anodyne, clunkily moved sets, with the spell continually broken by stagehands ushering furniture about.

With more than two years to go before its Met appearance, there’s time to develop the piece further. Tightening and a design rethink could only strengthen this not flawless but seriously auspicious debut.

“Two Boys” is perhaps the first operatic police procedural, in which dramatic events unfold in a series of interrogations and flashbacks. The New York-based Muhly is equally fluent in the TV tropes of “Law and Order” and the musical tropes of Benjamin Britten, and “Two Boys” is a grand homage to both. Though the opera focuses on the unsettling danger of the Internet, it has less to do with Twitter sex scandals than the nuances of deeply troubling personal relationships — more Britten’s Peter Grimes than Anthony Weiner.

The opera opens with the detective, Anne, puzzling over the bizarre attempted murder. As she interviews Brian, the culprit, she discovers a complicated game of online theatrics: Jake, Brian’s victim, created multiple identities in order to trick the other teen into cybersex and eventually the violent attack.

As Anne becomes more involved with the solving of the crime, she neglects her personal life (already a mess), treating the online world more seriously and even beginning to believe that some truth might underlie Jake’s masquerade. Playwright Craig Lucas’s libretto deftly conveys the nuances of language in instant messaging and real-world conversation.

“Two Boys” dragged towards the beginning but quickly picked up steam, and Muhly’s talents were fully evident by the first entrance of the ENO’s enchanting chorus. In several choral numbers, easily the best parts of the opera, Muhly transformed the unrelenting buzz of the Internet into a kind of ecstatic glossolalia, in which hundreds of words are layered atop each other to create a tableau of chanted gibberish (a technique already known to anyone familiar with the composer’s album Mothertongue). The chorus basked in the glimmer of laptop screens as projections by the team 59 Productions superimposed swirling visual representations of the Web onto the otherwise stark set.

Muhly composed several tender, brief, solo arias for the principal characters, and engaging dialogues both online and off. Though his music suggests the throbbing postminimalism of John Adams, his most clear influences come from this side of the pond — the English choral tradition of Herbert Howells (evoked in a somewhat out-of-place church scene) and the operas of Britten. “Two Boys” teems with references to Britten, from the pealing gamelan-style gongs of “Death in Venice” to the finale, an ornate passacaglia straight out of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Muhly’s score alternates between clear, pulsating lines and submerged menace, though the music sometimes lacks the brutality to match the violence of the subject matter. When the stabbing finally occurrs, it is almost empty of music, missing the inexorable urgency of Verdi or Berg.

But “Two Boys” is an impressive freshman opera and deserves its place at the Met in the 2013-14 season. Bartlett Sher, who has had mixed success transitioning to opera direction, crafted a compelling and well-acted production, sharply contrasting drab reality with the seductive glow of the Internet.

Mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley vividly portrayed Anne and tenor Nicky Spence sang Brian with subtlety; the ethereal boy soprano Joseph Beesley almost stole the show as the real-life Jake. Rumon Gamba conducted Muhly’s score with verve and the ENO orchestra sounded in fine form.

In the final moments of the opera, as Anne finally comprehends Jake’s elaborate mind game, a chorus of anonymous Internet users sings of love and murder over the sound of misty gamelan gongs. Even as it presents the most horrifying extremes to which people can use the Internet, “Two Boys” suggests that there might be logic, and even beauty, behind the chaos of the online world.

Over the span of 110 minutes, American composer Nico Muhly and librettist Craig Lucas take the audience and the main character, detective Anne Strawson, sung by English soprano Susan Bickley, on a journey from her office where she is trying to understand the seemingly senseless attempted murder of one teenage boy by another, to the darkest corners of the Internet.

Single, a technophobe and living with her aged mother, Bickley’s character discovers by the end that in life, as well as on the web, people “want to be loved.”
She also finds out that no one is who he or she seems to be, and that life is a masquerade — one of opera’s oldest ploys.

The production is up-to-the-minute Internet-friendly, with video projections that portray the web as twisting, interlinked strands of light, a chorus of chattering Internet voices and the whole mounted on a set that wouldn’t look out of place in a Hollywood film “noir.”

“There is always some sense — not here, not here,” Bickley, baffled by the stabbing, sings shortly after the opera, a highly publicised co-production of the English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, opens in a moody minor key.

The initial theme is a four-note riff that crops up again and again and might be a signature tune for a computer booting up or connecting to the Internet. And what a disaster awaits poor, 16-year-old Brian, a hard-working but dull student, sung superbly by the young Scottish tenor Nicky Spence. Using the web identity “A_Game,” when he logs on in his bedroom for his nightly web surfing he stumbles across the girl of his dreams, who says her name is Rebecca (soprano Mary Bevan) and uses the alias “Mindful_16.”

She says she lives in the same town, behind a new shopping mall, and has a brother Jake, but she is coy about giving out her address, although she convinces Brian to show her “his stuff,” with his pants down, using his webcam. The opera, which is based on a real case that occurred in Britain, is not recommended for anyone under the age of 16.

It turns out that “Mindful_16″ as well as a secret agent named Fiona (mezzo Heather Shipp) whose files Jake supposedly has hacked from her computer, are all false identities created by Jake, who is the boy soprano in the choir at the church Brian attends with his parents and has a crush on him.

The boy soprano version of Jake (baritone Jonathan McGovern does his doppelganger) is sung by Joseph Beesley with just the right touch of innocence-going-to-seed. If he cannot have the boy of his dreams, he will manipulate Brian to stab him to death in the delivery ramp area of the shopping mall.

VALENTINE TO BRITTEN

Muhly, who at age 29 is a rising star with feet in the independent rock scene of Icelandic singer Bjork and in the classical world, has called his first opera “a valentine to Benjamin Britten,” whose spirit seems to infuse the piece.

An orgy of Internet porn unleashed into Brian’s computer when he tries to find “Rebecca” after she abruptly stops chatting with him has echoes of a Dionysian dance interlude in Britten’s most overtly homosexual-themed opera, “Death in Venice,” based on the Thomas Mann novel.

There are ear-catching washes of sound, reminiscent of the works of American minimalists John Adams and Philip Glass, for whom Muhly worked for two years, but the overall style is very much his own. Bickley, for example, has two arias in which one of the main instrumental sounds is provided by the tuba — a stunning contrast with her strong, clear soprano voice.

The result is not a complete success for some.

“Such is the hype around the young American composer Nico Muhly that it’s difficult to judge his first opera squarely,” critic Rupert Christiansen wrote in The Daily Telegraph.

“But my first impression of ‘Two Boys’ is that it is a bit of a bore, dreary and earnest rather than moving and gripping, and smartly derivative rather than distinctively individual.”

Yet for the cheering opening night audience it was a treat.

“Nico Muhly’s music is so rich and beautiful, this is for our generation,” said Ashil Mistry, 17, of London, attending with friend Anne-Marie Twumasi of Ghana.

“It’s also quite sobering,” he added.

With most of the action taking place in cyberspace, it is a thoroughly modern opera, both disturbing and challenging.

The plot could have come straight from one of the Prime Suspect TV dramas, with a very Helen Mirren-like detective investigating the stabbing of a young teenager.

The victim had been conducting an online relationship with an older boy, with their chat having elements of sex, spies and violence, and most of the onstage action is a recreation of their talk, against a projected background of cyberbabble that captures both the inanity and sometimes threatening nature of the worst FaceBook and similar social networks have to offer.

Very rare for an opera, Two Boys actually has a plot that makes you eager to know what happens next. The crucial moment in the detective’s investigation comes very cleverly when she is talking to her aged Mum on the subject of clothes and make-up, and her Mum tells her that we try to present ourselves in a way that other people want.

Detective inspector Anne Strawson, very convincingly sung and acted by Susan Bickley, suddenly realises the true nature of the fantasy lives that the Internet permits, and everything begins to fit together.

For once, the programme of the opera includes no detailed plot synopsis in order not to give anything away. I feel bound to follow their lead on that matter. The story, though, is said to be based loosely on a real-life incident, and its unravelling is quite shocking.

In the role of Brian, the main suspect, Nicky Spence gives a fine performance as an intense, insecure teenager. While Mary Bevan, Jonathan McGovern and Joseph Beesley give excellent support as his Internet ‘friends’. The music, as one would expect from Muhly, is definitely not of a singalong variety, but provides powerful and emotional audio background for the disturbing storyline. Michael Yeargan’s gloomy sets and Bartlett Sher’s direction complete a thoroughly successful production.

The English National Opera has vigorously pursued a policy of commissioning new operas and new productions of old ones. Sometimes this has been distinctly less than successful, but when it works as powerfully as in Muhly’s new work, the result can be astounding.

Twenty-nine-year-old American composer Nico Muhly has an extraordinary CV for his age. Achievements include works being premiered by the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, a collaboration with Björk, and composing the film score for The Reader. If all this weren’t enough, shortly after this review is posted English National Opera will perform the British première of his first opera, Two Boys, with its thoroughly modern storyline about the darker side of the internet. In other words, think Muhly, think youthful no-rules classical, full of cross-genre inventiveness, and indeed that’s exactly what you get with Seeing Is Believing.

Seeing Is Believing references the ancient practise of observing and mapping the sky. His third album for Decca Classics, it punctuates four of Muhly’s original compositions with three of his orchestral arrangements, of motets by Byrd and Gibbons. Miserere Mei is particularly fascinating for the fact in which initially it appears to be a literal orchestration job, thanks to the way he has carefully conserved the original vocal part-writing. However, upon the opening of the “Zion is wasted” section, everything changes. Carefully placed little modern twists appear in the shape of registral extremes in the piano and gamelan gongs, which surprise, delight, and thoroughly update the originals whilst maintaining all their sense of antiquity and sacred dignity. It’s genius. They’re mesmerising complements to his original compositions, which are edgy, sometimes delicate, vital works, heavy with the influence of the great American minimalists but also drawing from modern electronic idioms. The title-track, a concerto for electric violin, is a case in point, played with brilliance by Thomas Gould. Equally brilliant are the Aurora Orchestra’s performances. In the motet arrangements, their playing style is a delicious amalgam of early and contemporary playing styles, whilst the original works are presented with energy, dynamism and a sheer joy in the music.

If Muhly is a new name to you, then this beautifully performed disc is the one to get hold of. His music is clever, young, complex and multi-faceted. It’s also capable of beguiling listeners of all ages, classical ‘experts’ and newcomers alike. You can’t ask for more than that.

Effortlessly straddling the academic and the popular, the 29-year-old Muhly’s sprawling oeuvre spans pieces premiered by the Chicago Symphony and American Symphony orchestras, film scores for Choking Man and The Reader, special commissions for the American Ballet Theatre, not to mention a long-term working relationship with Philip Glass (as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects), and a multitude of creative exchanges within the upper echelons of the alt.pop world: think Antony and the Johnsons, Bjo?rk, Bonnie Prince Billy and Grizzly Bear.
Muhly’s natural eclecticism and Herculean work ethic have made him a poster boy for the edgier side of the classical scene, with newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic drooling over his multifarious talents and infectious energy. In what can be seen as a breakthrough moment, The New Yorker published an in-depth profile of him in 2008, while the UK’s Daily Telegraph has hailed him “the planet’s hottest composer”.

“I don’t really deal with it,” says Muhly, via e-mail, of the media circus that seems to follow – and often anticipate – his every move. “Nor would I say I’m really enjoying; ‘swimming’ is a better word. But [this attention is] just internal to the press. They’ll just as soon be excited as they will write something awful, so I just continue making the best work I know how to make and hope that all the attention is a net positive for all young composers.”
Educated at Columbia and Juilliard (English literature and a masters in music, respectively), Muhly cuts a smart, yet personable figure, equally at home with literary theory and arcane theology as with pop culture and social media. He is an ardent user of Twitter, and among hobbies such as running, cooking and writing his increasingly popular blog, he also “loves going on interminable spirals into the depths of Wikipedia entries”.

While his work is eminently approachable, Muhly lacks the air-brushed patina of today’s classical crossover artists – Katherine Jenkins, Josh Groban and David Garrett – though he does have the handsomely boyish looks. His music also lacks commercial gloss, whether an experimental setting of a hymn (see Stabat Mater, a work commissioned to precede Harrison Birtwistle’s angular vocal scena The Corridor), his sparse, moody film scores (The Reader) or his two eclectic albums, which feature everything from choirs to samples of marinating whale meat slurping around in a bowl.

Born in Vermont and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, Muhly moved to New York for school and began producing the innovative works that have made his name. Early successes include orchestration for the film score for The Manchurian Candidate; a cycle of songs based on Strunk and White’s grammatical reference book The Elements of Style; and New York’s Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue commissioning and performing his Bright Mass with Canons (a work that has since entered the church’s regular repertoire).

Diverse as it is, discernible threads have emerged in Muhly’s work. Influences from the minimalists – Steve Reich and Glass are particular favourites – are overt, but the conceptual elements are counterbalanced by his passion for Anglican choral music and
such English Renaissance composers as William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons – then come colourful splashes of indie rock and electronica. The outcome is thoroughly modern, of course, but also joyfully expressive, brave and underpinned by a sense of emotional honesty.

Muhly considers his merging of the conservatory and pop more generational than personal. “I think that whatever I’m doing is pretty firmly outside the academy, but with definite roots there,” he says. “Even if I’m doing, like, a completely pop project like the album I made with Jo?nsi [from the Icelandic band Sigur Ros], I’m calling on skills that come very specifically from Juilliard and the general idea that technique is one of the best things you can bring to a collaboration. Even if you’re cooking on the beach, it’s nice to have all your vegetables cut the same size, you know?”

Our conversation takes place during one of Muhly’s regular stopovers in Reykjavik, a place that has become a kind of second home since he began working with Valgeir Sigurdsson, the sometime Bjo?rk collaborator and founder of the small but ambitious Bedroom Community label, which numbers the Australian experimentalist Ben Frost, the American singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and the Icelandic avant-classical composer Dani?el Bjarnasson among its roster.
In a typical display of bonhomie over business strategy, Muhly released his two solo albums (2006’s Speaks Volumes and 2008’s Mothertongue) through Sigurdsson’s boutique imprint, and regularly collaborates with his label-mates, and their extended musical families. “It’s all a kind of network, or love-fest,” he explains. “Iceland is a great place to write and work, because basically everybody here – like, basically every sentient being — is doing some pop stuff, some classical, some folk, and all with no sacrifice of quality. It’s very liberating to see how little people care about genre here, and how much everybody is down to listen to everything.”

Muhly thrives on this sense of open-mindedness. While extremely capable as a solo composer or arranger, he is continuously jetting around the world (“I’m usually in an airport or cooking”) to arrange, compose, conduct with others.

“I have about sixteen million things happening right now,” he says. “Slash, an opera, which has been rather loomy in the schedule; this opera which opens next year in London then migrates to New York; a chamber opera that will be in NY in 2012, a piano concerto, a bunch of collaborative things; and with any luck, I’ll start chipping away at an album this summer. I’m not too anxious about making another one just yet, honestly, because while making them is a total joy, they require some serious effort in touring, promoting and so on. I’d rather do that when I can really set aside the time to do it properly.”

There would seem to be no rush. Muhly also has two typically diffuse projects due on the Decca label. One – I Drink the Air Before Me – was conceived as a contemporary dance score and will be performed in the Barbican Hall, London in October, 2010. This aggressive, heterogenous piece is written for an amplified ensemble featuring piano, viola, trombone, string bass, bassoon and flute/piccolo. “I wrote it as an evening-length piece for this choreographer, Stephen Petronio, whose work I’ve always loved, but with whom I’d never worked,” Muhly explains. “He had a bunch of intense ideas about weather and storms and electricity. We threw things back and forth for a few months, then this music sort of erupted.”

The second Decca project, A Good Understanding, is both more understated and more personal. The album is a recording of Muhly’s choral pieces as
performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted by the acclaimed musical director Grant Gershon – a man who has worked hard to expand the Master Chorale’s repertoire and led them in a number of world premieres, including works by Steve Reich, Eve Beglarian and Donald Crockett.
Muhly, who trained as a chorister in his early years, is well known for his obsession with the human voice. As such, A Good Understanding represents a particularly poignant moment in his career: the first major release of his beloved choral works.

As one would expect of a committed thinker and adventurer into the wider implications of music, Muhly’s love for the form also goes far beyond mere sound, touching on ideas of time, ritual and tradition. “I prefer music where nobody claps, and I love the idea that the music becomes instantly sucked up into this traditional cycle of meaning that spans over the year,” he says. “It’s much more branche? than the concert tradition, which is rather abstract when you compare it to the giant liturgical calendar.”

Employing adult and child voices, A Good Understanding draws on spiritual music such as William Byrd’s Senex Puerum Portabat, but also includes an ecstatic arrangement of Walt Whitman’s poem Expecting The Main Things From You. Given the breadth of his work – from instrumental chamber pieces to surging masses of human voices – it is difficult to pin Muhly’s sound down. However, asked which genre he would prefer to work in if he could choose only one, his reply is immediate. “After existing on the periphery of the choral music world for so many years, it gives me huge shivers of pleasure to be able to collect all of this music in one place,” he says. “I am also especially pleased that it’s coming from such an unexpected place: Los Angeles! ”
Whether it’s his sociable nature or the realisation that collaboration engenders inspiration, Muhly appears to instinctively recognise the importance of working with others. In some ways, his work pulls together not just his own influences but the styles, nuances and ambitions of others, mixing up the mandarin and the demotic, the outre? and the accessible.

“The nature of being a composer is being alone, and collaboration is a natural way to interact with people that’s both work and play,” he says. “I have to say that my favourite collaborator is always my most recent one. I’m doing a thing right now for Jo?nsi again, he’s great; I’m doing another set of things with Antony [Hegarty], who’s great … I don’t know, I love everybody.”

Paul Sullivan is a Berlin-based writer and photographer whose work has been published in The Guardian, The Independent, Financial Times and Wax Poetics. He is also the author of several music and travel books.

A Good Understanding (Decca)
I Drink the Air Before Me (Decca)

Nico Muhly, not yet 30, is one of the most talked-about musicians of his generation. His musical sympathies range from working with artists as diverse as Björk, Philip Glass, Grizzly Bear and Antony and the Johnsons, and writing music for films like The Reader or an opera for English National Opera and The Met. In town for a couple of performances at the Barbican of the dance piece “I Drink the Air Before Me” – a collaboration with Stephen Petronio and his Company – he spoke with Gramophone. And the conversation started with his two new albums for Decca, the music for “I Drink the Air…” and “A Good Understanding”, five of his choral works sung by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

JJ Thinking of one of your new Decca albums, “A Good Understanding”, how did an American boy develop such a love for, and feeling for, the Anglican liturgy?

NM Well, it just happened accidentally. I was in a choir and obviously it was the only sort of music we were singing because one of the great things about that tradition is that it’s preserved in wax. I don’t want to say there’s very little new music – because there clearly is – but there’s very little outside influence. And there has always been very little outside influence. If you look at the dates when things were composed …

JJ … there’s a sort of continuum.

NM Exactly, and once you’ve kind of committed to it you can’t really swim out – which I like. But the fact of it happening in suburban Boston is bizarre but also true.

JJ Was it an Anglican church?

NM Yes. And in that strange tradition of Anglican churches that aren’t here [in the UK], they’d preserved a lot of old-fashioned ways of dealing with the liturgy – in ways that would be considered old-dated, even here. And the choirmaster was given free rein to do whatever he wanted which I thought was kind of great and it was very strange – contextually.

JJ So did they do the whole thing right from Byrd and Tallis to Herbert Howells?

NM …and even into Tippett. We did some contemporary things, but yes, right through everything: Finzi and so forth. Very comprehensive!

JJ And are you drawn to those early 20th-century British composers?

NM I am and I never really realised the extent – so immersed was I in this music. I never thought it wasn’t what everyone thought about and talked about. I guess I knew so much Howells and when I turned up at school people said “Who?”. You would never normally have heard a note if you hadn’t done what I’d done. By the standards of what you’ve been taught academically this music is “not good” but then it connects in such a way especially if you’ve come from the tradition of making it, singing it. Some of my earliest great musical experiences were singing Howells. It’s so good, so well put together – it still works all the time!

JJ So all the works on “A Good Understanding” were commissioned?

NM Yes. Some from the UK, some from America. This is a strange disc because none of it was written for the disc and in as much as I wrote all the music it’s really the product of the Master Chorale who wanted to do it very much. It was very happy to let this music exist in its liturgical context and it wouldn’t have occurred to me how to record it. So it’s a great sort-of gift, an unexpected thing.

JJ Some of the music here was written for all-male choirs – with boys’ voices – is that a timbre that you’re drawn to?

NM Yea, of course! That, for me, is the emotional connection to the music itself. For me that happened by singing it, but now there’s such a wide variety of good recordings with mixed choirs it’s become slightly less an issue…

JJ And the women’s voices are going for a much whiter, purer sound now so it’s sometimes not immediately obvious who’s singing.

NM Exactly, you sometimes have to listen longer to figure out which voices are being used. For me, the boys’ voices is one thing, but the countertenors is what I miss if it’s a mixed choir. That’s the sound I miss.

JJ So how did what you call your ‘First Service’ come about?

NM That was a complicated thing! There was an American woman who knew Tim Brown who was at Clare College Cambridge, so it was ‘You should write something for the choir’. So in this crazy way it just happened. It was one of these exciting and confusing academic cross-over things. So I wrote it and they’ve been doing it ever since.

JJ Here’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask a composer: what’s your relationship with your music once it has, as it were, flown the nest and gone its own way? Do you maintain a relationship or do you just move on with life?

NM It’s different for different pieces. There are certain pieces you can hold onto because you’re playing them yourself or if there’s something that you would be expected to deal with in some way. I prefer if I can – if someone has commissioned a piece in the formal way – for the piece to become theirs more than mine. And in that sense you want them to do what they want with it. But if you’ve done a really good job of notating it and making it as clear as possible in the score, it can start happening from people you haven’t met, in places you’ve never been. And it can start happening in contexts you can never imagine. So that, to me, is the goal for most of my music. But some I write specifically for me, or for me and my friends.

JJ And is that very much part of your make-up as a musician that the playing of music is as important as the writing of it?

NM Yes and no. Not for everything, but the fact that there exists music that I can play in juxtaposition with music that other people can play – without me – that’s interesting. If you write a piece for, say, string quartet and you’re constantly fiddling with it and are constantly involved in it then it’s kind of annoying for everybody. And if the parts are never done, and are constantly being revised, then there comes a moment when you have to say “If I get hit by a truck, that’s it. People can still do it.” Then there are other pieces that you think “I’ll continue to do them until my fingers won’t go any more.” So it’s about having both.

JJ And do you tend to tinker around with your music?

NM No, I try not to, unless it’s a collaborative thing and I need to. But in general I think it’s best not to. It’s a bit like thinking how I’d redecorate my old apartment. Once you go there in your head, you want to do everything differently.

JJ So, turning to “I Drink the Air Before Me”, which is a dance piece, how does it work in a dance collaboration? Because composer and choreographer – here Stephen Petronio – are very much equals in the equation…

NM The way we put it together was really fun. We mapped out the whole structure on a napkin in as bird’s eye view as we could, which is basically in a straight line. From nothing to everything! We then took turns making rules for the piece. Stephen said “I definitely want it to be an unbroken hour of music”. Cool! I said “I definitely want it to be for small, amplified ensemble”. He said “Good!” I said “I definitely want to use a children’s choir at the beginning and at the end” – that’s fine. And we went back and forth, and then he had some things that he knew he wanted – like a very aggressive trio for three boys. And he wanted a very calm duet for two girls. He wanted this crazy spiral crowd-scene thing where you could never tell how many people were on stage. We mapped it out and I started writing completely out of order. I went from most intense to least intense – did the really crazy things first and then the stuff with the fewest notes last! Then we started tinkering together: he’d ring suggesting one bit become longer and one shorter. It remained an “open source” until very close to the premiere which was a year ago in New York. And at that point I just said “If you need me to make it longer, I’ll make it longer. And he’d say if you can’t play that faster then I’ll make it shorter and so on. You work it out, you pick your battles – you don’t want to force anything but then you can see it on stage especially with dance because it’s so physical. You can’t fake not knowing the timing, you can’t fake gravity! If you just up you fall down – it’s that simple! There’s no fudging!

JJ In a score like this, though you’ve got an hour’s worth of music, it’s quite episodic.

NM Yes, it is episodic. The episodic nature of it is something we built into the piece. And once you’ve fixed that then yes, it does have similarities with film music because you’re imagining scenarios with bodies, and scenarios where the attention of the audience needs to move in a non-linear way. It wants to be receiving both musical and visual information. At the same time without it being obvious which is communicating with you.

JJ And did you structure it in certain ways so that there are moments of intensity, calm…and so on

NM Yes, you do. But you also want to make it – as you would with a film – so that if there’s a big emotional thing happening you don’t want necessarily need to be doing anything. You need to be showing that not doing that. And in other places if you’re leading up to something it can be more powerful if you anticipate things. If you anticipate a gesture you can deliver it in a rather cartoonish way. Some film composers do want to do that: really nail it. Sometimes the music announces something and then goes very much to the background and sort of hovers. And there are other places where the dance is very intense and the music is almost silent. The dancers now know it so well that it feels very different from when we put it together.

JJ Does it change from performance to performance?

NM It can! The way that I wrote the piano part for this – for me to play – is weird! There are a couple of places where, depending on where I start in relation to the rest of the instruments, it can go in different ways. It’s sort of aleatoric, but very very controlled. It’s a sort of ‘if…then’ function.

JJ And is it the same dance?

NM No, they’ll react in different ways appropriately. But Stephen did it in such a way that they wait for things to happen and then react to it. You know the way people talk about chamber music: “Oh, it’s a conversation” – but I’ve always liked the idea that rather than being a conversation between the players it’s like a whole bunch of people at desks on the phone talking to other people that you can’t see.

JJ So it’s a conversation – but not between the players on stage!

NM Exactly! There are certain sections where each player is doing his or her own little thing and the piano sort of organises it all together with this gigantic ‘thump’ and everyone has to change. Which for me is a fun, physical way to treat chamber music.

JJ So was “I Drink the Air…” a kind of milestone – in scale and ambition – of what you’ve been writing?

NM Yes
and no. It was definitely the longest unbroken thing I’d done, but it was a really easy collaboration. It didn’t feel like I was doing this really enormous crazy effort: it felt very workmanlike and it felt good to produce that much music for a single thing. It’s a lot!

JJ But then you sets your sights on an opera – and that’s a huge structure.

NM Writing large things like operas does have the advantage that the libretto provides you with a structure, and it’s not joined episodes. An opera needs to feel like a single big idea! It has a lot of rooms in it, but it’s one single entity! Structure is scary if you stop and think about writing two hours of music!

JJ Presumably there are instances where you don’t have a lot of choice; people come and say “We want you to do such and such…” presumably at that point you think “I haven’t written a symphony, or a concerto and I want to do that next as a kind of rite of passage”.

NM The ideal situation is to take work that you want to do and not have to do a million of the same thing. In a lot of cases the commissions themselves bear a kind of structural requirement. But that’s good and to be celebrated.

JJ Do you warm to the idea of composer as profession. You sit down at the start of a day and think “This is what I’ve got to do today”.

NM I totally do!

JJ And does writing music come easily?

NM Thinking about it like that it does, but actually doing it, not necessarily all the time. I always think about the extraordinary amount of music that church composers had to generate.

JJ Like Bach! If he was physically to write out all his music, how would he have had the time without actually composing the stuff as well?

NM I know – even as a copy job it’s mind boggling! Maybe he had all his kids upstairs writing it all out! Or even someone like Orlando Gibbons… There’s a lot of Gibbons and it’s all complicated. Or Byrd or anyone who was really a state employee! There’s a real bullshit filter on that kind of music because you just don’t have time to go into the woods and commune with nature! It’s Thursday and the choir’s waiting for the parts! I think that model of working is really good – again I think of the church composers in that regard. You think of the amount of really emotionally compelling and emotionally involved music – Taverner or Byrd, who’s really the best example. It was all done incredibly quickly and all done over an incredibly short period of time, and it was sort of dropped into the stream of this repertoire and it’s been there ever since. There’s something really crazy and fabulous about that. That to me as a kid was completely at odds with the pedagogical thing that basically Germany was this clock-making place that turned into this big emotional place and that was the history of music! People were once craftsmen and then all of a sudden they had ideas about philosophy and the nature of humanity and then “It’s Beethoven” or “It’s Wagner!” …

JJ … for a huge length of time!

NM Yes, for many, many years!

JJ But in a way as an American composer you can draw on a much more democratic background. It’s much freer because there’s a huge ocean in the way and you could say goodbye to the German tradition.

NM Yes, in a way. But it’s like that creeping chervil – those things never go away! You can pretend like it’s not there! People seem to know more about music that isn’t their own. Just the other day I was talking to the Guildhall kids and it was all “Stockhausen this and Stockhausen that”. And I was like “Does anyone know the Britten Abraham and Isaac Canticle” and it was like “Who?” But there is something fun about being American but it’s not to say we don’t have baggage. We have a ton of baggage but it just expresses itself in a different way. And the Continental traditions when they were adopted, were adopted real hard!

JJ But presumably writing something like film music doesn’t carry the same kind of stigma that it does this side of the pond…

NM Oh it does! You just think it doesn’t because we make it seem so effortless and fun! No, of course it does – but not like you have to care! What does stigma even mean! People are still hanging on real hard to high/low, uptown/downtown, but it’s generational.

JJ …and the watershed between the generations is moving ever higher so soon the divide between people who have no problem with a composers writing film music and those who do is …

NM …if we hold our breath for ten years then it’ll be fine! They’ll all have died off! Or their students will have mellowed out. I just don’t worry about it.

JJ Do you think that writing film scores will always be part of your work?

NM I do like it! And actually it’s really funny. It’s like everything you’ve been taught to do, everything you’ve learned, everything you’ve taught yourself to do – and it all has to happen really quickly. I mean really quickly: like in about a sixth of the time! For this dance piece I had something like eight months, whereas in a film score I had six weeks! It’s really crazy! And you have to record it and you have like 16 people breathing down your neck. It’s a very stressful process. But for some films you don’t hear from anyone and for others you have people virtually living in your house and poking your cheek to wake up! It depends greatly! What doesn’t change is that you have very little time to generate a lot of music that has to be very precisely synchronised to something. It’s technically very complicated. It’s like an Olympic event because it’s over so quickly.

JJ But it must also put you in touch with your own musical voice and how finely you can tune emotional responses through music?

NM Exactly! Exactly!

JJ Take the score for The Reader. If you watched the film without the music it would be powerful but nowhere near as gut-wrenching.

NM The music for that was really interesting because you had to have your skill-set in really good shape! I always give this as an example but I learned so much from this one moment! At the end of the movie Hanna Schmitz has learned how to write and how to spell her name, and there’s been this cue that’s been in for a few minutes because we’re moving quickly through time, so there needs to be music there. And when she writes her name on a piece of paper to say she’s received a package or whatever you’ve a number of choices about what the music’s going to do. You think, “Well, we can give her something, we can give her a note there”, “We can not notice it” or we can kind of undercut it and make it sinister. It’s a question of a single pitch – it’s a G sharp or a G natural in the harp or the oboe or whatever. And the scary thing is that in the first draft I did, it had this note in it and it really made it seem like it was okay she killed all those people and that adult literacy is really good and good on her!

JJ And who was making the decision about what would go in?

NM It was me and the director and the producer and the editor. There were five or six of us in the room. And we were watching just mortified because it just could not have been more wrong! Stephen Daldry, who’s a wonderful film director but also a wonderful stage director, has a great way of talking about music. It’s incredibly refreshing. He’s “This does work”, “This doesn’t work.” Two options!

JJ On, off!

NM Yes, no! “Keep it in the movie!”, “Get it out of the movie!” I came back the next afternoon with music that ignored it and he’s like “If we’re ignoring it why are we making a movie about it? If it doesn’t matter why are we sitting here in a darkened theatre thinking about it?” So you have to compromise and find some way of loading the material with saying “While it’s good that you’ve learned to write your name, it’s still not okay that you killed all those people that time, however…” All at the same time!

JJ But that’s surely the great power of music because it can be incredibly complex because it’s purely abstract. So you can be ironic, or duplicitous, or multi-layered…

NM But what happened for me was to realise that that can happen in a vertical moment rather than horizontally. If you’re trying to write a complicated thing, it doesn’t have to sound complicated. It just has to work in a complicated way. It’s like a flavour that hits your tongue: a “nutmeg moment” in the bottom of a beef stew! Something unexpected and you’re like “What was that?” and it’s over! And it has to work that way to have a real direct effect! Doing films has a lot to teach me!

JJ And before you write a film score do you come up with a sort of musical palette? To take an analogy with painting “I’m going to operate with these sorts of colours and this is what I’m going to draw on”?

NM You do! That has to be the first thing you come up with – the sound-world of the piece. One of the things about film that’s unfortunate is that the budgets sometimes dictate things in the wrong direction. Like how much you can have! The Reader was good in that way because I knew I couldn’t have an Inuit children’s choir or a percussion section the size of whatever. I could have a Mozart-sized orchestra and that was what the budget allowed. And you figure out how many minutes of music there are and there are many, many logistical factors that you have to work in. And you let them all marinate together and then you don’t wind up trying to record something much bigger than you have the money for. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff. When choosing a sound-world for a piece I tend to think of the biggest moment, the moment where I know the music would have to be the loudest and sort of back-fill it from there. If you look at these enormous, enormous movies where you’re just swimming through money…take Avatar! You’ve no way of telling how large that orchestra is – it think it kind of gets to where there’s too much stuff. And it’s all coming from 19th century European models of like what ‘other’ music sounded like.

JJ …as if Mahler went on to compose film scores…

NM Yes, or if he went to Bali for two weeks! And then at the end there’s always the Inuit choir! All that stuff sounds great!

JJ But it gets a little bit of a cliché in its extravagance.

NM … in its extravagance exactly! But then the urge for extravagance comes and it goes. I always have fantasies that if someone asks you to score some gigantic epic set in some far-off land you should just build your own instruments! But then it’s like what a pain in the ass! Can you imagine proposing that to the director!

JJ But then think back to some of Takemitsu’s film scores and how he would score them for amazing things like a dripping tap, a tin can and so forth.

NM Those Takemitsu scores are so crazily good! But I don’t think you’d get away with that any more! The appetite for that has rather changed! Again, I think it’ll go back and forth. Actually one thing I’m noticing is that as more and more people get home-recording set-ups, younger people are grabbing stuff from round their houses and making funny sounds and samples. It’s raised the expectation for electronic music and its context in classical music to be really organically made. So you can blow across an empty jug and make the bass sound and combine it with the sound of a tuba. It’s exciting.

JJ So, apart from the opera for ENO (and then the Met), what’s coming up for you?

NM Well, on Thursday I go to Amsterdam for a big orchestral piece I’ve done for Dutch National Ballet with the choreographer Benjamin Millepied. I have a ton of stuff, it’s crazy. There’s a quintupal piano concerto – which is insane!

JJ And can presumably only be done within easy distance of a Steinway warehouse!

NM Exactly! There a choral piece for male voices for Minneapolis. This whole is basically pointing towards the opera next year – gravity has really taken over that thing! It’s scary. Oh, then there’s a string quartet in the spring.

JJ Are you very disciplined? Do you get up, have a cup of coffee and just sit down and write?

NM Yes, that’s what I did today! You just do it!