Nico
Muhly,

A Good Understanding was written for Tim Brown and the choir of Clare College, Cambridge with the generous cooperation of John Scott and the Boys of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue.

Read more »

A Hudson Cycle was written as a wedding gift for two friends. This is music of longing and anticipation; losing a beautiful place, approaching a beloved person.

Read more »

Beaming Music is, at its heart, about small rhythmic cells transforming themselves into large, open chords. While this is most evident in the section immediately following the marimba solo 2/3 of the way through, the idea of something small blossoming into a huge chord pervades the piece. The title refers not only to the various [...]

Read more »

Bright Mass with Canons was written for John Scott and the choir of Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, New York.

Read more »

By All Means was commissioned by the Juilliard School and the Royal Academy of Music in celebration of their concurrent anniversaries. Each of the six commissioned works was meant to respond in some way to Webern’s Concerto for 9 Instruments, op. 24. My own response to this curious guideline was to focus on the opening [...]

Read more »

I wrote the soundtrack to the movie Choking Man, directed by Steve Barron. It’s a really great movie, I think, and the score is very important to it, which I like, and they gave me an enormous amount of flexibility in how much music there should be and where, etc. With Dan Bora, [...]

Read more »

Muhly writes, “Clear Music is an extended exploration of a single measure in John Taverner’s (1490-1545) motet Mater Christi Sanctissima. I have structured the piece into a series of peaks featuring the highest registers of the treble voice – here, the cello. I remember very vividly performing this piece and being struck by how distant [...]

Read more »

Duet N^o1: Chorale Pointing Downwards is the first in a series of short string pieces that serve as harmonic and technical studies for both composer and performers.

Read more »

1. I Hear
2. Interlude (A Farm Picture)
3. Poets to Come
Expecting the Main Things from You begins with a series of exchanges

Read more »

The Magnificat features an anxious two-note octave in the organ, nervously twitching in anticipation. The Nunc Dimittis (which is one of my favorite things written in the English language) starts slowly,

Read more »

Fits & Bursts was commissioned by Bard College to commemorate the occasion of the naming of their new performing arts center, the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. As a piece of music designed to celebrate a site of artistic production, Fits & Bursts attempts to mimic one of the most frustrating and [...]

Read more »

On the page, the violin part for Honest Music looks something like Terry Riley’s In C, insofar as it’s a collection of discrete, modular phrases to be recombined in “performance,” or in this case, by the electronic manipulation of the recording–but these aren’t Riley’s musical Lego blocks; most of these are long, expressive, idiomatic gestures, [...]

Read more »

I wanted the piece to feel like it comes from their preëxisting pantry of musical devices – a sort of thrown-together meal with close friends

Read more »

I Cannot Attain Unto It is a setting of a section of Psalm 139 arranged such that certain syllables repeat and cycle around each other. The harmonic motion of the piece is through common tones, a method in which a single note is sustained through two related or unrelated keys. The use of the repetition [...]

Read more »

Alex Zachary and Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen asked me to write an enormous amount of music for their Ancient Greek-language proudction of Iphegenia at Aulis, which they produced in association with the Columbia University Classics Department in 2005.

Read more »

For a piece with such a strong electronic component, It Goes Without Saying is surprisingly organic. While the electronics include chillier, metallic noises—samples ranging from a kitchen whisk to a unique set of tiny bells—most prominent are the warm, woody sounds of a harmonium and of clicking clarinet-keys, sounds that share a certain sonic [...]

Read more »

It Remains to be Seen was written for the Boston University Tanglewood Institute’s 40th Anniversary Gala in July 2006.

Read more »

It’s About Time has two sets of attendant notes, one by Sam, for whom it was written, and one by me.

Read more »

I wrote the soundtrack to a film called Joshua, directed by George Ratliff, with Vera Farmiga, Sam Rockwell, and Jacob Kogan, (who weirdly appeared in an episode of Wonder Showzen). It is a thriller involving a small boy (who is a piano prodigy) plotting against his family; the score is a piano-based score with [...]

Read more »

Keep in Touch is a lament, a sort of chaconne divided up into sections by more freely-composed cadenzas for the viola.

Read more »

I wrote program notes for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s concert featuring Andriessen’s Trilogy of the Last Day, as well as works by Julia Wolfe and Evan Ziporyn.

Read more »

I wrote program notes for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Minimalism concert in February, 2005, featuring Elena Ruehr’s Shimmer, Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3, Steve Reich’s Tehillim, and John Adams’s Common Tones in Simple Time.

Read more »

There are two distinct sets of material at play in Out of the Loop. The first is a clear, sterile pulsing—highly organized and mathematically informed. The second set of material (which exists primarily in the background) is a tonally and rhythmically flexible mess of sorts, involving more shimmering, aggressive and antagonistic material. For the most [...]

Read more »

Muhly names Pierre Boulez as the inspiration for Pillaging Music, and it’s easy to hear the influence of pieces like Sur-incises and Répons on this metallic piano/percussion texture

Read more »

Radiant Music was written for Alice K. Dade at her request for a short recital piece. The tape part is made up of several episodes of shimmering music for electric flutes, dulcimers, organs, baroque strings, trumpet, and choir. This piece is focused on a simple progression of three chords; this progression appears in the [...]

Read more »

Seeing is Believing references the exciting and superstitious practice of observing and mapping the sky; while writing it, I wanted to mimic the process by which, through observation, a series of points becomes a line – this seemed like the most appropriate way to think about a soloist versus an orchestra. The electric [...]

Read more »

So to Speak (After Thomas Tallis) is an extended meditation on an anthem for Pentecost by Thomas Tallis entitled Loquebantur Variis Linguis (they spoke in many tongues). After organizing the material for the piece, I wrote a melody that works against, underneath, and above Tallis’s lines to create counterpoint made of old and new elements. [...]

Read more »

Syllables is an exploded setting of an old Icelandic text describing the end of the world. I say exploded as I elected to set the text both in English, fragments of Old Icelandic, as well as nonsense syllables taken from both languages. There is a constant, anxious pulse throughout the first section, which [...]

Read more »

Ta-ing and Clapping is a method of teaching rhythms wherein all beats are accounted for, resulting in a fully-rendered moto perpetuo that only implies empty spaces naturally found in a rhythmic pattern.

Read more »

The Only Tune was written for Sam Amidon, a singer and instrumentalist (guitar, banjo, drum) trained in the tradition of American folk music.

Read more »

The Sweets of Evening (2006) was written for Dianne Berkun and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Having worked with this group of musicians many times before, I was honored to finally write them a piece. Having sung in a boy choir myself, I am fascinated and intimate with the changing nature of young voices, [...]

Read more »

Read more »

Time After Time was written for the Yesaroun’ Duo (comprising multi-percussionist Sam Solomon & saxophonist Eric Hewitt) and marimbist Nancy Zeltsman. I set out to write a piece that was primarily energetic and rhythmically challenging enough for two percussionist and one honorary percussionist to play. The title refers to the fact that all the material [...]

Read more »

I’ve always suspected that cartoons and illustrations do a better job capturing the emotional content of the unknown than pictures and first-hand narration. I have a picture in my head of the illustrators of the 1940s and 1950, holed up in Belgium drawing the tribal peoples of the Congo, or in California articulating gorgeous [...]

Read more »

I scored an episode of the MTV2 show Wonder Showzen, which you can buy on iTunes or on DVD. I had a great time writing it; the people who make that show are some of the smartest people around. The premise of the episode that I scored (A Clarence Special Report: Compelling Television) [...]

Read more »