Nico Muhly » Projects

Three Etudes for Viola

fmyers — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 19:25:33 +0000

These three etudes may be performed in any order, all together, or singularly.

The pre-recorded material for these e?tudes should be mixed in such a way that the viola rides in the middle of the texture. Etude 2, however, should favor the solo viola. While we have had successful performances with the tape coming from a PA and the viola unamplified, the ideal scenario has the viola closely amplified with a clip-on microphone, such as the DPA 4099V, or similar.

E?tudes 1 and 1a require a metronomic relationship to the pulse, whereas Etude 2 requires a more flexible approach.
These Etudes were written for my friend Nadia Sirota. They are designed as performance pieces as well as practice e?tudes for dealing with the messy fifth-based string crossings my harmonic language sometimes outlines. Etudes 1 and 1A also concern themselves with the messy business of grand pause rests, or silences, in the context of highly rhythmic music.

The pre-recorded material was engineered and produced by Dan Bora, and is available through St Rose Music Publishers or Chester-Novello. Recordings of Etudes 1 and 1a are available on Nadia Sirota’s First Things First (New Amsterdam), E?tude 2 is recorded under the alternate title Varied Titles (Bedroom Community/ Decca) and E?tude 3 is available on Nadia Sirota’s Baroque (Bedroom Community).

I Drink the Air Before Me

fmyers — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 19:15:29 +0000

I Drink the Air Before Me is an evening-length score for Stephen Petronio’s dance piece bearing the same name. Inasmuch as it was celebrating Stephen’s company’s 25th anniversary, the piece wanted to be big, ecstatic, and celebratory. Our initial meeting, in which we discussed the structure of the work, yielded a sketch: a giant line, starting at the lower left hand side of a napkin, and ending in the upper right. Start small, get big! The rules: a children’s choir should begin and end the piece. The work should relate to the weather: storms, anxiety, and coastal living. A giant build-up should land us inside the center of a storm, with whirling, irregular, spiral-shaped music and irregular, spiral-shaped dancing. Using these rules, I divided up the piece into a series of episodes all hinging around spiral-shaped constellations of notes. These are most audible in Music Under Pressure 3, and least audible when they are absent, in the diatonic, almost plainchant music that the choir sings at the end, the text of which comes from Psalm 19:

One day tells its tale to another,
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
Although they have no words or language,
and their voices are not heard,
Their sound has gone out into all lands,
and their message to the ends of the world.

I wanted the ensemble to be a little quirky community of people living by the edge of the sea: a busybody flute, a wise viola, and the masculine, workmanlike bassoon, trombone, and upright bass. The piano acts as an agitator, an unwelcome visitor, bearing with it aggressive electronic noises and rhythmic interruptions.

Far Away Songs

fmyers — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:23:47 +0000

What I like about Cavafy’s poems — and, specifically, Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations of them, is the sense of enormous distance between objects. I feel like the lines work well right next to each other as well as with enormous space between them. On Daniel’s suggestion, I set a pair of poems which are versions of one another; Voices is a refinement of the previously unpublished Sweet Voices. So the music, too, undergoes a process of refinement, and the third setting is a much faster, much more concise version of the first. The second section, Hours of Melancholy, employs a drone in some of the strings, while others interrupt and object to the voice. I love the self-effacing lines, “Mankind lauds the happy. And poets false extol them.” I set these lines in a sort of sarcastic, folksy way. I also wanted to take advantage of what I like to call Jennifer Zetlan’s athletic expressive power: she works well with quick text as well as slow, which is a special gift.

–Nico Muhly

Sweet Voices
Those voices are the sweeter which have fallen
forever silent, mournfully
resounding only in the heart that sorrows.

In dreams the melancholic voices come,
timorous and humble,
and bring before our feeble memory
the precious dead, whom the cold cold earth
conceals; for whom the mirthful
daybreak never shines, nor springtimes blossom.

Melodious voices sigh; and in the soul
our life’s first poetry
sounds–like music, in the night, that’s far away.

Hours of Melancholy
The happy sully Nature.
The earth’s a realm of grief.
The dawn weeps tears of unknown woe.
The orphaned evenings, pallid, grieve.
And the soul that is elect sings mournfully.

In breezes I hear sighing.
In violets I see blame.
I feel the rose’s painful life;
the meadows filled with cryptic woe.
And in the woodland thick a sobbing sounds.

Mankind lauds the happy.
And poets false extol them.
But Nature’s gates are closed to those
who, heartless and indifferent, laugh,
laugh: strangers in a miserable land.

Voices
Imagined voices, and beloved too,
of those who died, or of those who
are lost unto us like the dead.

Sometimes in our dreams they speak to us;
sometimes in its thought the mind will hear them.

And with their sound for a moment there return sounds from the first poetry of our life–
like music, in the night, far off, that fades away.

—C. P. Cavafy, trans. Daniel Mendelsohn

Cello Concerto

fmyers — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:59:26 +0000

When the Barbican asked me to write a concerto for Olly Coates and the Britten Sinfonia, I immediately started making plans. I wanted to write something formally traditional (fast-slow-fast) but with steadily developing content. The first movement is angular, the second supple, and the third motoric; there is constant progression and no looking back. The first movement begins with a texture quite explicitly stolen from the first bar of Dutilleux’s Métaboles, and proceeds from there. A series of “melting” textures in the strings, muted trumpet, percussion & piano antagonizes the soloist, who plays a quick perpetual motion toccata before the entire structure devolves into drones. The second movement begins with a very long drone over which the cello spins short lyrical phrases. Decorative chromaticism slowly becomes more pronounced, and the movement ends in a shimmer of bells and rude brass. The third movement is a long piece of fast process music: essentially a digital delay applied to two lines of counterpoint. The result is bright and insistent. The concerto ends enigmatically, with foghorn brass and a long, sustained drone from the cello.

Order of Operations

fmyers — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:42:30 +0000

Order of Operations is an orchestra piece in three large sections: fast, medium, and slow; structurally, it resists traditional symphonic structure. The first section is essentially a perpetual motion machine with hiccoughs and interruptions. The second section is an obsessive harmonic process, creeping slowly up from lower instruments to higher, but never exploring the extremes. The third section is a slow series of drones with a melody in the flute and lowest instruments: a displaced tune. The piece ends when the drones abruptly stop amidst clouds of brass and trilling strings.

Step Team

fmyers — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:35:44 +0000

Stepping is a form of almost militaristic dancing involving the entire body as well as the voice. The routines are highly choreographed and precise but maintain an expressive freedom that comes out of the energy required to pull off the moves. In writing this piece for the Chicago Symphony MusicNOW, I wanted to avoid too much delicate, pointillistic writing and instead focused on making the nine players function as one team with a singular rhythmic agenda. Whenever the Chicago Symphony comes to New York, I am always impressed with the massive steakhouse-style proportions of the brass sound, so, this score features the bass trombone as a guide for the harmonic and lyrical material.
At a certain point in the piece, the rhythmic unisons begin to break down, and individual players or groups of players start slowing down or speeding up against the pulse. The bass trombone works as a unifying element here, announcing the changes between sections. Some scattered pulses ensue, and the brass section continuously shepherds the other instruments back into line. Step Team ends with a duet between the bass trombone and the piano, with a series of ornaments from the other players.

Two Motets

fmyers — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:17:03 +0000

William Byrd’s music has always fascinated me both as a composer and as an erstwhile choirboy; on the page it looks like so little, but then in its realisation, an enormous emotional landscape unfolds. When Nick Collon asked if I might try to orchestrate a few motets for Aurora, I jumped at the chance. There is a moment in Byrd’s Miserere mei, Deus where the key suddenly shifts into an unexpected major, and the rhythmic footprint slows down. I aimed for an outrageous, but quiet, amplification of this moment that fascinated me as a treble; here, it is punctuated by registral extremes in the piano: gamelan gongs in the left hand and toy piano in the right. The second piece I arranged is Bow thine ear, O Lord, which is said to be one of Byrd’s most personal expressions of faith and the turmoil surrounding it. It has in it one of the high-water marks of the choral tradition, namely Byrd’s setting of the phrase “Sion is wasted and brought low”, which he sets twice in two different octaves, and it is scandalously lush even when performed by the most austere of choirs. Here, it’s brass, marimba, and ghostly strings, a texture that expands into the celesta and woodwinds intoning the word “Jerusalem”. I should point out that these are very liberal arrangements of the originals; occasionally, I have rendered the effect of one alto holding onto a note too long, a wayward tenor, a day-dreaming treble.

Drones & Violin

fmyers — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:24:13 +0000

Drones & Violin was written for Pekka Kuusisto, and was commissioned by the Muziekgebouw, Eindhoven. Each movement begins with either the piano or violin establishing a drone which lasts for the duration of the movement. The first bar of each movement can be quite long. The drone should remain loosely indifferent to the other part, avoiding any overly dramatic commentary. That having been said, the droning player should feel free to subtly and constantly change the nature of the sound. Rests are meant to be played freely, expanding and contracting
as the spirit moves the soloists, but the notes should be played in relatively even time. The space between the movements can work either with very short pauses or with no pauses at all; this is left up to the discretion of the performers.

Drones & Viola

fmyers — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:00:27 +0000

Drones & Viola was written for Thomas Bartlett and Nadia Sirota in 2011. Each movement begins with either the piano or viola establishing a drone which lasts for the duration of the movement. The first bar of each movement can be quite long. The drone should remain loosely indifferent to the other part, avoiding any overly dramatic commentary. That having been said, the droning player should feel free to subtly and constantly change the nature of the sound. Rests are meant to be played freely, expanding and contracting as the spirit moves the soloists, but the notes should be played in relatively even time. The space between the movements can work either with very short pauses or with no pauses at all; this is left up to the discretion of the performers.

Looking Forward

fmyers — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:40:32 +0000

Looking Forward was written for the 20th anniversary of the Britten Sinfonia. and, at their request, dovetails with Henry Purcell’s setting of Psalm 102. I have chosen fragments from the same psalm to set in a harmonic landscape that alternates between drone-based diatonicism and more confusing chromaticism, stolen from Purcell’s keening and twisted vocal lines. Towards the end, fragments of the Purcell begin to peek through the texture, and the piece ends with an ambiguous, shimmering drone.

Common Ground

fmyers — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:38:28 +0000

Common Ground employs three different repetitive techniques. The first third of the piece is a cycle of chords of expanding and contracting length, with the violin and cello trading agitated little lines. The second is a pastoral obsession over essentially one chord: light changing over a field. Here, the cello leads, and the violin and piano offer insect-like interruptions. After a metronomic interlude and a free-form interlude, the piano begins stating a ground bass – a repetitive line around which the harmonies constantly shift. This sort of thing pops up in Purcell, where I first encountered it as a choirboy. The piece ends with a hyperactive recapitulation and is approximately 9 minutes long.

Diacritical Marks

fmyers — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:32:01 +0000

Diacritical Marks was written for the Chiara Quartet in 2011, and is in eight short movements. I have a huge anxiety about string quartets; they are normally meant to be giant expressions of a composer’s emotional life. Here, I focused on details: a tiny dot above a letter, a tiny swivel of the bow. The first and last move- ments are energetic and driving, and the middle movements are more lyrical, rhapsodic, and/or floating. The quartet is bound together by a piece of drone music, found in movements 3, 5, and 7, in which the second violin and the viola play an interlocking repeating pattern ad infinitum, while the cello and first violin spin very long, outrageous lines on top. The piece lasts just under 20 minutes.

Drones, Variations, Ornaments

fmyers — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:33:54 +0000

Drones, Variations, Ornaments is music in constant transformation. What begins as a simple, cloud-like sequence of string chords with a trombone melody slowly transforms into an agitated perpetual motion machine of winds, guitar, percussion, and piano. The machine spits out an incessant syncopated drone on middle-C, over which a fragment of a melody in the violin and trombone slowly turns into something more dangerous. The sound of breaking glass and assorted violent string pluckings slowly ushers in a decadent, syrupy melting texture in the strings, who accompany an alto flute solo. The piece ends in a suspended crystalline structure with a cello & trombone duet. -NM 11/11

Luminous Body

fmyers — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:41:18 +0000

Luminous Body is a collaboration between me and Craig Lucas, written in the period immediately following our narratively charged opera Two Boys. Luminous Body is, as a result, abstract and poetic in gesture and form. The text interpolates, among other things, stylized versions of the teachings of Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and Plato; these are scrambled and re-contextualized and, in a sense, serve as background for the textures of the combination of nine male voices and orchestra.

Part 1 introduces the chord structure that governs the entire piece, and ends with the repeated words, “only your will is your own.” The second and third parts, loosely dealing with the Devil and the importance of choosing one’s words, are based on drones generated by the voices and the strings; the constant (but slightly morphing) texture is meant to be meditative and vague. I have always wanted to set the Beatitudes, and Craig has paraphrased them beautifully here; the tenors intone the word “blessed” over and over while the strings and winds reiterate the passacaglia from the opening of the piece. The fifth and final part is a series of proverbs. The orchestra begins in a series of loose, ecstatic drones, which increase in intensity (“Make your own family!”) until we jump suddenly to the garden of Gethsemane, where Christ was betrayed while his disciples slept. “Why are you sleeping? Couldn’t you stay awake for one more hour?” he asks, while the strings and winds lazily chant in the background.

From Here on Out

fmyers — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:17:59 +0000

When Benjamin and I first met in Paris in 2006, he was always playing Bach. For our project with ABT, I thought I would incorporate his love of repeated chords into a set of variations on a bass line, making a simple outline for the structure of the piece (an energetic ramp with a plateau representing the central pas de deux). The music begins with a brief introduction outlining the harmonic language and pulse-based rhythms. The passacaglia theme emerges in the double-basses and celli. Instruments are drawn towards the line – a bassoon, a piano, a marimba, an insect-like rustling of strings, and the piece becomes a gradual process of addition, as the sonority changes from earthly obscurity to piercing brightness. The pas de deux interrupts this process, with a new bass line, a louche, French texture, and some ominous growling from the low brass. The energies of the final section clear the air, and a loud statement of the bass line closes the piece.