MORTIFICATION
How soon doth man decay! When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants, whose young breath Scarce knows the way;
Those clouts are little winding sheets, Which do consigne and send them unto death.

When boyes go first to bed, They step into their voluntarie graves;
Sleep bindes them fast; onely their breath Makes them not dead.
Successive nights, like rolling waves, Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.

When youth is frank and free, And calls for musick, while his veins do swell,
All day exchanging mirth and breath In companie;
That musick summons to the knell, Which shall befriend him at the houre of death.
When man grows staid and wise, Getting a house and home, where he may move
Within the circle of his breath, Schooling his eyes;
That dumbe inclosure maketh love Unto the coffin, that attends his death.

When age grows low and weak, Marking his grave, and thawing ev’ry yeare,
Till all do melt, and drown his breath When he would speak;
A chair or litter shows the biere, Which shall convey him to the house of death.

Man, ere he is aware, Hath put together a somemnitie,
And drest his herse, while he has breath As yet to spare.
Yet Lord, instruct us so to die That all these dyings may be life in death.
—GEORGE HERBERT

Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorized everything and then would get entranced by the soloists (how can you not get drawn into a line like “See, O see the fresh wounds, the gored blood, the prick of thorns, the print of nails”?) and miss my entrance. This piece, Motion, tries to capture the nervous energy of obsessive counting. The piece is built on little repeated fragments from the Gibbons, as well as an extended quotation and ornamentation of one of the verses, where the viola and the cello criss-cross one another and the other instruments create a messy grid of anxious quavers. The piece ends ecstatically, using as its primary cell Gibbons’s melody “in the sight of multitudes a glorious ascension.”

The title comes from a vision of Christ’s reign: “the blind have sight and cripples have their motion” – the word “motion,” in Gibbons’s setting (and my appropriation), comprising three syllables.

Text

The Principles of Uncertainty

1. What is this book? What is anything? Who am I? Who are you? What is happiness? I ask you, what is happiness? What is happiness? How could young Nabokov tolerate such displacement, such loss? How could my mother tolerate such displacement, such loss? Could my mother have married Nabokov? Would Nabokov have been good to my mother? What is the most important thing? I walk behind people who are old. How can they function? How can I help? Step. Step. Step. How are we all so brave as to take step after step day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip then get up and say O. K.

I want to grow old gracefully, naturally: is such a thing possible? The sun will explode five billion years from now: Set your watches. The man dances on salt. Why? The man is disgusted. Why can’t people tell the truth? the woman stands under a tree. How do you go mad? How do you go not mad? The truth is everybody gets on everybody’s nerves. Everybody gets on everybody’s nerves. Right? Right. Right? Right. And the cake, and the cake: It was a mocha cream cake. And the inner peace? there was zero inner peace.

2. What is this fragment? This hard wisp? of what? Of darkness of thought, or immensity of the universe? A dream? A foreboding? Was Freud right? or Wittgenstein right? Can we speak? May I say something? No? Wittgenstein designed a house for his sister. Here is the radiator. To say that he found God in the details would be an understatement But how would he define “God?” Pushkin Pushkin Pushkin “” did he die in a duel? Yes. He died in a duel. What does all this have to do with that young woman with the crazy great hairdo with four bobby pins and two rubber bands? What does this have to do with bobby pins and radiators and Kokoshniks? One thing leads to another. Spring is in the air, don’t you think?

3. The man dances on salt. A package arrives wrapped in newspaper and tied with strips of fabric. The newspaper has a phto of a man. The man is lying in the snow, dead. Here is the man. His hat flew off his head. I hope he is not really dead, just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow. The woman leans over in anguish: not about that man but about all sad things; it happens quite often in February. She sings a lullaby about angels watching over the girl. You cannot help but notice that that is an awful lot of hair to wash and comb every day. The man stands behind the man. The seated man thinks, “For heaven’s sake, stop standing behind me. You are driving me mad. It’s freezing here. It’s February, and it’s impossible.” The woman stood in front of the tree before she went mad. She wrote a book, and then she went mad The woman is very ill. Her little dog never leaves her side. These twin sisters walking down the street in Budapest are cousins. There are black stripes on their sleeves. The sisters will never meet this man, but I have, and he has black stripes on the sleeves of his magnificent handstitched robe. He is a monk. On his card it says Inner Peace Center. My parents had a tea party in 1963. There was zero inner peace at this party. My parents were barely speaking. The heart breaks. Someone does or does not go mad. It is February, and all is forgiven.

4. The man asked the woman a dangerous question: “You don’t want me to kill her, do you?” I can’t ask any more questions. Was everything not said? Was everything not understood? Keep calm and carry on! Keep Was everything wrong? Will everything be wrong? Will we celebrate? Will we be kind? Will the world blow up? Will we eat egg salad sandwiches? Will we tell lies? The man asked the child, “what’s wrong?” The man asked the woman, “what’s wrong?” The child asked the parent, “What’s wrong?” The woman asked the child, “what kind of cake shall I bake for you?” What kind of cake should I bake for you? What kind of cake shall I bake for you?

Live Recording
June 2006
New Haven, CT

A commercial recording is available via New Amsterdam Records.

Eric Hewitt, saxophone
Chris Thompson, marimba
Sam Solomon, percussion
recorded by Mario McNulty at the Looking Glass Studios

The unaccompanied cello solo opening the piece quotes an expressive passage, near the end of Taverner’s antiphon, in which the trebles soar to a pitch two octaves higher than the next part down, the modal melody. Quoting such a high passage on such a low instrument, Muhly evokes not only the deeply stratified sonorities of Mater Christi but also the physical exertion of vocal performance.

The semiquaver syncopations that join the cello owe less to the backbeats of a rock song or a Beethoven symphony than to the rhythms of composers like Taverner, whose music antedates the use of barlines””here creating a smooth and constant motion that gently pulls the cello forward and bears it aloft. – Program Notes © 2007 Daniel Johnson

Performance Notes
The cello should be placed in the center of the stage, flanked closely by the harp and celeste. If amplification is used (which is not necessary but can help solve certain balance issues), it is recommended that there be one microphone on the back of the celeste as well as one microphone on the pedals, to amplify the clicking and shuffling of the feet. Similarly, both the harp body as well as its pedals should be amplified in this circumstance.

Clear Music is recorded on Bedroom Community Hvalur 001 (Nico Muhly Speaks Volumes).

Clarice Jensen, cello
Monika Abendroth, harp
Nico Muhly, celeste

Nico & Valgeir mixing Clear Music, Greenhouse Studios, Reykjavík

Clarice Jensen, Bridget Kibbey, Nico Muhly rehearsing Clear Music in Zankel Hall

The New Juilliard Ensemble & The Mason Ensemble
Simon Bambridge, conductor
Recorded in London, October, 2004

Simon Bambridge rehearsing By All Means in London, October 2004