The opera’s premise is that a sequence of smells guides us through a oblique parable about industrialisation, through short episodic bursts of information. Some smells are dirty, like the rubber of a train in Paris, and others are classically blended harmonically well-rounded scents. Occasionally, a clean, neutral, pure sound arrives as a little flute-scented garden which should have the effect of clearing the chaos of the surrounding music (and, indeed, smells).

Nadia Sirota and Helgi Hrafn Jónsson join us as two of the essential voices that bind the narrative together. The multivalent collaboration yielded many surprising results: a 14-minute score that is funny, aggressive, shape-shifting, electronic, acoustic, and strange.

I Know Where Everything Is is a cycle of chords in a pile. Each chord has a series of possible voicings, and a series of possible quick ornamentations. The piece starts with the most moderate of these, works through the slower, more languid variations, and then concludes energetically and aggressively.
—Nico Muhly

Orlando Gibbons! I love him so much. His cadences always drive me crazy with pleasure; when the Britten Sinfonia asked me to arrange a few anthems for small ensemble, I immediately said yes, on the condition that I could start with This is the Record of John, which is a chatty narrative piece featuring call-and-response interaction between soloists and the choir, with a fantastic accompanying meshwork of imitative phrases. Here, the viola is the star countertenor, slightly hungover but fiercely earnest.

Orlando Gibbons’s verse anthem See, see, the Word is incarnate is one of my favourite pieces of text setting: Gibbons divides up Godfrey Goodman’s verses into solo bits for solo or coupled countertenors, who weave in and out of a texture of viols. Then, the chorus comes in at the end of each verse, like a 1960s girl group, echoing the soloist: “Let us welcome such a guest!”, “Goodwill towards men!” Knowing when to come in was always an adventure for me as a chorister; I memorised 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 pricks of thorns, the print of nails”?) and miss my entrance. My 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 on 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.

NICO MUHLY (2002)

Fast Dances is a series of five short movements for two harps. Each movement is a sort of rhythmic étude with slowly shifting harmonies. The first movement takes a few perpetual motion lines and splits them, pitch by pitch, between the two players. The second movement is a game about dividing the measures simultaneously into 2, 3, and 6. The third movement — the slowest — is a meditation on a long, slow, downwards scale, with one harp playing 5 beats to the bar and the other playing 4. The fourth movement is quiet and anxious, and the fifth is anxious, loud, and fast.

Compare Notes begins with a large canon between the violin and the left hand of the piano in slightly awkward rhythmic shapes, and then
dissolves into a more playful traditional canon. All of this simplifies enormously into a sort of chorale with a drone, taking advantage of the open A-string of the violin. The violin then wiggles its way out of this drone material, re-introducing the opening
material. Jeffrey Kahane and Daniel Hope can play anything, so I wanted to give them something rhythmic to chew on!

Aston Magna was written to celebrate the history of the house and estate of the same name in Great Barrington, MA. The piece unfolds over five movements, thxe outer two being mirror images of one another. The first movement focuses on the grove of trees to the right of the house: a pruned, spiritual environment. The second movement relates to the studio, where I imagine Albert Spalding practiced; here, I tried to capture the rigors of practice rather than the elegance of performance — the music stops and starts, circles back on itself, and repeats difficult phrases. The third movement takes place in the neo-classical “architecture” around the pool: geometric phrases and solid grounding from the viola da gamba underpins simple phrases from the second violin: a solo swimmer at night looking at the sky. The fourth movement brings us into the convivial and friendly environment of the living room of the house: a traditional duet with casual accompaniment. The fifth movement brings us back to the grove of trees, with a slightly more winsome presence from the viola da gamba.