Given the strange makeup of the instrumental ensemble, subtle amplification will almost certainly be necessary for all players and singers.
The amateur percussion ensemble requires a bit of advanced planning. In practice, one of those players should be slightly more musically experienced and can be used as a sub-conductor.

Instrumental choice is absolutely left up to the group; score indications are simply an indication of how we did it at the premiere, and also as timbral suggestions. For instance, at bar 76, any small metal object will work, and any number of the players can participate in this gesture. If it’s a tiny spoon against a tiny teacup because you have those things in your house, use them. Similarly, bar 87 suggests a bit of a “round the room” game, where each player does something on each quarter-note. It doesn’t have to line up cyclically, just as long as each quarter-note is accounted for. There isn’t any way to do the amateur percussion wrong, as long as it is all planned and played carefully and seriously. The goal here is not a Prairie Home Companion wacky weekend afternoon, but instead, something ritualised but commonplace, like the rules of grammar.
—Nico Muhly

Hailing from the Faroe Islands, halfway between Norway and Iceland in the North Atlantic, Teitur Lassen (who uses only his first name professionally) has long been a successful pop artist in Europe, winning several Danish music awards, touring internationally, and collaborating with such artists as Seal, Corinne Bailey Rae, and French star Emilie Simon and Nolwenn Leroy. “We came up with this premise of boring videos, home videos,” he explains. “It was a time when everyone was posting these meaningless videos. It was just fascinating when we started watching them … The more you watched them the more you started to wonder, ‘What is behind this? Why are people doing this?’ They are really saying, ‘This is really beautiful, this is really sick, this is me,’ people confessing things. And that gave us the title for the record.”

“Teitur took a lot of these things,” continues Muhly, “and looked at the comments and imagined the world that these people inhabited. We also solicited some anonymous Dutch videos, people telling us things that are unexpected, including this woman who said ‘I love the smell of my printer in the morning.’ It made me so happy. That smell is so specific. These are not confessions in a dirty way but more like if you went over to a friend’s house 10 minutes before they expected you and you got a glimpse into something private. As a songwriter, Teitur focuses on a little detail or a little gesture, and then one can divine bigger content.”

Holland Baroque’s mission is “to convince a large and varied audience of the flexibility and vitality of (Baroque) music.” As Muhly notes, “They perform standing up, and they are as old school as you’d like, but they chewed into this material really gleefully. It was a kind of magic project actually.”

When he began his tenure at Eindhoven, Muhly says, “I knew I wanted to work with this Baroque ensemble. The distance between contemporary listening and Baroque music is one of the most heartbreaking and interesting things. Most of the music I like is from the 17th century or before. It’s a tradition that never stopped—a small tradition, a specific one. There is something incredibly direct about Baroque music and Baroque instruments.” He continues, “But it also posed a different challenge. Baroque musicians aren’t accustomed to the sorts of rhythms attendant to contemporary music, and that brought another interesting tension to the project.”

The original four songs from Eindhoven worked so well that Teitur and Muhly continued writing. By 2009, they had a concert-length piece comprising the 14 songs on Confessions. Muhly, Teitur, and Holland Baroque toured the Netherlands, performing the piece with the videos that inspired it projected behind the players; they recorded the songs at the end of the tour.

Confessions is available for purchase from Nonesuch Records.

COMPOSER’S NOTE

Sentences is a thirty-minute meditation, in collaboration with Adam Gopnik, on several episodes drawn from the life and work of Alan Turing. Turing lived, in a sense, many different lives, but at the heart of his work was, I think, a very musical set of anxieties. Even the idea of code-breaking is inherently musical; the French for score- reading is de?chiffrage: deciphering. His wartime work on the Enigma code translated, later in life, to a more nuanced relationship to code in the form of a primitive but emotionally (and philosophically) complicated artificial intelligence. The piece uses a single voice—here, countertenor Iestyn Davies—not to speak necessarily as Turing, but as a guide through these various episodes.
The piece begins in a state of optimistic nervousness, smudging, in a sense, the relationship between grammar and comprehension. The second part imagines a young man obsessed with his bicycle chain: the mechanisms whose faults are the focus of study. The orchestra functions here like a giant and dangerous machine, organised into large footprints of thirteen beats constantly recycling and jerking to a halt. We are encouraged to “adjust, anticipate, and listen.”

The end of part two then takes the image of the bicycle and repurposes it to imagine Turing and his friend Morcom at school, and transitions into part three without pause into a stylised version of Turing’s letter to Morcom’s grieving mother, his friend having died of tuberculosis as a result of drinking tainted milk. The orchestra functions here like a large planetarium: distant stars and closer insects.
Part four is another mathematical obsession game: “the universal machine’s just a card with a puncture.” We begin to see the idea of the human mind being a set of binaries, without any of the romance of the soul. Part five brings us forward to the war effort, with the realisation that even important codes are banal: they begin with a report on the weather, or with the fact that nothing has happened. While this revelation leads to a historically important de?chiffrage, here, we envision a soldier, alone, bored, tricked into a muddy and gruesome reality. The voice is sentimental, but the orchestra is strict and severe.

Part six jumps forward to the 50s, and the Turing Test. A sub-ensemble of three violas accompanies the voice, and woodwinds imitate imagined answers to the interrogator’s questions. A large and agitated orchestral passage ensues. We end with a sense of dry loneliness. The final part is a coda, in which we see the various interpretations of a purported suicide. A poisoned apple, and a mother’s objections. We close with the star-music from part three, and the various looped voices of the countertenor above a meshwork of glockenspiel, crotales, piccolo and celeste.
I’ve always felt that the question of sentient computers is wildly emotional: we anthropomorphise the Mars Rover, imagining its solitude on that dusty planet. Any act of communication in which the second person is unseen can be a one-way conversation. An email, sent, can never be returned — did it arrive or did it not? —, or a text message can be delivered but never read. The thrill of a fast response is immediately tempered with the harsh but empty rudeness of an out-of-office reply. Anybody who has made a condolence phone call only to hear the voice of the deceased on the outgoing answering machine message knows the complexities of what could be a simple binary communication.

ONE
Life is sentences
A series of sentences
A chain of sentences
A chain that links
A chain that bites
A chain that breaks
Encoded sentences
decoded eroded
A string of words becomes a sign of life.
Sentences and sentiment
They fill each one the other
The two are never one
To tell them apart is hard
To pry them apart is harder
What keeps the world together is a grammar When every one wants to make every sentence a sentiment
Can someone see that every sentiment is merely a sentence?
NICO MUHLY

LIBRETTIST’S NOTE
When Nico Muhly and I first contemplated writing a small song cycle drawn from the life of Alan Turing for Iestyn Davies we rather congratulated ourselves on the recherche? nature of the choice. In the interim, of course, Turing’s story has become approximately as well known as Robin Hood’s, and a ballad on the subject seems likely to run into the same traps of folk familiarity. But what we wanted to do with Turing was to show him neither as a pitiful victim nor as a kind of autistic intuitive, but as a thinker, a very great thinker, on the nature of mind—and to see if we could evoke musically (and lyrically) what were in many ways some very abstract ideas, while at the same time making their human origins apparent, or at least implicit. The central insight of Turing’s work is that seemingly simple chains of repetitive symbols, mere ‘sentences’, r could reproduce the chains of human reasoning. Minimal binary coding with simple off-and-on instructions could, given enough time and speed, simulate the most intricate computations that human computers, as they were then called, could offer. This insight could help you break a code, or it could help in imagining a non-human intelligence. But the central idea that in the apparently mechanical lay a solution to the ancient mysteries of mind and matter, remains constant, and with it the irony that some at least of the mysteries of mind ,and the matter of desire, remain mysterious even to the decoder, with the more tragic irony as well that a mastery of sentences does not keep one from another kind of brutal sentence. From this material, highbrow and ‘sentimental’ both, we made our piece—and hope also to have made our peace with Turing’s now somewhat over-extended ghost ADAM GOPNIK

I have long been interested in Frederick Law Olmsted; as a New Yorker, I am surrounded by his work. More so, even, than architecture, landscape design is subject to constant change both natural and human-imposed. In researching Olmsted, I realized that he was a melancholic: deeply affected by his time in the Civil War, he spent many of his later days in private anguish about how his work had been mangled and abused. The piece sets various texts — both formal and private — by Olmsted.

We begin in the 1850s, with his observations about gardens he visited both in England and in America. The music is eager, optimistic, and energetic. After several playful and bucolic episodes, the orchestra and voice shift into a slightly more poetic expression of the artistic power of ‘directing’ nature. The first movement flows seamlessly into the second, which sets some of Olmsted’s private letters written during the war. An uneasy texture in the clarinets and strings is the bed over which a long, drawn-out melody unfolds in the piccolo and oboe. This cycle of twelve chords repeats over almost the entire movement, occasionally stopping to allow the voice to describe another tragic scene. One was particularly moving, when Olmsted writes, “One of our most efficient men, who worked through all with untiring nonchalance, today, being the first day of rest, broke out in hysterics, and for hours afterwards, was in a swooning state. We send him home tomorrow, with an attendant, if he is well enough.” I set this text over a nervous and quietly relentless drone over two octaves of Gs. Winds and brace menace the drone, and the movement ends in a state of dreamy anxiety.
The title Pleasure Ground is a musical joke, a ground being a recurring bass-line that gives structure and melodic content at the same time. I use several grounds in this piece, but the third movement is particularly devoted to one cycle of thirteen chords. At first, the ground is hidden inside a chorale-like texture of strings, over which violent brass and percussion snarl and fight. As the baritone sings about nature having overrun his designs, some small ensembles of instruments echo the voice: a bass trombone, sometimes, and others, a little gamelan of harp, bells, and winds. On the text, “I have done a great deal of work in my life…” we first hear the ground bass in its proper position at the bottom of the orchestra. It goes through two cycles, and suddenly transforms into the material from the very opening of the first movement, but here transformed from youthful optimism into something melancholic and halting.

The piece ends with a delicate, drone-like texture under the words, “If man is not to live by bread alone, what is better worth doing well than the planting of trees?” This text slowly unfurls over a chordal drone, illuminated from within by slowly shifting woodwinds, and from without by celesta, glockenspiel, harp. The idea here is an ideal garden: designed but not fussed-with, communal, and fragilely eternal.
—NM

Music –Nico Muhly
Text – Maira Kalman
Soprano – Anne-Carolyn Bird
Viola – Nadia Sirota
Violin – Rob Moose
Clarinet – Hideaki Aomori
Trumpet – CJ Camerieri 

–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

There once was a Bird and there once was a Dog,
And the bird was Despondent, or sad,
A pensive frown on her Busy beak,
No matter that Cake could be had.

The Goat suggested a Convertible drive,
To purchase a cheering up Hat,
At a Haberdashery with a Scarlet door,
And a Baby to sell them just that.

The hats have Panache, of course, of course,
A sense of excitement and style,
The Mezzo-Soprano is done with her song,
So let’s all just eat for a while.

Tra la, tra la, tra la, tra la,
And sing those tra las once more.
Tra la, tra la, tra la, tra la,
Try not to get crumbs on the floor.

-Lemony Snicket

Recorded by Eve Gigliotti and Nico Muhly.

PART I THE HEREAFTER (1892)
I believe in the Hereafter. Material appetites or love for the real don’t beguile me. It’s not habit but instinct. The heavenly word will be added
to life’s imperfect sentence, otherwise inane. Respite and reward will follow upon action. When sight is forevermore closed to Creation,
the eye will be opened in the presence of the Creator. An immortal wave of life will flow from each and every Gospel of Christ—wave of life uninterrupted.

NEAR AN OPEN WINDOW
In the stillness of an autumn night, I sit near an open window, for entire hours, in a perfect, voluptuous tranquility.
The gentle rainfall of the leaves descends.
The keening of the perishable world resounds within my perishable nature,
but is a dulcet keening, rising like a prayer. My window opens up an unknown world. A fount of fragrant memories, unutterable, appears before me.
Against my window wings are beating—chill autumnal exhalations
approach me and encircle me and in their holy tongue they speak to me.
I feel vague and wide-embracing hopes; and in the hallowed silence of creation, my ears hear melodies,
hear the crystalline, the mystic music of the chorus of the stars.

PART II SEPTEMBER OF 1903 (1904)
At least let me be deceived by delusions, now, so that I might not feel my empty life. And I was so close so many times. And how I froze, and how I was afraid;
why should I remain with lips shut tight; while within me weeps my empty life, and my longings wear their mourning black. To be, so many times, so close
to the eyes, and to the sensual lips, to the dreamed of, beloved body. To be, so many times, so close.

JANUARY OF 1904 (1904)
Ah this January, this January’s nights,
when I sit and refashion in my thoughts those moments and I come upon you, and I hear our final words, and hear the first.
This January’s despairing nights, when the vision goes and leaves me all alone. How swiftly it departs and melts away— the trees go, the streets go, the houses go, the lights go: it fades and disappears, your erotic shape.
PART III 27 JUNE 1906, 2 P. M. (1908)
When the Christians brought him to be hanged, the innocent boy of seventeen, his mother, who there beside the scaffold had dragged herself and lay beaten on the ground beneath the midday sun, the savage sun,
now would moan, and howl like a wolf, a beast, and then the martyr, overcome, would keen “Seventeen years only you lived with me, my child.” And when they took him up the scaffold’s steps and passed the rope around him and strangled him, the innocent boy, seventeen years old,
and piteously it hung inside the void, with the spasms of black agony— the youthful body, beautifully wrought— his mother, martyr, wallowed on the ground and now she keened no more about his years: “Seventeen days only,” she keened, “seventeen days only I had joy of you, my child.”

IMPOSSIBLE THINGS (1897)
There is one joy alone, but one that’s blessed, one consolation only in this pain. How many thronging tawdry days were missed because of this ending; how much ennui.
A poet has said: “The loveliest music is the one that cannot be played.” And I, I daresay that by far the best life is the one that cannot be lived.
—C.P. CAVAFY
translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

In most versions of the tale, one sister kills the other over a boy””one is dark, and one is fair; one receives a token of the boy’s love, while the other seethes with envy. When the song is sung in Ireland, for example, her hair is used to string a harp played on the murderess’s wedding day, whereas in this rendition it strings a fiddle-bow.

What most of these songs have in common is this musical necromancy, fashioning a dead body into a musical instrument. Muhly uses the morbid tableau as a metaphor for the acts of violence and dissection inherent in any folk-song arrangement: The Only Tune is split into three distinct sections, each introduced by a turbulent and chaotic prelude. The harmony is embroidered with strange dissonances. Even the lyrics are dismembered and rebuilt, with a nod to the process-driven text setting of minimalist music. – Program Notes © 2007 Daniel Johnson

Credits
Sam Amidon: banjo, guitar, vocals; Valgeir Sigurðsson: knives, electronics; Ben Frost: Frost-bass programming, hair;
Sigríður Sunna Reynisdóttir: hair; Nadia Sirota: viola

Texts

There there there were there were there were two there were two there were two sis there were two sis there were two sisters there were two sisters there were two sisters wah there were two sisters wah there were two sisters walking there were two sisters walking there were two sisters walking down there were two sisters walking down there were two sisters walking down by there were two sisters walking down by there were two sisters walking down by a there were two sisters walking down by a there were two sisters walking down by a there were two sisters walking down by a there were two sisters walking down by a stream there were two sisters walking down by a stream There were two sisters walking down by a stream Oh, the wind and the rain Older one pushed the younger one in Oh, the dreadful wind and rain Pushed her in the river to drown Oh, the wind and the rain Watched her as she floated on down Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! Floated on down to the old mill pond Oh, the wind and the rain Floated on down to the old mill pond Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! Pushed her in the river to drown Oh, the wind and the rain Watched her as she floated on down Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! Floated on down to the old mill pond Oh, the wind and the rain Floated on down to the old mill pond Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! She floated on down to the old mill pond Oh, the wind and the rain Floated on down to the old mill pond Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! The miller fished her out with his long long hook Oh, the wind and the rain He brought this maid in from the brook Oh the dreadful wind and rain! He laid her on the bank to dry Oh, the wind and the rain A fiddling fool came passing by, Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! He made a fiddle bow from her long yellow hair Oh, the wind and the rain, he made a fiddle bow of her long yellow hair Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! He made fiddle pegs from her long finger bones, Oh, the wind and the rain, he made fiddle pegs from her long finger bones Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! He made a fiddle bridge from her own nose bridge, Oh, the wind and the rain, he made a fiddle bridge from her own nose bridge Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! and he made a fiddle from her own breast bone Oh, the wind and the rain, whose sound could melt a heart of stone Oh, the dreadful wind and rain! and the only tune that fiddle could play Oh, the wind and the rain, the only tune that fiddle would play was, “Oh, the dreadful wind and rain!” (oh oh the oh the dread oh the dreadful oh the dreadful wind oh the dreadful wind and oh the dreadful wind and rain)

Sam Amidon rehearsing The Only Tune in Zankel Hall, March, 2007

Nico & Ben after negotiating the bass sounds, Reykjavík

Nico & Sam during The Only Tune recordings, Þingvellir, Iceland