You know you’re in trouble when the audio sample of a burbling coffee machine or the sound of a knife scraping butter on toast exerts as great a hold on the listener’s interest as everything that preceded it.
One of the genre’s most impressive innovators is also one of its youngest: 27-year-old Nico Muhly. With an impressive list of collaborators, Mothertongue is a stunning meditation on the anxiety of the human experience broken into three movements.
Nico Muhly, a 20-something prodigy and Juilliard grad who may be one of the few surprises left to emerge from the classical milieu.
When Nico Muhly debuted a new piece of music at the Kitchen on March 7, he introduced a new instrument: the beautiful blonde. The composer teased, shook, and combed three women’s hair according to the score, below, while violist Nadia Sirota simultaneously performed the piece as a looped-track solo. 1. “The piece starts with my […]
Muhly’s command of the English religious-music tradition informs his non-liturgical compositions, too, if sometimes rather impishly. When I joined him one day at his office at Philip Glass’s studio””he works in a soundproofed interior room surrounded by high-end digital equipment, a few packages of dried seafood from Chinatown tacked to a corkboard for color””he was working on a section of his violin concerto, writing parts for the marimba, the strings, and the piano. “Now, if you want to make it really godlike, here’s what you do,” he said, and keyed in a few throbbing bass notes. “There is a specific way the bass works that makes the English go crazy,” he explained. “It’s like catnip for them, so I try to take advantage of it. I love a good nineteenth-century national stereotype. It is really useful in composition.”
The most vital works were Nico Muhly’s post-Minimalist “Stride” (2006) and excerpts from Jefferson Friedman’s brash, insistent String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3 (1999 and 2005), played electrifyingly by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.
BLAKE LEYH
Music supervisor for The Wire recommends…NICO MUHLY ”A young modern-classical composer in New York. He’s worked with Philip Glass. Nico has an electric-violin concerto that’s going to be really good.” (nicomuhly.com)
Benjamin Millepied and Nico Muhly’s electric ballet
Muhly borrows heavily from Stravinsky’s off-kilter rhythms and the pulsing minimalist patterns of Philip Glass. He sets these impulses in irregular phrases and jumpy meters that cry out for dancing — as the piece unfolded, I kept imagining sleek bodies hurtling through space in manic lurches and spirals […] this young composer has something to say and a smart, sassy, in-your-face way of saying it.
His world premiere MusicNOW commission “Step Team” was, with the Simpson, a deserved audience hit, a propulsive and seductive rhythmic nonet punctuated by CSO bass trombone Charles Vernon. Muhly was inspired by stepping dance drills but he transformed this concept into language all his own: seductive, snappy, even, at the close, touching.
© 2026 Nico Muhly. Site by Nick Scholl.