Nico
Muhly,

You Can’t Get There From Here is a meditation, in several connected sections played without pause, on, among other things, The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, itself a somewhat abstract collection of music by various composers. The piece is, in a sense, a collection of memories: a strange fragment of Tudor music here, a scrap of motor-music there, and a long, slow meditation on an uncredited piece of four-part harmony scrawled without note durations in the FwVB manuscript. The piece is designed to be a navigation challenge for Simone Dinnerstein, who, aside from her technical prowess, has an emotional and interpretive virtuosity I was very interested in exploring.