I just made a trip of the sort I\u2019ve not had the luxury to make in many years: a trip to London with only a few things to do. Normally I arrive in London and have to basically stack the day with appointments and usually performances or equally taxing things in the evening. London is decidedly not a place where it\u2019s terribly easy to do, say, six or seven things in a day as everything is wildly spread out and the whole thing ends kind of sweatily and flustered. I\u2019m so interested in the nature of a city being perfect for certain activities: isn\u2019t it the case that New York imposes its energy on visitors, and sort of insists on certain ways of doing things? You realize that little things \u2014\u00a0when school lets out, for instance, or, in hotter climes, the necessity for an afternoon siesta \u2014 all add up and start imposing patterns on our days. Perhaps a good use for poor Jonah Lehrer is to be air-lifted into the world\u2019s capitals and do some research on this.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spent a little bit too much time in cabs recently, and as a result have been listening to a lot more top-40 radio than usual. As ever, it\u2019s bubbly and inviting, like a pink champagne. The thing I\u2019m sort of interested in with the advent of these heavily processed vocals is what\u2019s going to become of regional accents? I\u2019m trying to think about accent markers in vocal music from the past. Joni Mitchell could only be Canadian with them vowels, right? And there was always something specifically Raleigh about Ben Folds; you got the sense from his songs of the way he was spoken to as a child, the accents of his first romances. One gets the same sense from the siblings Wainwright with their polyglot slurs, from Antony with his stylised mid-atlantic roundness, from, indeed, most of the folk-influenced musicians I know, both Anglo-Irish and, like, Arabian. What then do we do about a singer like Adam Levine, whose voice is practically inescapable in this world in which we all live? English lyrics have a particular problem across genres, namely that the words \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d are ugly words, with a few too many possible syllables in both. There\u2019s also, of course, the southern-but-mainly-AAVE possibilities of monosylabising I into basically ah<\/i>; this strategy seems to be the chosen shortcut of singers like Justin Timberlake and really anybody who wants to have a toe in the R&B universe; I don\u2019t necessarily think it\u2019s a congruous look with Timberlake\u2019s new suit and tie; accent markers and clothes should usually be coordinated, shouldn\u2019t they? But then a friend of mine \u2014 a tall sandy blond Jewish boy from Billerica or similar, sent me a recording of his band in which he very actively uses the \u201cah\u201d shortcut, so, who knows what\u2019s going on. Can anybody in the +44 enlighten me, too, about how that works with the tiny little isoglosses there?<\/p>\n
This last week I was in Chicago with eighth blackbird, the wonderful chamber ensemble. They\u2019ve apparently been playing together for seventeen years and it\u2019s always a pleasure to interfere in their patterns. We performed, among other things, David Lang\u2019s unforgiving 2002 how to pray<\/i>, Philip Glass\u2019s equally severe 1968 (?) Two Pages<\/i>, a bratty but successful and exuberant Tristan Perich three toy pianos and one-bit electronics, two of David\u2019s songs from death speaks<\/i>, and a new piece for piano four hands written by Lisa Kaplan, the pianist in the group. I haven\u2019t played four hands piano seriously since that time in Paris in 1999 when Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum and I bashed through the Jupiter<\/i> Symphony, so it was a thrill, but also, I realize how out of practice I am in playing music that isn\u2019t by Philip Glass or my own self. I\u2019ve become a specialized little machine, only capable of one sort of technical fluency. I have to fix this. <\/p>\n
I\u2019m about to head back to London for a weekend of music I\u2019ve loosely curated<\/a> at the Barbican. It\u2019s always a little anxious-making to curate concerts: you can never please everybody, everything\u2019s ever so slightly too long, I\u2019m positive I\u2019m going to fuck something up and end up at the wrong venue with the wrong music at the wrong time. But I\u2019ve tried to invent a sort of social security blanket which is that there is going to be a team of us droning on a few of the concerts, and it\u2019ll be casual and relaxed, and everybody will remain calm. I’m playing a bunch of Philip’s new piano \u00e9tudes, hooray, and Richy is coming with his <3 and Breath music, and the Sixteen are singing, and if you are anywhere near the 0207 you should come say hi or come to the bar at the St John for a bracing and necessary campari.\n\nIn other news, everybody should buy David Lang's new disc<\/a>, on which I join Bryce, Owen, and Shara in death speaks<\/em>. My opera Two Boys is 250% happening this October. Unless you already subscribe unto the Met, you can’t buy tickets until later, but here is the little page<\/a>. I had my intrepid assistant upload ALL the press about it \u2014 both good and bad \u2014 from last time so everybody can prepare emotionally for it. I think having an archive of all the appalling things people say about one is a nice thing; I’ve not read any of it, good or bad, for years, but I know it’s there if I need to ever self-flagellate. Also everybody should buy The National’s new record Trouble Will Find Me<\/a>, on which I have a small pile of arrangements.<\/p>\n okay good<\/p>\n okay bye<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just made a trip of the sort I\u2019ve not had the luxury to make in many years: a trip to London with only a few things to do. Normally I arrive in London and have to basically stack the day with appointments and usually performances or equally taxing things in the evening. London is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3820,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3819\/revisions\/3820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}