{"id":389,"date":"2007-11-10T17:33:51","date_gmt":"2007-11-10T22:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/news\/2007\/left-luggage-pig-scheme\/"},"modified":"2007-12-04T16:07:39","modified_gmt":"2007-12-04T21:07:39","slug":"left-luggage-pig-scheme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/news\/2007\/left-luggage-pig-scheme\/","title":{"rendered":"Left Luggage Pig Scheme, Program Notes (an introduction)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Every time I travel, I somehow manage to leave one little thing behind. In the case of this trip to Chicago, I totally left a little container of cucumber-scented face-scrub. Too bad. Sometimes, I’ve left whole sweaters and other times it’s nothing more than a tube of lip chap. I’ve been reading a book about apocalyptic christianity (Have a Nice Doomsday<\/em>, by Nicholas Guyatt), which features descriptions of people re-united with their loved ones in an instant during the rapture; I have a similar idea that all of these lotions and unguents are going to come flying at my face during the end times. We’ll see. The book features him traveling around the country interviewing various minor and major celebrities of the Apocalyptic Publishing Sub-Industry, and for a while, it’s a good time, and then his insistence on his distance from his subjects starts to become grating (we have to hear about how difficult it is to be a vegetarian in Texas, and there are numerous cringe-inducing paragraphs where he essentially describes himself as the Hugh Grant character in those 90’s RomComz, awkwardly English in the face of American Excess.)<\/p>\n Speaking of awkwardly English, I am going there this week. England in November, England in November. I’m going to meet with Tom<\/a>, for whom I am writing a concerto: an electric six-string violin concerto, to be specific. I’m very excited about it. My original intent was to actually write a piece where somehow Tom would be playing this pervy instrument and then also his acoustic violin (which, it must be said, is very fancy indeed; I think it’s one of those instruments that is Literally Priceless); in any event, I have since modified my proposal and am going to writing a piece that’s sort of about early attempts at cosmology, attempts at understanding the constellations, with some brief asides to Arabic grammatical and\/or astrological charts. I’m not entirely sure what the outcome is going to be; electric instruments tend to occupy that weird intermediary space between weaponry and sex toys. Go here<\/a> and see what I’m talking about:<\/p>\n ab<\/a>c<\/a><\/p>\n In any event, I’m excited to get out of New York during the Rockette-Holiday-Shopping-Wormhole. Even though Chinatown tends to not participate in the normal ebb-and-flow of the midtown tourist season, they are still playing Frosty the Snowman in the Duane Reade, which is really not acceptable, seeing as how it’s not even advent. What I want them to do is play Ben Frosty<\/a> the Snowman and then we’ll talk. I’ll be going directly to Iceland after London, to mix Mothertongue<\/em> (album II), and with any luck will have the chance to sit in the hot tub and properly write Tom’s piece, having seen what the thing can do. I’m writing it for a new-ish orchestra called Aurora<\/a>, in London, who seem to be totally great; look how organized they are here<\/a>. There is something so wonderful about these organized-out English websites; I think that there was a lot of shame about how benighted things had been, from a design point of view, particularly in supermarkets, that now all the big supermarket chains have these totally art-directed sites. Check out this<\/a> one, from Waitrose’s. Did you notice this sentence: “All our pork is reared under the Assured British Pig Scheme.” Then you google their ass and you find a slightly less organized website<\/a>, but a fascinating and endearing government program nonetheless. (PS, If you, like me, can’t leave well enough alone, you may find yourself signing a series of petitions such as “Pigs are worth it” (dot<\/a> Koh<\/a> dot<\/a> you-kay<\/a>).<\/p>\n In celebration of the travel and its attendant losses, here is the first track from the David Lang \/ Michael Gordon \/ Julia Wolfe oratorio Lost Objects<\/em> which is so beautiful I could die. It used to be a game around my house to sing that little motive about really any random thing we had lost. Then we rediscovered Eddie Murphy’s Boogie in Your Butt<\/em> and the game changed slightly, do you all remember that song?<\/p>\n [audio:01 I Lost A Sock.mp3] PS, you’re not meant to be able to tell which Bang-On-A-Can wrote which Bang-On-A-Movement but you can usually tell. This one is Str8 Up David Lang, in my opinion.<\/p>\n C<\/span>hicago! It was so much fun, I was really taken aback by how seriously Cliff Colnot (the conductor) took the piece, as well as the degree of intensity that the musicians brought to it. It was a strange program: first, a viola concertino by Mark-Anthony Turnage<\/a>, who is a really genius composer whose opera Greek<\/em> was one of my favorite things when I was first starting to compose, a piece by 19-year old Mark Simpson<\/a>, a piece by American composer Derek Johnson (whom I had never heard of but who was very nice indeed), and then my piece being the last and the premi\u00e8re. All of this was somehow overseen by Osvaldo<\/a> Golijov, who shares the duty of Chicago Symphony Composer-In-Residence with Mark-Anthony. Part of the deal was that Osvaldo was going to interview us from the stage, asking us about the pieces. He had taken his Wacky Uncle pill right before he interviewed me; it was fantastic, because I was completely unsure as to what he was going to say. He, interestingly and touchingly, asked about Picasso, whose Guernica was one of the inspirational images\/processes behind Golijov’s own La Pasi\u00f3n seg\u00fan San Marcos<\/a>, which was my first exposure to his music. Here it wacky is:<\/p>\n
\nLang\/Wolfe\/Gordon I Lost a Sock<\/em> from Lost Objects<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n