S2 E04: From Star Wars to Drones with Nico Muhly
Today we chat with celebrated American composer Nico Muhly about everything from Star Wars to drones (no, not that kind), the gamelan, and tons of other fun stuff. Buckle up, kids, it’s going to be a fun ride!
Music Excerpts
Gambangan, trad., from Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music by Thomas Bartlett, Nico Muhly
Pemoengkah, trad., from Balinese Ceremonial Music for Two Pianos performed by Colin McPhee, Benjamin Britten
Gambang Suling, trad., performed by Gong Kebyar of Peliatan
Act 2: Interlude: “Ah, No!”, from Death in Venice, Op.88, by Benjamin Britten performed by English Chamber Orchestra
Tetabeuhan Sungut, by Slamet A. Sjukur, performed by IOCSF
Lord, Heare My Prayer Instantly, by Nico Muhly, performed by IOCSF
The Glitch, by Nico Muhly and Greg Pierce, performed by Krysty Swann, soprano; Lester Lynch, baritone; and Adam Tendler, piano
Mothertongue: I. Archive, by Nico Muhly
Look for Me, by Nico Muhly, performed by Calefax Reed Quintet
Throughline, by Nico Muhly, performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
New York Counterpoint: III. Fast, by Steve Reich, performed by Roeland Hendrikx
Viola Concerto, Pt.1, by Nico Muhly, performed by Nadia Sirota
Drones in Large Cycles, by Nico Muhly
Drones & Violin: Part I Material in Eb, by Nico Muhly, performed by Pekka Kuusisto
Theme Song: Mr. Puffy by Avi Bortnik, arr. by Paul Kim. Performed by Dynamic
Episode Transcript
Intro [00:00:07] Hello and welcome to In Unison, the podcast for choral conductors, composers and choristers, where we interview members of our choral community to talk about new music, new and upcoming performances, and discuss the interpersonal and social dynamics of choral organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. We are your hosts. I am Zane Fiala, Artistic Director of the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco. And I'm Giacomo DiGrigoli, a tenor in IOCSF, the Golden Gate Men's Chorus and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. And this is In Unison.
Zane [00:00:44] Today we chat with celebrated American composer Nico Muhly about everything from Star Wars to drones. No, not that kind. The Gamelan and tons of other fun stuff. Buckle up, kids. It's going to be fun ride.
Zane [00:01:02] OK, joining us today, we have Nico Muhly and Nico is an American composer and sought-after collaborator whose influences range from American minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. Nico is the recipient of commissions from so many places, such as the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Tallis Scholars and St John's College, Cambridge and others, of course. And he has written more than 100 works for the concert stage, including the opera Marnie in 2017, which premiered at the English National Opera and was staged by the Met in the fall of 2018. Nico is a frequent collaborator with choreographer Benjamin Millepied and as an arranger has paired with Sufjan Stevens, Antony and the Johnsons and others. His works for stage and screen include music for the Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie and scores for films including the Academy Award winning The Reader. Born in Vermont, though currently a resident of New York City, Nico studied composition at the Juilliard School before working as an editor and conductor for Philip Glass. He's part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes in '06 and Mother Tongue in '08. Did I miss anything? I get it all there?
Nico [00:02:16] I don't think so. That seems like almost too much.
Zane [00:02:21] It's great to have you on. Thanks for joining us.
Nico [00:02:22] My pleasure.
Giacomo [00:02:22] Nico, thank you for joining us, and we usually start these conversations with a little bit of an icebreaker to kind of just get to know you casually and have a little bit of a chat. So here's one for you, which is if you're anything like me, you probably grew up maybe standing in front of a microphone imagining your rehearsed Oscar acceptance speech. And I thought we might start this morning with just a moment of gratitude, of just, you know, thinking about if you were accepting an Oscar right now, what would your Oscar acceptance speech be like and who would you thank?
Nico [00:02:57] That's an extraordinary question. I've never been asked that before. Well, first of all, I will confess, I didn't spend that much time in front of a microphone envisioning that. So perhaps that's a difference between you and me. But I would say, you know, there's two paths through this sort of thinking process. And one one would be, you know, all the teachers that I had in sort of formative ways. Right. And in general, it's like the people who kick your ass the hardest. And it's, you know, my first piano teachers who recognized a kind of talent, but also laziness. My choirmaster, who is the sort of martinet with very serious musicians that have, you know, really important influence and then moving moving all through the sort of more traditional educational structures that I went through.
Nico [00:03:43] But in a lot of cases, I would I would end up sort of thanking a lot of non-musicians. So it would be, you know, people who taught me Dickens at Columbia or whatever. And then so that's one department is the kind of pedagogy and history. And then the other would be sort of my community now. And so that's the people with whom I make music and for whom I write music. And that would be, you know, a sort of coterie of maybe eight or a dozen people. All which is to say, you know, all of these things have come in much sharper relief because of covid, because it's like you don't get to be around people and you are really left with kind of what you have in the pantry in terms of, you know, in terms of what you're making. So I've been hyper aware of how lucky I've been to have had the pantry stocked so well and also how depressing it is to not be able to actually, like, go meet people. And, you know, I had. Yeah. Anyway, so that's a long and stupid answer here. Good question.
Giacomo [00:04:46] No, I love that. And by the way, like, we've got the kiss and cry cam backstage. So if you remember somebody else later and you feel like that and by all means, we had one more, which Zane actually wrote, which I thought was really fun. So you just recently watched all the Star Wars movies. And if you could score the next big Star Wars Universe movie, what would the title of the movie be?
Nico [00:05:06] Oh, my God, that's outrageous. I never even thought about it. The titles are always such kind of jokes anyway, right?
Giacomo [00:05:16] I know.
Nico [00:05:17] I mean, I suppose it would be, um... I don't know, because where did we leave off? Everyone, everything was... Because I feel like the next Star Wars, we should just be, you know, domestic problems, just like it's her, like figuring, you know, figuring out what's wrong with the plumbing and, you know, the Internet doesn't go. And, you know, I think it would be that. What she ends up using the force for is actually coming to fix my spectrum Internet.
Giacomo [00:05:49] In a galaxy very, very close to your bathroom.
Nico [00:05:52] Exactly, the East Village, come and deal with this construction on the Second Avenue subway move the rocks around. There would be that, it would be Rey move some rocks around, so they build the Second Avenue subway faster, and I can get to the Upper East Side for some reason.
Zane [00:06:06] I love it.
Giacomo [00:06:07] Amen. I would love to shift gears a little bit now and talk a little bit about the gamelan.
[00:06:20] [Music excerpt: "Gambang Suling," trad., performed by Gong Kebyar of Peliatan. Music description: after an initial gong sound, about 15 seconds of a clanging, almost metallic percussive sound plays in a rapid tempo]
Giacomo [00:06:20] Which is really interesting. You had a piece and there was an interview that we saw. A Canadian ethnologist Colin McPhee and Benjamin Britten wrote the Balinese ceremonial music for two pianos as a transcription of the gamelan music that McPhee heard in Bali. And which I think inspired part of your collaboration with Thomas Bartlett on Peter Pears, Balinese ceremonial music.
Nico [00:06:40] Yes.
Giacomo [00:06:40] And it said that McPhee's study of Balinese music played a role in the development of minimalism. For example, John Adams' China Gates for piano was maybe influenced by such music. First question: is that kind of what inspired you to think about this instrument? Like where did the idea for that project come from?
Nico [00:06:56] Sure. So this is a this is a complicated one and it touches on four or five different kind of large areas of thought. So you can make a pretty clear argument that Western music changed in the World's Fair in Paris when Debussy heard the gamelan for the first time. You can make an argument that that was a kind of seismic event in terms of what the kind of received harmonic and rhythmic language of music that was being written in France and then kind of expanding out around the turn of the century, the turn of the 20th century, number one.
Nico [00:07:35] So that's one conversation is like, you know, when that got into the DNA of Western music, the second part of the conversation is a more modern one about appropriation and about what does that mean? What does that mean for a Western composer and ethnomusicologist, right? Which is an important distinction.
[00:08:00] [Music excerpt: "Gambangan," trad., from Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music by Thomas Bartlett & Nico Muhly. Music description: An old, out of tune piano begins by slowly playing a wandering melody, one note at a time; then a triumphant flourish precedes a regular rhythmic process of chords reminiscent of the gamelan instruments.]
Nico [00:08:00] You know, to question and to interrogate, to have made a transcription of this music that reduces and kind of levels the scales that are being used in that music and the notes that are in that instrument into what we have here, which is to say 12 notes. What is that process of? You know, it is a colonial gesture to a certain extend. So, that's number one.
Nico [00:08:26] Number two or number three. Number three, the question then becomes, what does that, quote unquote, mean and how have people used that? And and what is the... If you're going to say it's kind of a colonial project, it's also kind of not in a sense, because it wasn't used as a form of saying, you know, these people have no history, these people have no culture, as you see in, for instance, Australia, right? That's an argument for Aboriginal genocide. Essentially, you say they're just kind of wandering around, which is it wasn't that. It was McPhee had enormous respect for it. But of course, it comes with the weight of all this complexity. What I was interested in is not my relationship to it, right? Because no one cares what, you know, it's like...champagne isn't on ice waiting for my thoughts about the gamelan. But what I think I could offer is how I see it relating to the music that I love. So it's basically two generations removed. When McPhee came back from Bali, he and Benjamin Britten had written the transcriptions. He and Britten recorded them in this house in Brooklyn where they were living. So the original recording of those transcriptions is really mesmerizing because it's this jacked up piano.
[00:09:45] [Music excerpt: "Pemoengkah," trad., from Balinese Ceremonial Music for Two Pianos, performed by Colin McPhee & Benjamin Britten. Music description: An eastern, quasi-pentatonic melody is played in octaves on the piano; in traditional Balinese music, these keys are referred to as Slendro or Pelog.]
Nico [00:09:45] And it's from the 30s or 40s, and it's a really...
Giacomo [00:09:51] And just as a side note, like you, it sounded like you also treated the piano in some way on the first track in that you just maybe just out of tune or something.
Nico [00:09:59] It's an old piano. It's actually right over there. And so for me, what was interesting about about Britten's relationship, right. Is that you always can listen to his music with this sense of craft, underneath which is always something else. And there's something always a little bit out of you in a way that's very English and also very gay. And I think that one of the transmission methods of this gamelan music that Britten takes advantage of is this kind of formal abstraction, which he also takes from Japanese music. But what you see in the church parables, right. So you see in [inaudible], and you see very, very explicitly at the end of Death in Venice.
[00:10:56] [Music excerpt: Act 2: Interlude: "Ah, No!" from Death in Venice, Op. 88, by Benjamin Britten, performed by English Chamber Orchestra. Music description: A xylophone plays in descending pentatonic intervals].
Nico [00:10:56] And [inaudible] music is is very explicitly taken from Balinese/Javanese music, and the very last page of Death in Venice is this... it kind of does this deliquescence into that imagined scale. So clearly for Britten, at the end of his life, it had this serious emotional import, right? And you can then expand that argument out into saying, you know, there was this sense that the disease in Venice at that time came from the east.
Nico [00:11:34] There was this sense of, you know, there was a built in kind of xenophobic project of that of that moment and also, by the way, this moment.
Giacomo [00:11:42] That we're still reckoning with to this day.
Nico [00:11:45] Yeah, that we're still reckoning with to this day. And so there feels to me like there was this kind of invisible handshake that happens at the end, right where it's Britten remembering his relationship with McPhee and then going back to McPhee's time in Bali. And so there's there's a kind of continuity of this material. And I know this sounds very complicated when you say it, but essentially what I was trying to say with that project with Thomas was let's not be influenced. And I'm doing air quotes, for listeners. Let's not be "influenced" by this thing. Let's think about transmission and how something gets into the bloodstream of somewhere and then what you end up with, you know, right now, today, in 2021. Where does that come from and what has it meant? And what is it what does it mean now?
Giacomo [00:12:38] So the reason we ask is because a couple of seasons ago or actually was it our last, most most recent concern when we actually got together.
Zane [00:12:46] Second season of 2019, yeah.
Giacomo [00:12:47] We worked, we have a composer in residence every year with IOC. And that season was Robin Estrada, who with Zane programed a concert called East By Southeast. And part of that was we performed a piece called Tetabeuhan Sungut, by Slamet Abdul Sjukur.
[00:13:03] [Music excerpt: Tetabeuhan Sungut by Slamet Abdul Sjukur, performed by IOCSF. Music description: Choir basses vocalize non-pitched, percussive sounds to mimic the drumbeat of a gamelan ensembleband. Soprano and alto voices join in with simple pentatonic melodic motifs. ].
Giacomo [00:13:14] And for a lot of us in the choir, it was the first time we had experienced it. And Robin brought it to us because she was like, I want you to experience this. And Zane'll take over here in a second because we wanted to get your thoughts about the score. The score that Robin and Zane asked us to look at was actually not in Western notation at all. And it was, again, this sort of notion of like the intention of like, well, how do you want people like what's the throughline? How do you want people to absorb what you're seeing here all the way down to whether or not we were looking at something that was notated in sort of a Western score fashion and so, Zane, I don't know if you have it, this is going to be hard to explain. For folks who are listening, we will put the image of the the score on our website as well. But just kind of wanted to get your reaction to thinking about this and like how you feel looking at this as a musician trying to learn what this is.
Nico [00:14:10] [mostly inaudible sounds as Nico quickly reviews the instructions in the score.].
Nico [00:14:10] OK, this is fine. This is [laughs]. You just do what it says. I mean, it's not you know, essentially it's a graphical notation. This is 1976. You know, at that time, I think there is perhaps greater interest in doing things this way. It's. Yeah, I think I can figure this out. Essentially, it's just it's graphic notation in the way that you'd find in, I don't know, like the Cage Carillon music or whatever. It's a graphic notation, but there are Western notations on top of it, indicating a kind of example fragment. And then, I mean, honestly, this is not... For me, this isn't that crazy. It would take a second to decode. But I think it's fine.
Giacomo [00:15:00] And I guess the question to follow up on there is, does this process of decoding matter?
Nico [00:15:06] Well, you know, this is an interesting question. I mean, I think speaking as a composer and speaking as an interpreter are two different things. And I think that there are a lot of people... There are a lot of musicians I know who would love to deal with this, right? In the same way it's like people who love puzzles, right? And it's people people who love... I mean, you know, the French word décodage is literally decoding. And and I think there are people for whom this is like, oh, my God, I can't wait to get in there. And I think that's true of... I mean, I can think of like 60 things that are that are like this. Uh, number one.
Nico [00:15:56] Number two, I think that there's a joy in the context of teamwork in doing stuff like this. And I think doing something like this together brings you kind of emotionally closer to the person with whom you have to do it. And I think that's true with...uh, could be this or it could be an Ockeghem motet or it could be, you know, music from the 15th century that doesn't have bar lines. Or it could be music from, you know, that requires electronic interpretation. So I'm pretty like go for it with this stuff. What I'm not a huge fan of, which is not what this piece is doing, but sometimes the kids get obsessed with this kind of notation. And what you end up with is something that's actually not clear. This is clear. It's a code. You decode it, then you know what to do. You know, how do I put this, if you've written a score that requires you to teach it to somebody, there's a problem with that, which is that you might die. [laughter] And in fact, you will die.
Giacomo [00:17:11] It happens to the best of us. Yes.
Nico [00:17:14] I mean, you know, right. We should all be so lucky. So it's in, you know, there's two things. There's music that exists in a kind of totally oral tradition, right? Where no one's writing anything down. There's music that exists in a hyper notated situation. And then there's music that exists in this kind of middle space, which is probably the biggest, right, in the same way that baroque music is not fully written out ever. Like we know what these—huge air quotes everyone—we know what these ornamentations mean. We've inherited the oral tradition of baroque music is performance practice, right? Like, you know how to do these like agogic accents before the end and, you know, to sort of speed up into these resolutions and whatever. So, you know, decoding is decoding can be really fun. And again, I think there are musicians who would look at that and say, I don't think it's worth my time to do this. And there are others who would literally like cancel all their appointments and just work on that for three years.
Giacomo [00:18:15] Well, it's interesting. We were talking a couple of days ago with, or rather, we attended the Instagram live feed with a gentleman named Alex Blake, who leads a group called Tonality in L.A. and he is the one of the authors of a thing called the Black Voices Matter Pledge. And the conversation was largely around ADEI, sort of access and diversity, equity of inclusion. And what's interesting to me about the score, and what I wonder if you think about this at all is, my gut reaction to that score, and looking at that was like this feels like it can be a little bit more accessible to folks who were just like, "I don't know, I never learned to read music." Like when you talk with Alex and he mentions how music is generally taught in gospel choirs. Right. Like they're like, no no, we're not reading music. It's just going to be that oral tradition. How do you think about creating those kinds of access points for folks who are looking at your scores or who maybe want to sort of perform any Western notated music but kind of throw their hands up and they're like, oh, I don't know.
Nico [00:19:13] Sure. I mean, I'll confess to you, you know, because... How do I put this? It's never really come up in the context of... Like the closest I come to this is working with partially hearing impaired students on choral pieces where it's kids. And I think kids have a really different relationship to the printed page than adults do. And sometimes it literally is like, OK, that that is physically higher than that. So I will physically raise my voice. This, you know, but all of which to say is I have not given too much thought to this specific issue because it lies, I would say, relatively far outside of the sort of Ken of what it is that I do, with the exception of the music that I've written explicitly for children, which is, again, a slightly different thing, because of the nature of, you know, the kids are going to be like probationers at King's College, Cambridge or something. So it's a different situation. And this is also something, again, where I don't think my voice is needed in it. Like I'd rather the people who are... I say rather as if I have a choice. I think that there are so many people who are great at that process of figuring out alternative means of transmission. That having been said, I also think that there are people who can't read music, who can hear you play something on the piano and can play it back. Like it's not actually that rare to have non musicians able to do that. And, you know, there are non musicians who don't know that they have pitch, but they do have pitch because they can always sing a song that they know in the exact same key. So it's I again, I don't worry about it too much unless there's a situation where I can specifically help. Right. So if someone were to say, all right, you're going to write a piece for a choir of people who don't read music, now what? You know, and then you figure out something like shape note or you figure it out. But right. So there's a conversation about access that is like specifically related to what you were talking about that hasn't explicitly arisen in in my context. Which is again, you know, it's not because I don't care. I just feel like there are other voices who could speak to that better than I could.
Giacomo [00:21:39] Switching gears a little bit into sort of social impact or social issues and sort of like the message of compositions. I think you see this a lot, and especially now like there are lots of folks who are writing to say something specific. And you've said "a piece of music can and should exist as a space in which all manner of emotional itineraries are possible, all within a single context. A piece of live music unfolds in real time and is experienced by a roomful of people at precisely the same moment, but should mean different things to each of them." And I think you also used a metaphor of a cathedral, of sort of like you can take a snapshot any moment and there's tons of stories in there. Flipping the script a little bit. Have you have you ever done the opposite? Have you ever set things to mean something specific or had that thought in your mind?
Nico [00:22:23] Well, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I mean, I think, you know, I don't want to tell people what to think, but I think, you know, it's sort of like suggested use and, you know, an opera is pretty is pretty suggested use-ey, right? The kinds that I write where it's like, this is the story, this is where this happens. Like, you know, the kid gets stabbed here, like you can care about it or not, you know. But, you know, I think I still try to avoid like the loudest bit or the quietest bit being the most emotional bit and the fastest bit being the fastest. But like too much one to one ratio, which isn't to say that I dislike music that does that. Like I sometimes want to get on that train, like I want to get on the romantic music train where it's like very clear where you're, like, meant to get that note, right? But sometimes I don't. And sometimes, you know, and again, this sort of relates to what I just said. It's like I always feel a little uncomfortable kind of responding to something I've said in the past, because it makes it seem like I'm eschewing any other way to make. Which is not what I'm doing, it's more just like my project is not that. So but that having been said. But think about it again. Like architecture, right? Like there is a thing that the architect is up to. But part of what that thing can be is creating atmosphere that is flexible and creating spaces where, yeah, sure, this is the kitchen, but also you can have it in a weird kind of personal way.
[00:24:08] [Music excerpt: "Lord, Heare My Prayer Instantly," by Nico Muhly, performed by IOCSF. Music description: A choir sings the opening title text; treble voices sing an aching opening major 7th leap as if it were a plea to God for help.]
Nico [00:24:09] And I think, again, thinking, you know, thinking about sacred architecture is a really good way to do that because it isn't domestic architecture. Nor is it a kind of narrative thing. I don't know how to describe it, but I do know that it's something that I set out to do. And not to say that any other way is a bad way. And related to what I imagine is the fallout of this, where it's like, you know, there's so much music... I'll put it differently: there's so many composers who are really good at encoding political, emotional, you know, any combination of those things, kind of deep... Let me think about how to put this... Deep resonances, about complicated ideas, about, you know, the practical world in which we live and everything goes along with it; the emotional life of the composer; the emotional perceived life of a community. There are many composers who are very good at that. So I don't feel I don't feel the need to do it. And I think, you know, if I make something oblique and weird that people can relate to in a different way than that's, you know, I'm staying in my lane.
Giacomo [00:25:28] Well, so on the same tip or kind of continuing in the same trajectory, those questions, um, some of the composers we chat with are very hyper specific about certain things like their engraving or like their intentions or like they will be very specific, like super, super specific about things, about dynamic workings or whatever. Have you ever seen a performance of any of your pieces where the performers just took certain liberties with your composition? And where do you draw the line between being like, "OK, that's not mine anymore"? I mean, it's obviously once you put it in people's hands, it becomes theirs. But, you know, is there a point at which you've ever seen performers just take your piece and do something with it, where you're like, "huh."?
Nico [00:26:10] No.
All [00:26:10] [Laughter]
Nico [00:26:10] No, I literally haven't. I mean, I think what I try to do I mean, for me, going back to what we were saying before, notation is a form of communication between me and the performers, right? And notation exists as precisely or imprecisely as you want. And you should feel free to experiment with that. And you can try writing a score that has no dynamic markings and see what happens. You can try writing a score that has, you know, hyper, hyper, hyper specific markings. You can try any combination of those things. And as long as it's clear, you get what you deserve. Or you get what you ask for. So if I've written something that says that says "espressivo," right? And I'm not deliberate about what I mean by that, that opens up a little space between me and the performers in which the performer is invited to make a variety of decisions, right. If I write a little pattern in a box and I say "repeat out of time, asynchronous," whatever... Whatever the performer does is correct, by definition. I've literally never had it go haywire in that way, I mean, sometimes someone will ignore a tempo marking and that's frustrating, but it's like, you know, I think that unless I've said "absolute strict tempo," which I do, sometimes, right, where you say, you know, "no slower than," or whatever. But in general, the thing that actually opened up my whole world in terms of that was opera, because, you know, you can be as specific as you want. But when that curtain goes up, the thing that occurs is hundreds of people trying to do it right and hundreds of people trying to do it right who have memorized this thing fully, like literally embodied the thing. And for me at that moment, what they do becomes the right thing. Because, you know, it's so deep inside their muscles that, you know, if they're reaching for a high note and then float it, and I wrote "forte," it's correct what they did, you know what I mean, it's like and you can you can be an asshole about it and be like, oh, I thought I meant...
Giacomo [00:28:29] But there's a certain beauty and kind of just letting it...and seeing what happens.
Nico [00:28:33] And the other thing is, you know, if I want total control, I will do it all myself or I'll do it in the studio.
[00:28:43] [Music excerpt: "Mothertongue: I. Archive," by Nico Muhly. Music description: A pitched treble voice begins reciting the letters of the alphabet in aleatoric fashion on one note; a second treble voice joins at an interval of a in seconds, also repeating the alphabet. As the music fades, a buzzing drone petal rests underneath the singing voices]
[00:28:46] So the albums that I've made, Speaks Volumes and Mothertongue and other projects or film scores or whatever, you know, I have absolute control because I'm in the studio. I can stop. I can say, "don't do that, do it this way." I can you know, I can fix it in post. I can I can turn one and turn to another. You can mute someone entirely. So I have enough avenues for that level of control where I don't feel like my concert music or my choral music has to be that hyper notated. But, I will say something else interesting, which is: I've also learned that if your music is under marked and looks very, very simple, oftentimes, and I hope too many people aren't listening to this, but sometimes, let's say, your inclination will not be to practice it, because if there's four pieces on a concert and one is like mine, that's just like dead simple, and then the other one is atonal and whatever, the intervals are complicated. And then the third one looks like it's going to sound like R2D2 and the score looks like Raccoon's got into it, like, you know, you're going to focus on the Racoons.
Zane [00:29:58] Right.
Nico [00:29:59] And then you're just like, "no, no, we'll just do the Muhly at the end." And so I've started to be a little bit more detailed about certain things just to indicate that I care.
Giacomo [00:30:09] Well, like what's an example of that?
Nico [00:30:11] An example is like more dynamic. So essentially, if you if you are playing the oboe and you see a line that's like a simple line.
[00:30:26] [Music excerpt: "Look for Me," by Nico Muhly, performed by Calefax Reed Quintet. A woodwind quintet is playing a piece at a slow-ish tempo of about 60 bpm; the melody and counterpoint is being exchanged between instruments.].
Nico [00:30:26] Sometimes you won't realize that you are the primary voice, right? So I'll add something that says "solo" or whatever, and then you really shape the phrase for them and you show exactly like where the crescendo would lead to in a way that they might do naturally to a piece like the Brahms Violin Concerto, like, you know, how to shape it. But indicating that I know that they know that we all know together that this is a melody and this is how I would do it, you know, indicating really clearly things like for choral music: do you want me to cut off before the beat or on the beat? Indicating, do you want to place the S whatever or do you want the N to be vocalized or not vocalized? Just being a little bit more careful about that. And part of that arose—my interest in specificity—out of a couple of situations where even though the piece I wrote looked simple, it was actually complicated and suffered from a lack of rehearsal, number one. And number two, you know, again, I don't like being in a situation where musicians feel like they're kind of flying blind, you know, and they don't feel like they know what I want. That's bad. And I think, you know, there's two versions of bad. There's one version where they feel bad and they kind of just wing it but in different ways. And that's my fault, right? If I haven't been clear, that's on me. But there are other situations where in like an orchestra rehearsal, like some random musician will decide that, like the move is to stop the rehearsal and ask a really specific question about, like, do you want stems in or stems out on a mute? And I'm like, first of all, this is like the first reading of this thing. It's Tuesday morning. We can talk about this at lunch, you know what I mean?
Giacomo [00:32:08] We call that Chorus Dolores in our group, which is very like hyper detailed and like I'm like, well, wait.
Nico [00:32:15] And now I'm like, I'll tell you if it's wrong, but, you know, your first your first instinct, the first time it happens to you when you're a young composer and it's like you have an eight minute piece and you have five minutes of rehearsal and someone asks about some random cutoff and you're like, "can I have your mom's number? Because you were raised wrong?"
All [00:32:30] [laugher].
Giacomo [00:32:30] Yes!
Nico [00:32:30] Like, yeah, that's money. I can't deal with it. Anyway, so, again, I know that person doesn't mean... Because they're trying to do it right, so you assume best intentions. And in the interest of not having rehearsal stop, as specific as you can possibly be, is an act of respect to the musicians.
Giacomo [00:32:50] You heard it here, people. Niko Muhly said, "hold your frickin questions till the end of rehearsal. It's nice to other people who are rehearsing with you.
Nico [00:32:58] I will also say, you know, P.S., in a context of making orchestra music or whatever, like if I have something to say to a player, I'll probably wait. And, you know, unless it's something that applies to like five people, right. Where you're like, OK, everyone, can everyone just crescendo through that note or whatever, you know, that's fine to say in context. But actually, one of the reasons that I love what I do and one of the reasons I hate what's going on right now is that I don't get to have that moment in the break room, you know what I mean? At like in the Philharmonie in Cologne or, you know, in like the Frits Phillips Hall in Eindhoven or whatever it is, like, you know, next to that weird Dutch coffee machine that like it's horrible and you pay a euro, but it's like really delicious somehow. And then you find the English horn player, introduce yourself, and then, you know, chances are you'll have a new friend because you behave like a mammal.
Giacomo [00:33:50] Speaking of having those moments? You recently there was a new opera that you wrote called Glitch. That was extraordinary. I mean, it literally like knocked my socks off.
Nico [00:34:02] Thank you.
[00:34:03] [Music excerpt: The Glitch, by Nico Muhly and Greg Pierce, performed by Krysty Swann, soprano; Lester Lynch, baritone; and Adam Tendler, piano. Music description: Piano chords underlay an operatic soprano and rich baritone voice, who exchange imagined lines spoken between a husband visiting his wife in prison. The dialogue:
Tilly: ”I didn’t go through with it.”
Lyle: “You came awfully close.”
Tilly: “That’s why I panicked that night. I didn’t...I didn’t go through with it. Isn’t it proof that I love you?”
Lyle: “What were you thinking?”
Piano chords play underneath the continued podcast conversation.]
Giacomo [00:35:05] It's fascinating because, for those who don't know, it's basically like Escape at Dannemora, but it's this notion of these felons who broke out...
Nico [00:35:14] Iit's a true story.
Giacomo [00:35:15] It's a true story, yes, it's a true story. But one of the things that's equally fascinating, aside from the sort of impact of watching this piece, which is really remarkable, was watching the sort of after bits where it's just two performers. There's a pianist, there's an iPad, I think that, like the two performers were looking at. Fascinating, by the way, how you were able to put all that together. In that process, were you able to have those moments with the performers and the folks who were involved? I mean, how were you able to create those moments?
Nico [00:35:44] No. No, and I think this is a perfect example of, like, Corona nightmare.
Giacomo [00:35:49] Yeah.
Nico [00:35:49] I mean, yeah, it was commissioned within this time. So we knew that that was the situation. You know, I did another piece that might be worth investigating around the same time, called Throughline for the San Francisco Symphony.
[00:36:11] [Music excerpt: "Throughline," by Nico Muhly, performed by the San Francisco Symphony. Music description: A triangle and string flourish opens the piece, with a violin quickly entering with an ostenato-like dancing melody that travels up and down the instrument in florid leaps.].
Nico [00:36:11] Which is this really complicated, basically a full orchestra piece. It's on YouTube and it's kind of the opposite version of that, where I was just up in everyone's grills the whole time, you know, like because I was there on the stage with them. But, you know, one at a time with masks and people and puppy pads. So... But the glitch is an interesting example, because that was really put together by Marcus Shields and Neal Goren's. Marcus was the producer and Neal was the conductor and artistic director of this brand new opera company. I knew all of the participants really well. I hadn't written for Lester before, but I knew his work. Krysty Swann was the cover for Denise Graves in Marnie and for whatever scheduling reasons, Krysty took a week of rehearsals and I literally took her aside and I was like, "I want to write for you." And it's, you know, and again, that's that weird magic moment, right, where it's like you're at your rehearsal and the cover mezzo-soprano comes out and you're like, that's so badass. Like, let's make something together, you know, three and a half years later. Adam Tendler is a wonderful pianist, also from Vermont. I wrote the part on him, you know, and so that's to a certain extent, the kind of piece where your writing into a known void, if that makes sense.
Giacomo [00:37:29] And on compositions, just shifting gears just a little bit, because I'm curious personally about this as well, you've said "the primary task, I feel, is to create a piece of art that is better than the same amount of silence. I would prefer to sit silently thinking for ten minutes than to listen to certain pieces of music and therefore feel that it is my duty as a composer to occupy the time of the listener and the musicians with something challenging and engaging and emotionally alluring." And I totally agree with that. A question for you about that statement: how do you experience your compositions? I mean, can a composer affect themselves when you hear it come back?
Nico [00:38:07] That's an interesting question. I mean, I find it difficult to listen to my own music sometimes. I'm not sure why. It just it feels like listening to your voice on the answering machine or something, like there's something kind of off about it. I mean, I try to make the music as, how do I put this, I try to bake enough of my interests, obsessions, emotional, whatever, into the material at such an early level that yes, listening to it affects me, but in different ways and in different times. And, you know, it's it's more like a memory of having written it or a memory of kind of where I was (again, air quotes), I mean, more like what my artistic obsessions were at that time. And those things are always very moving. I also have written about this, but I was kind of mis-medicated for a long time for bipolar, which meant that there was this kind of weird hole in the music that I wrote that I don't really remember at all. So sometimes when I hear those pieces, it's simultaneously really depressing and also kind of moving. And there's a period around 2015 when when I got better over the course of a year, those pieces I find actually quite moving because there I really can hear it undo itself. I can just hear my communicative strategies becoming more generous. And that's pieces like the Viola Concerto. That's that's a piece called Spiral Mass. There's there's a couple, there's like five or six things around that time. So yes, it can be affecting. But also like no one really needs to know that if it makes sense like that. And that's what I hate about, about reading music history where it's like I don't need to know, like that Clara Schumann got her pussy ate. Like I just don't care.
All [00:40:02] [Laughter].
Nico [00:40:02] That's great...
Giacomo [00:40:04] You just need to know that she got a cup of coffee in the morning beforehand.
Nico [00:40:08] Yeah, I don't want to know where Brahms put like... It's like, you know, it just feels crazy to me. I mean, I'll say also I don't need you know, I don't think anyone else doesn't need to know. And I'm very glad that people want to read about, like, you know, what List said to Wagner that time they were... That great. Like, that's a that's a good use of someone's time. Keeps them off the pole, you know. But um...
All [00:40:32] [Laughter]
Nico [00:40:32] Anyway, so all that is to say, yes, some of it does have an effect. But again, you know, and this is a Corona conversation. One of the things that I think a lot of us have been wrestling with is that, you know, we like to think and we talk about the music being in in the abstract, right, if you're a composer. Like you're writing this thing that, you know, has weight and dimension and is a stack of paper and whatever, and then that, you know, composers are lucky because we can still compose at this time. But for me, again, it goes back to those moments, those serendipitous moments when you're in a room with people making music. But it also goes back to this kind of social element of this thing, which is why does this thing exist? And, you know, for me, writing choral music always sort of comes back to, and this is another reason that I think so much about duration, is that if you write a setting of the Canticles of the Magnificat, people are standing when they hear it. Right? You were standing up. I mean, if you're doing it the right way. And, you know, it exists in a liturgical context—no one claps, no one really cares who you are. It doesn't matter. It's this kind of method to allow the assembled company to sort of look upwards. In the same way that incense and architecture combine to create this directional gesture. That isn't a romantic narrative. So one of the things that I think we've all been missing are these stupid social interactions like where you just meet someone at the bar beforehand for two seconds. Or for me, the most touching is always if you're doing one thing and like conducting some baroque thing. And then an old friend of yours is in town rehearsing an opera at that time and you meet at the market and have some fucked up oyster at 2:00 in the afternoon before everyone has to go. But, you know, it's like those moments where there's a sense of intended and unintentional community that I find so important in what we all do. But accompanying that is this weird guilt where I'm like, well, does that mean I don't actually care about the notes and the rhythms?
Giacomo [00:42:46] Well something personally that I've been struggling with myself, and recently we're thinking about this. I sing with a group called the Golden Gate Men's Chorus in addition to singing with IOC. And GGMC is turning 40 this year. We're very excited. And we may reach out and ask you for a commission by the way, just a side note in case you see that coming. But one of the things that we've been thinking about a lot, of course, you know, being a member of a choir, like the gay choral movement kind of really picked up in the late 70s, early 80s, part of the like sort of big sweeping American, you know, choral tradition picking up. And, you know, GGMC was a founding member of GALA, which is the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choirs, and it's mostly North America. It's U.S. and Canada. And one of the things I'm struggling with, and particularly now that we're kind of looking back on 40 years of making music and as the sort of small community in San Francisco, the question kind of keeps coming up, which is like, well, why do we still need gay choirs? Especially when it's like men's choir, like the word men is right there and it already sort of on its face feels like we're saying something about who's welcome and who's not. Even though it's openly kind of welcome to anybody. I mean, what are your thoughts about the needs for gay choirs? Like, do we still need them?
Nico [00:43:58] I mean, is there any other kind?
All [00:44:02] [Laughter].
Giacomo [00:44:02] Yes, like lesbian, like field hockey, women's field hockey teams. But I mean...
Nico [00:44:07] Yeah, in my world.
Giacomo [00:44:09] But let's be honest, you know.
Nico [00:44:11] Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, that's one of those things where unless you think only the queens can sing the Brahms Alto Rhapsody in a special way like I, you know, but I think... How old you?
Giacomo [00:44:24] Five years older than you: forty five.
Nico [00:44:26] I feel like we might exist on slightly different cusps of the necessity for something like that. But I will say that, I imagine, not myself having been part of any form of homosexual collective, that there is, there was or there is a need for an explicit piece of community making. And I think I'm thinking more now, my friends in London in the sort of pink singers where it's about just kind of that form of—not to use too sacred a term—that from a fellowship that can be so lacking in people's lives in a variety of ways. Again, you know, in my personal experience, most choirs with whom one deals hits is of the purpler variety.
Giacomo [00:45:18] Yes, moot point basically.
Nico [00:45:18] Yeah, but it's also it's not even about that. I really do think it's about a question of community. And I think if you, if it was needed, it was made. And I think that's great. And it's you know, I think also, how do I put this, I think there's too much or not enough rep for something like that, and then sometimes you end up in the kind of show tunes land, which is fine. But, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I hope that things like that exist, you know, as long as they're genuinely, emotionally and artistically useful for the people who are in them and and who listen to it.
Giacomo [00:46:03] And maybe also following on the tip of this, speaking on sort of identity and being a composer, every bio I've seen of you, or every description that I've seen of you online is very clear that it's "Nico Muhly, American composer, American composer Nico Muhly." And some of that, I think is because I was reading The Guardian and in the U.K., they wanted to be clear about that. Do you consider yourself an American composer? And what does that what does that mean?
Nico [00:46:26] Well, you know, it's so funny. It's like legally or whatever, my publishers are English and I think the UK universe has like adopted me slightly more now because, you know, I'm there half the year anyway. Like this is the first year I haven't been in the UK half the year since 2009. I think that's just a shorthand because I have a name that's unclear where it could be from and that I've never really clocked it. But I think it's a part of what you do as any sort of musician is you just say where you're from. I think I think it's... I don't consider it like a fundamental part of my identity that people need to understand, but yeah, whatever, like maybe it is.
Giacomo [00:47:11] Well, there is I mean, there is sort of this notion I don't know how true this is or not, I haven't spent very much time investigating it. But we went to ACDA and we asked a very well-known composer who I won't mentioned, you know, "What is the American sound? Is there such a thing?" And his response was just like, well, "there's me." And I'm like, "really just you? Just you?" Do you think there's such a thing? Like, what does that even mean?
Nico [00:47:38] I mean, I think there totally is and there totally isn't. I mean, but I think it's more a constellation...it's like seeing similar constellations and calling them different things, right? Like the plow versus the dipper versus... I think what there is or are... What you can observe handily is like a pedagogical tradition. And I think if you rewind to like the eighties, for instance, there was definitely more geographically specific places where things sounded a certain way, like Darmstadt sounded like this. American composers who weren't in institutions sounded like that. France has always been its own universe. But now I feel like people have passports and are moving around more stylistically. And again, born in the 80s and sort of coming of age stylistically and in the early 90s. But really kind of later you realize that, it's really what the musicians around you are playing that informs what you do. And I'm incredibly lucky to have so many friends who are are just at home playing just as at home playing Boulez as they are playing John Adams as they are playing Reich. You know, so there's always this metaphor I always use is that I'm obviously from America, but doesn't mean I can't go somewhere else for a minute. And I definitely don't think it's a useful way to talk about anything. However, I will say that there is a thing about orchestral playing that is specific to—and I think you see this, I think this is something that John Adams talks about and you may want to dig up the quote before I disgraced myself, we just drive over his house—but it is a sense that there is a certain kind of American music, which is to say the kind of repetition economy where a lot of American musicians have played more of that music and therefore it's baked in. Like there's a metronome baked in that you don't necessarily always find in other places. So there's a sense of, I don't want to say rhythmic accuracy, because that's not what I mean, but listen to people who aren't from America playing Steve Reich "New York Counterpoint" and you'll see what I mean.
[00:50:10] [Music excerpt: New York counterpoint: III. Fast, by Steve Reich, performed by Roeland Hendrikx. Music description: Woodwinds are playing at a frenetic tempo, with a bassoon plodding along at a slower pace than the other woodwinds, as if the bassoon were a tourist ambling slowly on a New York sidewalk.]
Nico [00:50:10] It's just there's something kind of CGI'd about the swing of it.
Giacomo [00:50:12] It's like a strict adherence to the score or something?
Nico [00:50:16] Or it's like it goes the wrong way or there's always something. I don't think it's uninteresting and it doesn't make the piece bad and doesn't make the performance bad. There is that...that's the piece. That's the example I always give is those Reich pieces where you're playing with your own self and you have to kind of groove in a specific way that will sound different. But it also doesn't matter. Again, it's it's like, you know, I always think that's a sort of I don't wanna say lazy, but it's a shorthand way to understand sometimes someone's style.
[00:50:52] [Music excerpt continues].
Nico [00:50:52] And I think, you know, how do I put this, if you've been described in the press as like indicative of this in the style, if you start believing that, then it starts changing what you write.
Giacomo [00:51:02] Well, and speaking of which, just totally random question. Do you do you read the reviews?
Nico [00:51:07] No. And listen, no one believes me. I will tell you, not only do I not read it, here's what I did. So I stopped. I had to stop reading cause it was driving me so crazy around Two Boys in London and driving me crazy because it was like it was a combination of things. It was like, you know, no one likes to hear something bad said about one's own work, number one. Number two, you realize really quickly that there's a bigger narrative at work, right? So people are like the notes and the rhythms kind of vanish in this imagined foam of like social thing where it's like, "oh, well, you know, it's the end of British opera if they're commissioning these Americans" or it's like it's like because there's a grand opera, like no one cares about chamber opera anymore. It's part of a journalistic kind of, how do I say...
Giacomo [00:51:52] It's part of a lens or a perspective that they bring to it.
Nico [00:51:56] Yeah, and I don't think it's uninteresting. I just don't feel like I need to be in that washing machine, number one. Number two, then I slowly stopped reading any arts coverage, and I cannot tell you how much better I feel for it. Like, look, there is something in The Washington Post apparently a couple of weeks ago where it was like the top 20, whatever the fuck, and the amount of agita that friends of mine who are on it. But it said something weird, not on it, but they wanted to be or not on it, but they hate those people, and like whatever. It's like the amount of foam that came off of this little listicle, right, somehow turned into this big thing. And it's like, and you realize that there's this whole other ecosystem of like caring about that. And in New York, it's so absurd because it's like if you really care that much about like how the Times thinks about what you do, you're literally putting yourself at the mercy of three white homosexual men. You're like my entire life depends...
Giacomo [00:52:59] Yeah, why?
Nico [00:53:01] ...one of these three gays liking or not liking or finding...
Giacomo [00:53:04] And like maybe they're just bitter that day and you're like, really?
Nico [00:53:07] Right. Or they make a brilliant observation or whatever. But it's just like, you know, do you see what I'm saying? It's like there's so many more interesting ways to...
Giacomo [00:53:19] Measure your impact.
Nico [00:53:20] Yeah, just self evaluate, and I don't think it's uninteresting and I'm glad that other people care about it so much. But the other thing, and this is, again, like not reading anyone else's reviews has been great. And here's why: I think the most disgusting thing in the world is when people congratulate people on having gotten a good review. I think it's so awful. And it happens all over Facebook, right, where someone's like "so proud to have...thank you, thank you, New York Times." And everyone says "congratulations. So well deserved." And in all of that bullshit, you completely lose track of whatever craft has gone into making the piece that we're talking about. Also, what's the opposite of congratulations? Like, sorry? You know what I mean, it's a really interesting question. And so what I try to do if I've gone to something of someone's, right, then that's fine, I don't need to read the review. If I can't go, I make it a point to write to them and say, can I have a score and a recording or can I have a MIDI demo or something? And so then it's like I don't need to know in what system this has a certain kind of value. What I need to know is what I have, how I engage with it. And then similarly, again, moving backwards to the kind of choral thing that opened it up for me in a sense of the music that I love the most, was not written for a review or for applause or for whatever. Like, you know, maybe you could say, OK, like, you know, in this in the in the court of Henry, the whatever, like these musicians were in favor and out of it. But actually, you know, it's a sacred architecture. So I think worrying about it is kind of a waste of time. And it does really put you... And the economy of like, thank you for a good review and fuck you for a bad one really does put you at the mercy of strangers in a way that can blind you from the real communicative duty of the composer and the performer.
Giacomo [00:55:20] Yeah. And preclude you from your own experience of it.
Nico [00:55:24] Yeah, exactly. And again, I'm not saying no one, no one should read the reviews, but it really did, I felt like 15 pounds lighter, just not worrying about it and watching my really, really good friends like intimate friends put so much weight in this thing. That it's hard to watch sometimes. And I know that a good review can be like a career boost, like I understand this, but I really do feel like it gives it an enormous amount of power and turns into kind of like Gollum with the ring. It's like if you've got it then... And if you don't have it, it's like [raspy Gollum voice] my precious.
Giacomo [00:56:11] Nico we've only got a couple of minutes and we want to be mindful of your time.
Nico [00:56:13] We can go a bit longer if you want. We can go like five or whatever.
Giacomo [00:56:16] Fabulous. In that case...
Nico [00:56:18] Get through your questions so we don't end on some weird note about me talking about like, Gollum.
All [00:56:23] [Laughter].
Giacomo [00:56:23] Our last series of questions are largely about just looking forward. And, you know, we're in this moment together in COVID, it's terrible. I loved your tweet, by the way, where you were sort of talking about the impact of COVID on your notations, like lontanissimo and these things.
Nico [00:56:41] Yeah, exactly.
Giacomo [00:56:43] But sort of looking forward, two questions I wanted to ask. One is just what are you excited about right now? What is exciting you? What is inspiring you? If you can find those feelings right now, if you can access those feelings, what projects are inspiring you?
Nico [00:57:00] That's a little vague. I mean, you know, there's a bunch of stuff going on that... I don't know, it's hard because I feel like, you know, inspired—in the etymologically radical sense—you're breathing in, and there's not much air to breathe. It feels like Spaceballs right where the air has been sucked out by that giant vacuum. I am excited to see what the kids do. Like I feel like I'm excited to see what people in their 20s are going to do with this. I'm excited that...I have a, not a theory, but I'm super excited about people expanding their... Performers expanding their sense of what they can do alone at home. I'm very nervous that performers' ability to spend six thousand dollars on some microphones and cameras and stuff is going to be the dividing line. And I think that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later and that schools need to, like, if you go to Juilliard, Juilliard should partner with Avid. And Avid should give every student a Sebelius license and every student should get like a Logitech webcam or something. So that there isn't this, like, really obvious—because that's what was so busted up in the first couple of months of it, ight? It was like people who had the resources to just go on Amazon and get like a kit were...
Giacomo [00:58:17] You had an advantage, basically
Nico [00:58:20] I mean, I coached a percussion seminar and it's like, it was literally like who had the money versus whose marimba didn't sound like Nintendo, and that's horrible. And that not acceptable. Anyway, so I'm excited about, like, whatever resilient structures build up. I'm excited about, you know, because I'm from Vermont, this is a metaphor maybe other people won't know, but, you know, cows have been in the barn the whole year and when you let them out in the springtime, they buck and they go wild. And, you know, the the girls are going crazy. And I'm excited to see what that feels like. And I don't know, it's hard to feel excited about anything because we don't know when it's over. Every Tuesday and the news is a nightmare. And it's like, well, this is going to be the worst two weeks, this is going to be the worst. Bitch, it's already been the worst two weeks.
Giacomo [00:59:08] Every fucking two weeks are the worst weeks.
Nico [00:59:10] And it overlaps. Right, I'm like, wait, you just said two weeks now you're going to say another, you know, it's just awful. So I find myself really unable to be, like, specifically excited. I'm selfishly excited to ride a plane. I'm selfishly excited to see my friends. I'm selfishly excited to, you know, hear all this music that I wrote that got canceled. I'm selfishly excited to go to the opera. And this is the worst thing I'll say, one of the things that I miss the most is NOT going to something.
All [00:59:45] [Laughter].
Giacomo [00:59:45] Oh, I can't. I'm so busy, I just can't.
Nico [00:59:46] Not even "you can't", no, it's not like making up an excuse, just I don't want to and you can't make me.
Giacomo [00:59:52] Just having the choice and you having the choice, yeah.
Nico [00:59:55] OK, literally like tonight is the night when I am going to stay in the studio until 10:00 and write. And I'm just not going to go to Tsaich(kosvksy) four and you can't make me. [laughs]
Giacomo [01:00:08] Yeah. As opposed to this moment where everyone is like, what are you doing, you're at home, and you've got an Internet connection. How can you not come to a thing, or?
Nico [01:00:16] Yeah, I can't. So all of which is to say I'm—excited isn't quite the right word—but I think when we get out of this thing. So I wrote Laurie Anderson the first couple of months of this just being like, hey, how are you doing? And she said something so Laurie Anderson, where she was like, "if this thing has sides and I don't know if it does, I'm sure I'll see you on the other one." If this thing has sides is so, Laurie, right? But that's kind of how I feel about it, where it's like I don't know what direction we're going to get out of the box and I don't know what it's going to look like. And we have to immediately fix all the stuff that's fucked up, especially about how it relates to access to resources and whatever. That's got to be like the first thing that we do. And I think this is a good and I say we as if I have any control over it. But, you know, to a certain extent, something that's been cool about this is I've been doing much of teaching almost exclusively to people who don't live in New York and to whom I would not have...they wouldn't have access to, like this form of intimate, you know, going back and forth. And that's been really, I think, great. And I hope that that form of you don't need to be here, you know what I mean? To feel like you're included in a conversation. So I'm excited about that. Like, people can be anywhere and still feel connected.
Zane [01:01:40] Yeah. I had a question based on...I was watching the New Music Help Desk video that you joined in on and composers were calling in and asking you questions. And at one point one of the composers called in and was asking about your Viola Concerto.
[01:02:31] [Music excerpt: Viola Concerto, Pt. 1, by Nico Muhly, performed by Nadia Sirota. Music description: A rapid orchestral crescendo is met by a pizzicato viola line, followed by a series of double-stop chords played forte on the viola; eventually a melodic motif emerges from the orchestra, followed by the viola].
Zane [01:02:31] And you took just a moment and you described the beginning of it, and your hands were up in front of you and you were showing this like clearly what you saw when you were writing that piece. You had this visual representation. And it made me wonder if that's a common way for you to compose music when you're setting out to write something new. Do you see it? Is there a visual component to your compositional process that's happening in that particular case?
Nico [01:02:59] If I'm remembering what we're talking about, so we use a lot of words when we talk about music that have different meanings in reality or in dance, like if we say "line" to people in dance, line means different things. We say "phrase" it means different things. If I say "texture," that, to a musician, that can mean a bunch of things. If I say texture to, you know, other people, they think it's like what your bedsheets feel like. And you know what? And sometimes it's difficult to explain what we mean when we say texture. So I would say that what I was probably doing was forcing a visualization of what for me was a sonic thing and what that concerto—which I'm sure we can play—what that does is the very beginning is a kind of what I would call meshwork texture, where it's something that looks solid depending on how you light it. Sort of like a scrim right. Where it's all these things kind of suspended in air, moving at different tempi. And so for me, it was a very audio texture, just thinking about sort of crystalline structures and, you know, things that when you throw them up, stay up. But again, that that for me is sonic. And then you can visualize it if you want. You can visualize it if you want to. But sometimes I think it's good to, again, let people think about texture in as abstract or as tangible way as they can. And I think, let me give you a example, if you're listening to a piece of orchestra music, right, and you want to make a pass through it, that's just thinking about textures. I think that's a great way to study a score. Or just just think about dynamics or just think about range: is there high stuff or low stuff, just really break it down. And I think you'll find yourself being drawn towards a visual map of things or an emotional map of things or, you know, you'll find it kind of repellent structures or alluring textures. And I realize I'm speaking in code, but the answer is no. I don't think about it visually at first. I can think about anything visually if I put my mind to it. But it's useful to have the vocabulary to do it any way you want.
Zane [01:05:41] Yeah, that's awesome. The other thing I wanted to ask about was the drone project.
[01:05:48] [Music excerpt: "Drones in Large Cycles," by Nico Muhly. Music description: An electronic drone pedal sits alongside a static-sounding, uneven click track].
Zane [01:05:48] Because we didn't get a chance to talk about that, and that's something that's really fascinating to me. You talk about it that when you first brought it up, you were talking about being on an airplane and hearing the pitch of the engines, essentially. And then as the plane moved forward on the tarmac, it rose in pitch and then it came back down. And you talked about how you have this association with the background noise of life, is that right? Did I describe that correctly.
Nico [01:06:18] Yeah.
[01:06:18] [Music excerpt fades back into foreground].
Zane [01:06:18] And I think that's really fascinating and something that I personally have always had an attachment to. I feel like I hear the sounds around me a lot and I interact with those pitches in ways like I'll...Giacomo and I have talked about this: I have an electric toothbrush and it makes a pitch.
Nico [01:06:34] Oh, my God. I know. I know.
Zane [01:06:36] So I'm brushing my teeth and I'll hum along with that single pitch.
Giacomo [01:06:39] It's the choir nerd in all of us.
Zane [01:06:42] It is a little bit of a choir nerdy thing, but it's also something that really satisfies me deep down. And so I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about the drone project and how you conceive of that and then where you see it going, especially in regard to choral music.
Nico [01:07:00] Sure. I mean, it's I wish I had a heady, complicated explanation. It's really quite simple. I mean, it, you know, for me what that opened up was, OK, so you've got this fixed thing. And then whatever you put against the fixed thing, it's like a horizon line. And you can play with and manipulate sort of foreshortened... As if, for instance, you get the fixed thing and you put something right next to it. That's like a minor second above or below. Suddenly you're aware of a form of gravity, of sort of an object being drawn towards a line or if you put something an octave above it, suddenly you're aware of another kind of resonance or something. A fifth above it, you're aware. So basically it's about establishing different gravitational, you know, like basically you can make the drone feel like home base or you can make it feel like it's you know, it's basically it's recontextualizing a single object in a bunch of different ways. It's incredibly simple. The project is incredibly simple. With choral music, I mean, you know, honestly, I've written a couple of pieces, I've just written two introits that have drones in them. I wrote them for Magdalen college, Oxford, but they do them at Westminster Abbey primarily now. And, you know, I don't know, it's fun. And I think it's also a way to get to what's funny about those pieces is that you can just kind of all participate in them and you can just make drones and do and, you know, it's a fun way to have an orchestra. You just say, do it. Just hear the rules. You know, you've got to be exactly this. Pitches don't get too loud. Don't get too soft. You know, whatever. The first drones project I wrote was—not the first, but one of them—is for my longtime collaborator and good friend, Pekka Kuusisto, the Finnish violinist, and he sometimes does the first movement of Drones & Violin as an encore.
[01:09:01] [Music excerpt: Drones & Violin: Part I Material in Eb, by Nico Muhly, performed by Pekka Kuusisto. Music description: An orchestra drones on an Eb and Bb as a violin plays double-stop chords against the droning orchestra].
Nico [01:09:01] Where he has the whole orchestra just hum or play or whatever, the E-flat and the B-flat, and what it does is it creates a really explicit environment in which notes have more complicated meanings than if you're just playing alone. But again, it's such a simple idea, and it shouldn't be more or less artistically engaging than you singing along with your toothbrush. That's not quite what I mean, but it is meant to be music that just kind of you find. And, you know, obviously eventually I'd love to write a set for every instrument. But I've also been thinking about weird ways to write things that are very portable, where you can just, you know, like you just play the drone through your speakers. And then there's ten things that you can do on top of it and it'll sound good.
Zane [01:10:08] Yeah, that's cool.
Nico [01:10:10] Do you have one one final question for I have to bounce?
Zane [01:10:14] Giacomo, you got one last one?
Giacomo [01:10:16] No, a random last request. We are trying to create a thing called the Playlist of Joy that we hope will mirror the barns coming out and sort of like we're trying to sort of preload this feeling because in these conversations, one thing we've learned is that it feels like the thing that is lacking for everyone right now is this feeling of joy, like we just don't have access points to that right now. And music has the ability to do that for us. Anywhere on the spectrum of music. Is there any music right now that is giving you life, that is just giving you...when you're just like, I just need a little bit of something to kind of get me out of bed in the morning or whatever. What are those pieces and what might we add to our Playlist of Joy?
Nico [01:10:56] Graceland.
Giacomo [01:10:59] Graceland.
Zane [01:10:59] Paul Simon Graceland!
Giacomo [01:11:01] The entire the entire album or that one piece?
Nico [01:11:04] No the whole album, you just press play.
Giacomo [01:11:05] The whole album, done.
Nico [01:11:08] That's my answer. You just...that's what you do. It's great. I mean, that's my easy answer. I mean, anything else, anything else besides that you start getting into more qualified, more qualified joy, which also sounds like a bad piece for small ensemble. But yeah, right? We've all been to that at the conservatory. But yeah, Graceland's the best. I mean, I haven't been able to listen to too much new music during this. I've gone back to, you know, as I said, like, you just go and sit and watch Star Wars and let your mind turn to jelly and, you know, there's something about the the joy in things that you know, and just going back to it and saying, like, "hey, how you doing" in the same way, and my friends and I say this all the time. It's like I want to go to the bar that we always go to and not make a plan with someone and just know that you'll see them there. Right. I want to go to a familiar place and not like make a huge plan or like a reservation...
Giacomo [01:12:11] It's serendipity.
Nico [01:12:11] ...or if it's one of those things where you like, you know the maitre'd and it's like you kind of do and you kind of don't or like, whatever. That's what I want. And and for me, like going back to older music is that. So sure, like, you know, you would listen to the Tallis scholars doing [inaudible] or whatever, but for me, the answer really is Graceland.
Zane [01:12:32] That's a great answer.
Giacomo [01:12:34] I'm going to put it on today. Nico, thank you so much.
Nico [01:12:38] Because it's also the exactly the length of some kind of task that's... like dinner is a Graceland, like making dinner is a Graceland, or organizing something is a Graceland or you know, there's things that you can get done in exactly that time. The Reich Octet is similar where it's like you put it on and then you can kind of, you know, wash a bunch of stuff.
Giacomo [01:13:03] I think that was the last of my questions, Zane, unless you had any others. But Nico, thank you so much. This was super fun.
Nico [01:13:10] My pleasure.
Giacomo [01:13:11] This was the best time. This was great.
Nico [01:13:11] I'm glad.
Outro [01:13:14] Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the In Unison podcast. If you've got ideas for our podcast, please send us a message at ideas@inunisonpodcast.com. And who knows, maybe Chorus Dolores will ask us to talk about it during announcements. In Unison is sustained, nourished, and fostered by you, our loyal and loving listeners. And don't forget to subscribe to In Unison on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @inunisonpod. And hey, if you like what you heard, tell a friend or a section mate. Thanks again for tuning in. See you soon.
Chorus Dolores [01:13:52] Supernumerary chorus members recruited by Chorus Dolores, who wants to remind you that every time you sing flat, an angel loses its wings.
Credits [01:14:01] In Unison is produced and recorded by Mission: Orange Studios. Our theme music is Mr. Puffy, written by Avi Bortnick, arranged by Paul Kim, and performed by the Danish vocal jazz ensemble Dynamic on their debut album, This Is Dynamic. Special thanks to Paul Kim for permission. Be sure to check them out at dynamicjazz.dk.
