aworks :: "new" american classical music

Describe You (2009). Nico Muhly, Teitur Lassen #youtube-inspired music now on #spotify

• "Teitur (IPA: [ˈtaitʊɹ]; born Teitur Lassen 1977 in Hoyvík) is a Faroese musician, singer-songwriter and producer based on the Faroe Islands." Wikipedia
• The Faroe Islands are somewhere north of the UK. Wikipedia
• "The two musicians began work on the project when Muhly was composer-in-residence at Muziekgebouw Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The songs' lyrics were inspired by or culled from video and commentary the pair found on YouTube." Nonesuch

Wonders (2008). Nico Muhly /of a plethora of music options/

I prefer the rdio interface but the social playlists are better on Spotify, primarily due to the efforts of ulyssestone and his Spotify Classical Playlists. His latest includes music arranged and composed by Nico Muhly.

I admit to having a hard time focusing this morning. I started out with the John Cage 25th Retrospective concert album on rdio, then I listened to Messiaen on Q2, and then George Walker on counterstreamradio. Now it's Jonsi from the Muhly playlist.

Two Boys (2011). Nico Muhly /between phillip glass, john cage & indie superstars/

Cover of Nico Muhly

The Sydney Opera House Blog on Nico Muhly's new opera:

Musically it sits somewhere between Philip Glass, John Cage and the epic sweeping melodies Muhly has created for a range of indie superstars. 

I need to think more about that spectrum of music. I can imagine the space between Glass and Cage (Bruce Brubaker would know best) but not sure what to make of indie superstar melodies.

Back to Cage and Glass, here's a quote from John Cage: composed in America:

Yet with repeated hearings the music and the words that might have first seemed incompatible come to sound made for one another; and the political message, despite the lack of plot, is scarcely less loaded than the message that Glass was later to deliver in Satyagraha. Although John Cage always insisted that art is socially situated, one could not imagine him delivering the sort of message one finds in Glass.

Drones & Piano (2010). Nico Muhly /the drones were pre-recorded/

Le Poisson Rouge has a potentially great show tomorrow by pianist Bruce Brubaker:

Glass: Etude No. 4 and Etude No. 5
Nico Muhly: Drones & Piano (New York premiere)
Cage: Dream
Alvin Curran: Inner Cities 2

The Glass Etudes are better when played by someone other than the composer, Dream is one of Cage's best pieces, the same for Curran and Nico Muhly is Nico Muhly. Brubaker:

Backstage, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, after we gave a Haydn performance, I asked Nico about writing some new piano music, possibly with electronic sounds. Somehow, in Drones & Piano, fragments of Haydn, as well as lexia from lots of other music I play -- John Adams' Phrygian Gates, a phrase of Janáček via Alvin Curran, the drones in Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes -- all appear.

From a review of the premiere of the Gilmore Festival in Kalamazoo:

The drones were pre-recorded on Brubaker’s Ipod and amplified through the theatre’s sound system. They consisted of pitches bowed on a viola and other scratching and percussive sounds. ... Like in an Indian raga, a drone sets up an expectation that the music will become grounded in the drone tones. Indeed, there were harmonies built on the drone tones but there also seemed to be another mysterious dynamic at work here.

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TBD works for solo viola and tape (2009). Nico Muhly /nico and nick and.../

The weekend Wall Street Journal asks numerous notable figures their 2009 resolutions. Here's the response from composer Nico Muhly:

PROFESSIONAL: In 2009, I am going to finally finish a long series of short works for solo viola and tape [recorded elements]. I'm into this because it's weird and specialized, like taking a year of your life and learning how to make blood sausage.

PERSONAL: I am going to wake up much, much earlier.

INDUSTRY: It would be great to see cities take more pride in their orchestras and small ensembles.

In a development also of importance to the aworks household, the president of Disney Channel suggests one of his resolutions is to help the Jonas Brothers launch a new series next year.

Wikipedia: The series is about the Jonas brothers having to cope with being pop stars while trying to live an ordinary life. The series will be set in New Jersey...

Mothertongue - Nico Muhly

A Little Bit Longer - Jonas Br...

Beaming Music (2002). Nico Muhly

Marimba and organ sound surprisingly good together.

Description and MP3 here.

So to Speak (2004). Nico Muhly

Alex Ross in the New Yorker, writes about his recent sojurn listening to the music of young student composers. In a play on the famous 1958 Milton Babbit "who cares if you listen" headline, Ross writes:

They care if you listen.

Most promising for Ross was Nico Muhly, a twenty-two year old Julliard student.  About Muhly's symphonic Go to Speak:

It is based on Thomas Tallis’s Pentecost anthem “Loquebantur Variis Linguis”; those spastic woodwinds are speaking in tongues. The music spins away into a kind of gritty ecstasy. This and other Muhly pieces achieve a cool balance between ancient and modern modes, between the life of the mind and the noise of the street.

In an interview with Muhly:

One of the ways in which Tallis imitates this sort of chaos is by having all these crazy lines of counterpoint going at once, up and down and intersecting. It's a fabulous thing and something I always adored." The composer then used fragments from the Tallis work, wrote his own countermelody, created harmonies, and "put the thing together."

Ross comments on the diverse musical variety available to Muhly; Ladytron, Björk, Wagner, John Adams etc.  I've listened to the work (available as an MP3 of the Muhly web site) three or four times now.  I don't hear the pop or older classical influence as much as contemporary American symphonic music: Michael Daugherty maybe, some melody and percussion a la John Adams' El Dorado, the colorful rigor of John Corigliano.  For me, the music was not particularly noisy or chaotic.  By the way, the fact I can make my own judgment so easily via the composer's own website strikes me as a healthy thing for all concerned.

For history's sake, here is a quote from the Babbitt article:

The unprecedented divergence between contemporary serious music and its listeners, on the one hand, and traditional music and its following, on the other, is not accidental and- most probably- not transitory. Rather, it is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics The immediate and profound effect has been the necessity of the informed musician to reexamine and probe the very foundations of his art. He has been obliged to recognize the possibility, and actuality, of alternatives to what were once regarded as musical absolutes. He lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of "common practice," but in a variety of universes of diverse practice.

And in a recent rebuttal from Christopher Palestrant:

Twelve-tonalists, atonalists, serialists and multiserialists have treated their audience most contemptuously, assuming that any disfavor is a shortcoming. They cry out for music that moves them, surprises them, connects to their own passions. We must return to them: they are our partners. We have lived far too long in the void.

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Update: The Randolph, Vermont Herald

summarizes the New Yorker mention of Nico Muhly.