Nico Muhly was born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in English Literature and received a Masters in Music from the Julliard School one year later.
Since receiving his degrees, he has amassed a string of commissions, collaborations, and premieres that would be notable for a composer twice his age. He has written orchestral pieces for the Boston Pops, the Chicago Symphony MusicNOW, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Julliard Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra, and the American Ballet Theatre (for choreographer Benjamin Millepied). His works have been premiered on the BBC and at New York’s St. Thomas Church, Carnegie Hall, the Whitney Museum and the New York Public Library – the latter, a special collaboration with designer/illustrator Maira Kalman in honor of her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style. Finally, Muhly has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects, and contributed to projects by a striking constellation of pop figures, among them Rufus Wainwright, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), Björk, Teitur, Will Oldham, and The National.
These many personal connections highlight one of the more important aspects of Muhly’s musical life – in a word, community. The cast of characters who appear on Mothertongue include his closest collaborators -- violist Nadia Sirota, folk singer Sam Amidon and, last but not least, Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurðsson. Sigurðsson’s and Muhly’s view on musical relationships was, in part, the inspiration for Bedroom Community, the label Sigurðsson founded and which created both Mothertongue and its predecessor, Speaks Volumes, Muhly’s 2006 debut.
NOTES ON MOTHERTONGUE:
Classical music can be a daunting exercise for those unfamiliar with the genre. Luckily, the composer Nico Muhly prizes communication — both in day-to-day life (note his frequently updated blog at nicomuhly.com) and in his music. It’s this sensibility which has inspired the titles of both his records, Speaks Volumes and Mothertongue. Mothertongue, in particular, sounds like the product of someone in love with language. Voices are treated as exquisite instruments. (The click of the teeth, the tap of the tongue, the smack of the lips, et. cetera.) The music itself speaks to deeper meanings and specific ideas and emotions, like words on a page…
From the Composer
“The Only Tune”: “Mothertongue started as an attempt to reconnect with the folk music of my childhood; I remember my parents singing the ballad of the two sisters – one murdering the other in a river – and I remember a disjuncture between the simple beauty of the song and the intense violence of the words. I still shiver at the memory of the miller fishing the girl's body out with ‘his long, long hook,’ and the ensuing phrases, in which the girl's corpse is slowly turned into a fiddle, are continuously haunting. In writing ‘The Only Tune,’ which is essentially an explosion of the folk song, I started becoming interested in personal archives – figuring out all the things, physical and otherwise, that define us.”
Voice, Banjo & Guitar: Sam Amidon
“Mothertongue”: “After the intense corporeal experience of ‘The Only Tune’ (which deals with the body exclusively: its two hundred and six bones, its skin, its hair), I wanted to turn my attention inwards to the body's memory bank: all of the things we can remember without searching. I tested myself and managed to write down two pages filled with numbers, addresses, the names of the states, the capitals of the countries in West Africa (surprisingly), friends' phone numbers in other countries, a social security number, my mother's old, old studio number from the mid 80's. The result of this is ‘Mothertongue’ the song, which mimics this process of discovering all the codes and numbers that make up my – and Abigail Fischer, the singer's – personal archaeology. ‘Mothertongue’ is in four movements: the first engages the singer with all her addresses and ways to remember English grammar. The second takes place in a shower and at the breakfast table, and features an introspective and congested twitching and muttering. The third section (entitled ‘hress,’ the Icelandic word for being over-excited and stupidly joyful) is manic, frisky, and eager to please; this spirals into a violent, ecstatic recitation of addresses and zip codes antagonized by a ‘monster’ made out of over-amplified cereal and synthesizers.”
Voice & Trombones: Helgi Hrafn Jónsson
“Wonders”: “Part of my experience as a musician is informed by exhaustion related to travel; I wanted to see what would happen if I took the historical borrowing techniques of ‘The Only Tune’ and threw them into the sea, trying to write, in a sense, a soundtrack for a cabinet of wonders: eels, counter-tenors, drunks, jetlag. ‘Wonders’ is a meditation on an anxious time in English imperial history, when explorers came back with tales of whales, volcanoes, and exotic flowers. The launching point for ‘Wonders’ is a madrigal by Thomas Weelkes (1575-1623), ‘Thule, the period of cosmography’ whose text describes the extreme climates of the far north (specifically, Iceland), and concludes with the line, ‘These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I, whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.’ I love how the (anonymous) author includes the extremity of Icelandic volcanoes into his conception of himself; the heart of the traveler is the end of the journey. Accordingly, I tried to bring the terror of the unknown home; the middle section of the piece depicts the devil harassing a coachman in England, and the piece ends with an anonymous complaint to the bishop of Chichester against the composer Weelkes, citing him for his drunkenness and for his foul temper in the presence of children.”
Mezzo-Soprano: Abigail Fischer
Read more...