Nico
Muhly,

I’m sitting backstage at Benaroya Hall in Seattle simultaneously re-packing my bags and listening to these outrageous republican debates. I love it so much! I’m going to do a pre-concert moment in about half an hour’s time — I’ve been sent a sort of loose set of guidelines for what we might talk about and it’s a lot of Schubert — it’s the Unfinished on the same program as tonight. Last night, I premiered, along with Owen, Shara & Bryce a new work by David Lang that basically extracts all the “death” bits from all the Schubert songs. The piece, Death Speaks, is meant to be a companion to his Little Match Girl Passion, with which it was paired last night. I met Paul Hillier! I am kind of his biggest fan but I refrained from whipping out my “No. 1 Choral Music Foam Finger” and writing the Psalm settings from The Cave on my chest in latex paint.

(an aside: has everybody seen, recently, the Ian Bostridge videos for Winterreise? He looks SO fine in these videos although it’s too bad it’s no pictures of Julius Drake. Julius Drake, in addition to sounding like a lesser Ducktales character, is one of the best collaborative pianists ever in the history of ever. He’s done albums with everybody you’ve ever known about, and is a really sensitive and wonderful performer. Apparently he and my homegirl Alice Coote just did a Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall that made everybody throw their knickers at the stage; it’s heartening to know that it’s still music you can do in any octave about which people will lose their shit.)

Last night was strange: it’s very rare that I play music in public other than my own or, like, Thomas’s. I had an experience that I’ve never had before. We’ve been working on this piece for a few months, but only really started putting it together in the last few days. Playing David’s music, in my experience, is rather like cooking octopus, where either you do nothing to it at all or boil it for a million hours with a wine cork. Last night, our normally minimal approach to the fourth movement kind of went to the other side, and an unexpectedly tender moment happened in one of the bars and I lost track of my triplets!!! That’s never happened to me before; I’m normally super solid, but it was so B-flattish and delicious. By the time my eyes got back to the page, it was probably a half a second, but I sort of fudged a left-hand moment and made a weird face I hope is not on video. I should also point out here that David’s music is crazy-looking on the page. You really have to follow it like early Nintendo (scroll mode!) or you can get not just lost but destructively lost.

Everybody get back into the L.M.G.P., though. David’s music is often process-based, and when text is involved, the text is sort of subjected to the same process as the notes, sometimes to a kind of abstract effect. In the Passion, the texts and the processes driving the car align in a really beautiful dance, and each of the many, many movements has a toe-curlingly great moment. Shara and I watched from backstage and I still get deep deep cilice passion pangz from “Eli, Eli.”

Today, I got up at Sparrow’s Fart and flew from San Francisco to Seattle, just in time for the dress rehearsal for my new piece, So Far So Good. I blogged about this piece before; it’s growing on me despite its oddness. There’s a trumpet solo which sounds really really American and delish. There’s a horn line that I’m pretty sure I ganked from Harmonielehre and that’s fine with me because I love that piece more than garlic. Newt Gingrich wants to go to the moon and I’m also fine with that. Ludovic Morlot is absolutely heaven.

Who administrates the indecency laws on the teevee? Are they laws or just conventions? I’m curious for a couple of reasons but mainly, I’ve been obsessively watching the Jersey Shore. It’s kind of incredible: totally indecent grinding is shewn, the word, “smash,” which is used as a stand-in for “fuck” is presented uncensored, and yet, there are certain parts of these women’s rumps which are blurred out. The usual swear words are bleeped out, even when one buys the season via iTunes, which seems disappointing, in a way. For $3 an episode, I wouldn’t hate a potty-mouthed Staten Islander. They appear to not be allowed t o say the word “blowjob” even though a notorious one appears to be the McGuffin of a major subplot this season? But they can fully say, “I’ma gonna smash this girl in your honor in your bed.”

I suppose I have the same question about the showing of brand names. All the blurring makes you actually run through the visual lexicon of brands in your head and be like, “…no….no….no….ah! It’s Bacardi!” It seems to undo whatever work it was put there to do.

Another anomaly: everybody is completely honest about all the various procedures they do to their bodies: tanning, hair extensions, eyebrow trimming, hour-long hair blowouts, et cetera. However! All these boys have perfectly hairless thoraxes and at no point does anybody confess to a chest wax or anything — it’s strange, it’s like the one thing nobody’s talking about despite the fact that it is, one presumes, something that has to happen at least once every few weeks?

Anybody who is interested in how the Rhode Island accent works would be well-served by studying Pauly D, who has one of the finer specimens of the same. His family comes for a visit and his mother! Her accent was almost identical to the awesome lady who works at Venda Ravioli on Federal Hill. I’ve never been happier. It’s like when Emeril (from Fall River, which I think falls in the Rhode Island Accent Watershed) says “Lamb Heart.” The Jersey Shore is a real triumph of the editing room; I think there must be a kind of Sympathetic Linguist in there with them, who seems to be constructing mini-narratives around single words and turns of phrase just for my delight!

OMG OMG OMG you know what would be the best thing in the world on Top Chef would be if they could do a post-concert meal. That’s always seems like the biggest problem in the world, and readers of this space know that I am perpetually — especially when on the road — bemoaning post-show options. Pre-show is easy everywhere in the world because all you need is hummus and red wine and some of them Stacy’s pita chips, but afterwards is complicated. Pretend, for instance, a show ends at 10. There are people who helped organize who want to come with, and then there are some people we know who want to come with, but really, what’s at the heart of the matter is six people who have just sweated and had adrenaline and lactic acidz and need to get some unfussy food with an air of the fabulous to it, to accompany an inappropriate drinking sequence — start with bourbon and move to red wine then back to bourbon! Yes ma’am! It’s a hard chord to strike: what’s required is some combination of the St John in London and the Landmarc in New York, but without it being the One Fancy Restaurant in the Place Where You’re At because usually they’re too expensive and get nervy when people order different amounts of things. Some of the best post-show moments have been stolen ones: grab one person and run to Lupa after a show at LPR. Charlize Theron just said, “if you had to cast a bean, that would be the bean to cast” right before she ate a lamb’s heart, by the way, on this week’s episode, while wearing a white goddess-toga? Also Eric Ripert. Anyway somebody tell Padma to calllllll meeeee or more specifically to call Nadia.

How are we feeling about fancy cocktails these days? I feel like there was once a time where I would seek out a complicated thing with a million ingredients and an egg made by a dude with historical facial hair, a vest, and a bow tie? But…of late…? I don’t know. I used to crave it and now…I suppose I wouldn’t kick it out of bed. The changing tastebuds!

So, another sequence of travel! This particular itinerary is loosely sensible: New York to Salt Lake to Seattle to New York to Winnipeg to Santa Fe to New York to Kitchener-Waterloo to Lewisburg to New York all in approximately a month. I had a jarring month over the New Year in which I had to kind of reconcile a lot of tax mishegas from the Distant Past, reorganize the apartment and its attendant billings, redo my whole online life (unsubscribe! unsubscribe!), and carve out time to make two smart sets of revisions to Dark Sisters and Two Boys as well as start writing this monster collaboration and finish this cello concerto and learning this piece which is harder than it looks. Also all my friends had babies? So, that’s a half-assed excuse for why I haven’t been posting anything.

The baby thing is crazy. I have some friends whom I had pre-planned to visit about a week after they had the baby. In the course of things, I didn’t really confirm and then the baby was late so I ended up being the first non-family visitor to this Very Tiny Creature. I’m an only child, so I didn’t grow up around nuggets that size and it was intense for me. I’m really looking forward to being a Fabulous Uncle-style figure – I think I’m much more suited to that. I love going to the zoo and my job is basically making noise.

I just had a very heartening ride to the airport; in the course of natural banter, it came up that I was a musician, and my driver said that his daughter is in this middle school in Brooklyn. I’ve spent a few minutes nosing around the website and I’m just really happy to see all of this — the site itself is kind of nuts but it encapsulates, it seems, all the stuff going on. The model seems to be one in which kids are dancing, singing, playing a zillion instruments, acting: a kind of holistic Orff eduction. I’m into it. I wish there were some oblique way I could participate in young-ish music education; a few years ago I did some volunteer work and a few years before that worked in Colorado in a K-12 school teaching music for a few weeks and it was actually really, really great.

I’ve also been watching every second of these Republican debates. I can’t bear this whole thing with Newt Gingrich where he gets to have three wives and gay people can’t have nann and then randomly gets to still be sanctimonious about it? I can’t bear Newt Gingrich’s fake-blunt answers or that whiny scold Santorum. But it’s so fun to watch I can’t turn it off! I can’t help thinking how irrelevant my specific life is to these people and this process; I’m as involved in the process as I can be — I read everything and vote all the time, including absentee which is a Whole Process for those of you who have never done it — and yet it feels very sim-city to me. All the alarm bells in my head tell me to run far away from these people — what is up with Karen Santorum!? Have we all processed that she lived with in a sex-type way the obstetrician who delivered her? And now is homeschooling all those weeping children, see illustration? Or how about how Newt Gingrich’s second wife, with MS, was inwestigated for taking a half a million dollar bribe from some dude in Paris to win her then husband’s favor?! I get the same vibe as I do with those cancer grifters, accused molesters, Stephen Glass. Some reptilian part of my brain is constantly alerting me that something is up. Ron Paul not knowing who wrote those newsletters? The weird thing about authorship — especially before the internet — is that somebody wrote the thing. It doesn’t particularly matter who — is there anything sadder than scholarly work about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works? Yikes. Anyway, Ron Paul. Fuck that dude. Would it be so hard to find the person who wrote them and talk about it? I think that would be interesting: even if they (by which I mean The Author and Ron Paul, who may or may not be the same Entity) disavowed half the stuff and still believed in the other half, it would be, as they say, a teachable moment.

I’ve written a piece for the Seattle Symphony which premieres this coming Thursday. I’m excited! It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything purely orchestral. I’ve been in a constant state — for almost two years — of writing narrative pieces or pieces too short to have anything other than a fragmentary narrative. This commission – plus or minus twenty minutes for orchestra with no specific program – was a real challenge coming out of two operas. I have a confession: I am not naturally very good at structure. If there are four or five things that I’m fluent at, musically, structure is not one of them, and it’s always a struggle. I attribute it to the fact that my favorite favorite music in Tha Formative Years was Purcell verse anthems. I’m thinking of one in particular: Sing Unto the Lord. Check out the score here. Basically, it’s a sequence of perfect little two-minute emotional mini-statements keyed to the text. There’s an alleluia that comes and goes and comes back again. There isn’t much that relates A to B to C, which isn’t to say that the piece doesn’t work; on the contrary, it’s my favorite! Anyway, that structural model doesn’t translate very well into secular music — I’ve always said that writing sacred music is writing incidental music to a play whose plot we all know, so there is strangely more flexibility to bounce around structurally. But when I first started writing instrumental music this was sort of the model I’d use: a series of not particularly interrelated great ideas. John Corigliano, my teacher at Juilliard along with Chris Rouse, kicked my ass about it and made me listen to music with developmental (rather than additive or just Massive) structure and I can do it now! I know how to do it! But sometimes? I check back in with Purcell and those big choral works like the Te Deum which contain fast music, slow music, duets, trios, beautiful music, pomp & incense, curlicues. I’ve tried to make a version of the same for orchestra with a slightly more modern sense of structure in which stuff comes back, but changed (“stuff comes back but changed” being, I think, the one emotional gift of the romantic era I have fully unwrapped). The piece is called So Far So Good and I’m really excited! Okay now I’ve had like nineteen Delta cappuccinos and I am ready for aviation!

So apparently the war in Iraq is officially over as of today. I don’t have much to say about that except that we should maybe all take a second (ten minutes, really) and listening to the heartbreaking third section of Steve Reich’s Different Trains.

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Steve Reich
Different Trains: III. After the War
Kronos Quartet

A few things about this. 2:05 in, there are some really delicious chords that I’ve been stealing for years. The minute this album came out (the Kronos version) I was right there sitting on the floor with a pencil and manuscript paper trying to figure out the voicings. The other thing is that around seven and a half minutes in, Reich really turns it out. In a miniature Mahlerian structure, almost, he introduces an almost folk-like melody with “there was one girl who had a beautiful voice,” followed by an anguished, central-european chromaticism on “and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans,” which suddenly transforms into a sort of sun-dappled flautando environment for the final lines. It’s super super gorgeous.

Note that although I’m using the iconic, original Kronos recording here, there are now five or six others, including the wonderful Smith Quartet, the London Steve Reich Ensemble… more and more people, and younger people, too; this is a piece that has been so outrageously important to me, and I’m sure to a large number of young composers, and it’s great to see it falling into the fingers of our contemporaries.

The text, which Reich compiled from interviews:

Then the war was over
Are you sure
The war is over
Going to America
To Los Angeles
To New York
From New York to Los Angeles
One of the fastest trains
But today they’re all gone
There was one girl who had a beautiful voice
And they loved to listen to the singing,
The Germans
And when she stopped singing they said, “More more,”
and they applauded

The limit of my ability to be practical in Icelandic: trying to buy “you know that rubber thing in your garage that keeps the cold air out that they sell in SkyMall that seals itself to the concrete by way of pressure? That, but for the shower.”