ARTS RICK JONES BEYOND THIS
SENSORY WORLD The composer of ENO’s recently opened opera Two Boys drew on his passion for Byrd and Gibbons to create a new type of contemporary music
A
s the clock at St Martin-in-the- Fields strikes 10, I shake hands with the 29-year-old American composer Nico Muhly, who is
already seated in the coffee bar next to the London Coliseum, home of English National Opera. He’s a fresh, new voice in the dissonant world of contemporary classical music. Showered but not shaven, dressed in a loose, dark-coloured tee shirt, he is attending rehearsals for his first opera Two Boys which has a run of seven performances from 24 June to close ENO’s current season. The New Yorker talks quickly. He wastes
little time with pleasantries and soon voices his puzzlement over the differences between voices and instruments. “Singers get so nerv- ous when they have to perform for the composer,” he says. “They want to do every- thing right first time. But the orchestra just says, ‘What the heck!’ and gets on with it.” Singers are actors; they join Equity, not the
Musicians’ Union. “Maybe it’s because, as a singer, you’re doing it with your body, your voice is you, you’re exposed on the stage, not hidden in the pit,” Muhly muses, “But a com- poser writing a piece of music is a tailor making a suit. He doesn’t want to just hand it over in a bag. He wants time to tweak here, stretch there. If it’s too good when you hear it, it feels like it’s polished already, that it’s after the vernissage and there’s no opportunity to do anything with it. It’s because I’m, like, such a crazy perfectionist, I understand the singers’ urge. But I’m also kind of shameless about making mistakes – and that’s fun!” For Muhly, composition is an exhilarating collab- orative act between himself and the performer. Mistakes and imperfections are essential ingredients en route to creation. He likes to see how the suit fits first. Muhly’s music tends towards abruptness and confrontation. Two Boys is a dark work, its sinister plot a matter of internet corres - pondents on either side of puberty, treble and tenor, who agree to become victim and mur- derer. A policewoman investigates. “It’s like
an operatic Prime Suspect,” says Muhly, “except the perpetrator is not unknown. It’s the motive and psychology which provide the drama. There’s a lot of lying on the internet so the focus is where truth and deception connect with the virtual and real worlds.” A stabbing occurs at both the beginning and end. Is flashback used? “Flash-everything,” says Muhly. “Large cast, large orchestra. There’s even a church scene. After all, it’s opera!” The younger protagonist and victim is a church chorister, as was Muhly. The abuse of innocence is a theme. Muhly’s familiarity with this world gives him authority and the opera authenticity. Growing up in the small college town of Providence, south of Boston, the only child of a Lutheran father and Jewish mother, his formative experience in an Anglican church choir was positive. He learnt only to love music, but he is aware of the potential for those on the exit side of puberty to take advantage of the curiosity of those yet to enter. The dissonance of contemporary music is a harsh but more realistic reflection of the world than the ideal harmony of older com- posers. Muhly’s third CD, released by Decca this month, contrasts his bitter compositions with his arrangements for orchestra of Byrd and Gibbons. The CD is called Seeing is Believing after the electric violin concerto which it contains. Muhly denies any great significance in the choice of title, with all its doubting Thomas desire for the undeniable, confrontational truth. “I don’t worry too much on a textual level about how it relates to the music,” says Muhly. “It just felt correct. It’s a turn of phrase someone in my family might use. I like reap- plying it to an actual situation.” There is a stark, unsubtle aggression in the
concerto which begins with a no-nonsense cadenza from the soloist. He has six strings on his wired-up fiddle, “which give me more options, more colours, more deployable ideas”, according to Muhly. The tones punctuate the empty background like light in black space.
Nico Muhly: ‘a fresh, new voice in the dissonant world of contemporary music’
The composer talks of an impulse from other sensory worlds, including the visual, in the creation of a work. “As a usual process, I begin by reading things and listening to things and then applying them to music much later. I was thinking about old Renaissance maps of the sky and the way constellations started to be identified and the way scientific observation and faith were kind of the same. Galileo wasn’t trying to be antagonistic; it was more an attempt to push boundaries forward to what faith could include.” The connections Muhly traces between notes are as constellations and become his harmony. Eventually, music learns to embrace the new logic. In recent years, Muhly has formed a strong
working relationship with the composer Philip Glass and his scores abound with minimalist techniques, repeated phrases, progress through the slow metamorphosis of chords, lack of climaxes. Nonetheless, it is the old music of Byrd and Gibbons which lies at the root of his musical experience and which, dressed in modern orchestral instruments, acts as an anchoring force on the disc. The violin concerto is followed by Byrd’s “Miserere mei”; Gibbons’ “This is the Record of John” with the alto solo replaced first by viola, then clarinet; and Byrd’s “Bow Thine Ear”. “I just love that music so much,” says Muhly. “‘Bow Thine Ear’ is the first piece of music which clicked with me. The scales at the beginning drive me crazy with rapture. And just below the surface where you can’t quite see what’s happening, there’s an emotional tension achieved not through structural tyranny, which is the way Romantic music works with every- thing building towards a climactic apogee, but through many individual great moments with nothing you would call traditionally the climax which I think is a really great way to be.”
25 June 2011 | THE TABLET | 25
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