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March 11, 2007

Nico Muhly: 'Genre-bending' young composer who grew up in Providence leads off Carnegie Hall festival Friday

Young Composer Finds His Fuel in Restlessness, in today's N.Y. Times, notices 25-year-old Nico Muhly, who was born in Vermont, where his parents have a second home, but grew up largely in Providence.

THERE is no easy label to hang on Nico Muhly, a 25-year-old Juilliard-trained composer in New York. His music — typically small, elegant parcels filled with clear melodies, pulsating rhythms and the occasional alarming abrasion — has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and prominent international halls. Vibrant, erudite and endlessly irreverent, Mr. Muhly sees no reason to ally himself with any particular stylistic camp. He doesn’t need the company: he has more than 1,000 friends on his MySpace page.

Mr. Muhly has friends in the real world too. At 18, he started working for Philip Glass, rising in no time from archiving loose manuscripts to sequencing and even conducting Mr. Glass’s film scores. His circle now includes the innovative Icelandic singer and composer Bjork, for whom he has served as an arranger and conductor, and the British vocalist Antony, whose songs Mr. Muhly has orchestrated for several occasions, the latest being a concert by the Brooklyn Philharmonic last week.

On Friday Mr. Muhly is to present a concert at Zankel Hall, part of John Adams’s genre-hopping series “In Your Ear Redux.” Half the music will be Mr. Muhly’s own, and he will perform as a keyboardist with a group of regular collaborators. Those pieces will be interspersed with Tudor choral works by John Taverner, William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes, performed by the Vox Vocal Ensemble.

Nico is the 25-year-old son of Providence painter Bunny Harvey, a professor of art at Wellesley College, and documentary filmmaker Frank Muhly.

Nico Muhly is not your grandfather's classical musician, nor his electronic one:

“There’s a generation for whom the first chord in ‘Music in 12 Parts’ is totally, totally, totally an emotional moment,” he said of a seminal Glass work.

(You can hear the chord here.)

So it might not surprise that Muhly's own compositions are wildly original.

In “The Last Song,” which will receive its premiere at Zankel, the vocalist and banjo player Sam Amidon sings a rustic folk ballad, accompanied by shimmering keyboards, snipping scissors and the scrape of a knife sharpener.

Zankel Hall is at Carnegie Hall -- it was originally the Recital Hall. Tickets for Muhly's concert are $25 and $35 and can be purchased online. Here's the program. The blurb from Carnegie about the series begins,

In his fourth and final season as holder of The Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, composer John Adams curates the third annual In Your Ear festival from Friday, March 16 to Sunday, March 18. This year’s festival weekend focuses on young, genre-bending composer/performers, with music ranging from English Renaissance choral works to American bluegrass to contemporary chamber arrangements of British electronica. The featured performers are Nico Muhly and Vox Vocal Ensemble, Chris Thile & The Tensions Mountain Boys, and Alarm Will Sound. All performances take place in Zankel Hall.

The festival begins on Friday, March 16 at 7:30 p.m. with a performance featuring the music of Nico Muhly, a composer and keyboardist who counts American minimalism and English choral music among his chief musical influences. The March 16 program juxtaposes his amplified chamber music with some of the Renaissance anthems that steered him toward his career as a composer...

Mp3s of some of Nico's earlier work are linked at his MySpace page and at the bottom of nicomuhly.com

Bonus link: Defining Nico Muhly is an interview published March 1 at NewMusicBox. Nico Muhly talks, at length, largely about music and process.

There's video in the page, much of it from the interview, with a track of his music behind it, and clips of others, and of the composer himself, performing his pieces.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 7:15 AM | Permalink