nico muhly
Wombat gait
Nico Muhly is the best blogger. He consistently delivers weird cool insights into creative processes and creative organizations, especially within the strange realm of high culture, and he always does it with loose limber language. It’s such fun, especially when you go from stuffy ballerinas to shuffling wombats in a single post.
The view from a different discipline
In an utter and absolute twist, Nico Muhly waxes rhapsodic about a totally sci-fi notion:
Oftentimes, I wish I had somebody who would just rush into my studio and say, here’s the deal with this piece: this part is awesome, and these two bars have to go. Or “those two bars are irrelevant.” I’ve written at length about this problem before; in the other Arts, both applied and otherwise, there are outside forces to temper the artist. Visual artists are restricted by the size of their canvas or the space their art will inhabit. Writers have editors! Can you imagine, composers, if you had an editor?
And what I love is the way he defines an editor in the very next line…
Somebody you love & hate & trust & mistrust who has access to your music at any juncture?
…which sounds rather Jekyll-and-Hyde-ish, doesn’t it? Almost like some other version of yourself that you swoon and transform into: “Huh, what? Where am I? What is this? Who wrote this? I… wait… my god, this is crap!” Some other version of yourself with one difference, one impossible advantage: fresh eyes.
More Muhly
Nico Muhly, the terrific composer, is also a terrific blogger. It’s all about the voice. The voice! He’s in the Netherlands—look at the conversational flow, the thinking-out-loud, the high and low:
Dutch is one of those languages I wish I had a quicker time with. I’ve mastered ordering coffee and sparkling water without people switching to English, so, that’s good. There’s something slightly disturbing about the visual scan of the language (I don’t even know what the term is for that: you know when you see a page, or a sign, written in a language and you have an immediate impression of the content of the text? This works also in your native language: look at a page from, like, Dickens, and you can sort of get the Shudder of the Text, or whatever, anyway, what I mean is that some languages, like French, always seem to bear a melismatic philosophy behind the page; German, an authority, Amharic, a crooked delight…) … with Dutch what I get is a sort of childlike pornography: hoog, sneeuwt, poesje, standplaats.
It might seem like I’m overreacting, but no, this is a really good blog post, and they’re often like this.
“Amharic, a crooked delight.” I love it. “The Shudder of the Text”—I’m not even 100% sure what that means, but I love it, too. I want to write a story called “The Shudder of the Text.”
This post is also ace.
And Nico Muhly’s music is, of course, also great.