Nico Muhly: Composing from the A.D.D. Camp

Hometown: New York
Album: Mothertongue
For Fans Of: Björk, Steve Reich, Bang on a Can

Don’t get Nico Muhly started on categories. Don’t even waste time bringing them up because the composer will ignore any suggestion that boundaries mean anything nowadays, and he’ll plow forward in his rapid-ricochet speaking style on his loves and, amusingly, his hates: “I love the idea of making an album, working within the confines of that fixed unit, which is still how I experience music,” and, “I’m in opposition to Beethoven as he’s done now. It’s like arriving at a bar at 6 p.m. and some drunk is already there and you don’t want to be a part of it. For me, the whole vibe is already set up, and I hate that.”

“Loves” and “hates” are themselves categories, it could be argued. But when you’re 27 and you’ve been profiled in The New Yorker, and your music has been performed in clubs and at Carnegie Hall, and your collaborators and friends run from Björk to Rufus Wainwright to Philip Glass, and your obsession is English Renaissance church composers, the whole musical world probably seems there for the taking. Why bother bean-counting such bounty? Oh, glorious feast!

“I hate the idea of doing one thing,” Muhly says from his loft in New York’s Chinatown. “I admire specialists but I’m not one at heart. It’s generational, too—you learn from people older than you who do something amazingly well and with focus, but I’m in the scatter-brained A.D.D. camp.”

His first album, Speaks Volumes, is Muhly and various friends playing instrumental works on mostly acoustic instruments: the piano, the viola, the voice or weird percussion instruments. It’s a friendly album. Moody and a little timid. Pretty. The music is brilliantly immediate because it reflects our own cultural insecurities. We’re nice, we’re smart—right? But we have no idea where we’re going, or what our world will look like around the next corner.

Mothertongue, Muhly's second album, was recorded in New York and Iceland and feels even more handmade. “The Only Tune” is a morbid three-part folksong in which a woman drowns her sister to make a fiddle from her body parts. Muhly says his parents, both artists, sang him the tune as a child. “I can’t say that I aim to please anybody,” Muhly says in his half-joking/half-dead-serious tone, “it’s somewhere between ‘fuck the audience’ and ‘please love me, I’m desperate.’”