Quickly out of the classical traps

HYPERACTIVITY appears to be Nico Muhly’s default setting. That’s the only conclusion to draw from the width and depth of this talented, prolific twentysomething musician, composer, collaborator and arranger’s CV.

His time at the Juilliard School, in New York, where he studied composition under Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano, is where he began to put down markers. While at college, Muhly worked part-time with Philip Glass, before taking a more full-time role on graduation as editor, keyboardist and conductor.

The Vermont native also composed pieces for such orchestras as the American Symphony Orchestra, the Juilliard Orchestra, the Boston Pops and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as writing numerous choral, chamber and ensemble works.

It doesn't end there. There have also been film scores ( The Reader, Choking Man, Joshua), collaborations on ballets with Benjamin Millepied, and assorted aid and assistance to a parade of indie and pop stars, including Bjork, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Grizzly Bear, Antony Hegarty (of the Johnsons), Sam Amidon and Icelandic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson. Muhly has also released two quite sublime albums for Sigurðsson's Bedroom Community label.

For this interview, to plug a forthcoming appearance at the Dublin Fringe Festival, Muhly is tracked down to a studio in Iceland. As he puts it, he’s in the studio dodging “screaming children and washing machines” while he records arrangements for a new Sam Amidon album and “starts the process to figure out where I am going to go for my next album”.

The Dublin visit will be a fleeting one. A few days later, he will be in the Faroe Islands working with a local singer- songwriter called Teitur. Then, it’s a move to a cottage in Massachusetts to do some work on an opera with librettist Craig Lucas about an online meeting between two boys which leads to murder, a work which has been commissioned by New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

MUHLY SPEAKS QUICKLY, as if his words are in a rush to keep up with the frantic juggling of projects, ideas and deadlines. To him, such a blur of activity has become the norm and he doesn’t stop – or have the time to stop – to imagine why this is the case.

“I think it’s not so much about avoiding boredom as seeing what the world holds for me,” he says. “Having seen how the classical world works, there is a trap you can fall into of doing the same thing over and over again, and staying in a very enclosed area.

“Believe it or not, part of me actually identifies with adopting a hermit-like lifestyle. I could imagine myself sitting in a cave writing poems or music for the next 50 years. Maybe my hyperactive need to get involved in all these new projects is a reaction against that tendency?”

Yet Muhly points out that this willingness to go where the musical wind takes him is not a put-down to his classical peers who remain behind the walls of their own citadels. “It’s not deliberate, it’s certainly not about me saying: ‘Let’s show these old folks how to have fun.’ It’s more me behaving as a musician in the same way as I live my life.

“There is a schizophrenia when you have to switch back and forth from one project to another which is probably similar to what some actors experience when they have to jump from role to role. And yes, I do sometimes feel it’s not necessarily the best way to approach music. I yearn to spend a year on one thing and one thing only, and that might be the case in the future. We’ll have to see if I have the patience to do that or if I’ll invent 50 other side-projects while doing that to keep me sane.”

Many classical composers have dabbled in pop music, yet few have immersed themselves as wholeheartedly or enthusiastically as Muhly has in recent years. This has manifested itself in his arrangements for Grizzly Bear on their exquisite Veckatimestalbum and his work with Antony Hegarty, which led to the big singer with the unique voice doing Beyoncé's Crazy in Lovewith Brooklyn Philharmon Orchestra. Muhly has a talent for turning a one-off collaboration into something a lot bolder and brighter than might have been the intention initially. His accomplices tend to describe his role in the purplest of terms. Hegarty, for one, hails Muhly as "someone who thinks of music in terms few others can visualise".

To Muhly, collaborations of this kind are “effortless” and he attributes many simply to being in the right place at the right time. “For me, it’s very natural to work with these artists who come from other disciplines and who are outside the classical world’s way of working,” he says. “I met Edward from Grizzly Bear through a friend of a friend. In the case of Antony, Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson had been invited to do a show and they wanted some younger people to participate, and she asked him and Philip asked me and we all turned up and made friends.

“My home is in New York and that’s a natural place for those kinds of collaborations to come into being, because those connections come about naturally due to the size of the city. But I’ve also tapped into other smaller communities where there are a lot of musicians who function in the same way as I do. For instance, I’m going to the Faroe Islands in a few days time to work with Teitur. I met him though a mutual friend who is Icelandic and we thought it would be fun to work together.

“Serendipitously, a Dutch presenting organisation wanted to commission me and commission him to write some songs together, so now we’re co-writing 10 songs for that.”

Away from these collaborations, Muhly's releases, such as Speaks Volumesand Mothertongue, dazzle audiences with their expansive ideas. On these albums, Muhly has brought together his fondness for classical, electronica and folk ideas with great glee and panache.

Works such as these owe much to an initial spark which spurs the composer to investigate further. “The initial idea always comes from a moment or whim or a place, and I map the music out from there,” Muhly says.

“For example, for my next album, I’ve been researching activities where you make something with your hands in an area which is about six inches square. I’ve been watching YouTube videos of people making tortellini and knitting and doing these very small mechanical actions with their fingers.

“I’ve no idea where that is going to go, but it means the music I’m thinking about is going to be a lot less abstract and a lot more craft. I don’t think about actual notes until very late in the process, so it does tend to be abstract until it comes to that stage. It’s usually the case that I’m thinking in terms of language or a sentence or an image until just before I have to get others involved in the process.”

THERE ARE TIMES, though, when Muhly can’t count on such randomness to provide a route for him out of the blankness. He’s recently began to work on film soundtracks and finds that he’s relying heavily for this work on what he learned as a composer back at Juilliard.

“Writing a soundtrack is not easy and that’s when so much of formal classical training comes back into play,” he explains. “I always think of it in terms of a sport event. You’ve trained and trained and trained, and all of a sudden you have to make a quick reaction to a stimulus. For instance, you get handed this scene and you have 12 hours to come up with a really genius response to it and make a demo. It’s very athletic because you don’t have time to think and you have to rely on muscle memory to make emotional and convincing music.”

For his forthcoming Dublin show, he promises what sounds like a Greatest Hits turn. "I think I'll have about four or five people with me and we'll do something from Speaks Volumes, something from Mothertongueand maybe three new piano pieces with electronics if I have them ready. A chamber-sized experience of what I've done to date."

Nico Muhly plays the Spiegeltent on Sep 6 as part of the Absolut Dublin Fringe festival which starts on Sat and runs to Sep 20

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