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Nico Muhly was born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in English Literature and received a Masters in Music from the Julliard School one year later.

Since receiving his degrees, he has amassed a string of commissions, collaborations, and premieres that would be notable for a composer twice his age. He has written orchestral pieces for the Boston Pops, the Chicago Symphony MusicNOW, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Julliard Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra, and the American Ballet Theatre (for choreographer Benjamin Millepied). His works have been premiered on the BBC and at New York’s St. Thomas Church, Carnegie Hall, the Whitney Museum and the New York Public Library – the latter, a special collaboration with designer/illustrator Maira Kalman in honor of her illustrated edition of The Elements of Style. Finally, Muhly has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects, and contributed to projects by a striking constellation of pop figures, among them Rufus Wainwright, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), Björk, Teitur, Will Oldham, and The National.

These many personal connections highlight one of the more important aspects of Muhly’s musical life – in a word, community. The cast of characters who appear on Mothertongue include his closest collaborators -- violist Nadia Sirota, folk singer Sam Amidon and, last but not least, Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurðsson. Sigurðsson’s and Muhly’s view on musical relationships was, in part, the inspiration for Bedroom Community, the label Sigurðsson founded and which created both Mothertongue and its predecessor, Speaks Volumes, Muhly’s 2006 debut.

REVIEWS / PRESS

from The Sunday Times

Nico Muhly: Mothertongue - The Sunday Times review

Dan Cairns

When I was a cathedral chorister, my choir gave the first performances of much of John Tavener’s early work, back when he was truly out on the weirder fringe, and long before he arrived at the relative formalism of The Lamb and Song for Athene. At times, the score would invite us to sing pretty much what we liked, or the notes would so resemble ink flicked maniacally at the page that the results tended to be equally arbitrary. Nico Muhly, a New York-based American musician, evokes early Tavener here, among referencepoints that also include Radiohead, Björk, Ligeti and Glass. If Sigur Ros (see below) eschew conventional structure, they are like Westlife compared with Muhly. In a transfixing exploration of the sung voice’s possibilities, he draws on Icelandic myth, English folklore, 17th-century church politics and royal superstition. It is never less than fascinating. It’s also fairly odd.

4/5

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From The Milk Factory

Jun 3rd 2008

NICO MUHLY Mothertongue

HVALUR5CD

Bedroom Community 2008

10 Tracks. 49mins11secs

A year on from the release of his critically acclaimed debut album Speaks Volumes, New York-based classical composer Nico Muhly returns with an altogether more ambitious and visionary record. Entirely based around the notion of language, Mothertongue is a strange and fascinating work which goes beyond Muhly’s previous work and undoubtedly feeds on his brush with various musical genres, most notably with the likes of Björk, Antony & The Johnsons or Bedroom Community’s label head and producer Valgeir Sigurðsson.

Split into three major parts, each recorded with a different vocal artist and making use of the human voice in a particular way. On Mothertongue, Muhly collates words sung by mezzo-soprano singer Abigail Fischer, phone numbers, address, names of American states or capital cities of countries in West Africa, assembling them into chaotic formations, at times placing them in overlapping clusters of range and tone to give the mind very little other option than to focus on the sound of the voice, and the sound made to form the words, rather than the meaning of the words spoken, and at others spreading them out into more comprehensible groups. While the flow fluctuates over the whole four parts of Mothertongue, it is on the opening two sections, Archive and Shower, that the density is at its most extreme, and if the pace picks up again on the closing part, Monster, words have by then become almost entirely inaudible and redundant, a process started on the third part, Hress.

Wonders, which follows, is quite a different piece. Recorded with Icelandic artist Helgi Hrafn Jónsson, who sings and plays the trombone on the three parts of this composition, which has for starting point a madrigal by seventeenth century English composer and organist Thomas Weelkes. Wonders adopts in part melodic structures and musical forms of the era, especially in its middle section, The Devil Appear’d In The Shape Of A Man, when two vocal lines keep on crossing paths and circle around each other like combatant engaged in a stand off fight, while harpsichord and trombone become more intertwined and cacophonic as this section develops. What starts as quite a benign songs on New Things And New Tidings, becomes progressively more complex and twisted. On A Complaint Against Thomas Weelkes, an anonymous complaint to the bishop of Chichester against Weelkes’s depraved behaviour and bad temper, phrases are sung without apparent leading structure, words delivered in rhythms that go against normal speech, confusing the information further by, once again, focusing on two main vocal lines evolving concurrently.

While presented as the last piece on the album, the whole of Mothertongue is articulated around The Only Tune, and actually began with its recording. Featuring fellow Bedroom Community Sam Amidon, who provides vocals and plays banjo and guitar, this triptych piece is rooted in folk music, with at its core a disturbing ballad about two sisters, one murdering the other, that Muhly recalls his parent singing when he was a child. Declined over The Two Sisters, The Old Mill Pond and The Only Tune, this song, which takes shapes amongst a blend of dissonant electronics and instruments which are progressively streamlined before fading away completely, leaving the bare melodic skeleton carved by Amidon’s banjo at the end of The Two Sisters. As the tale progresses down The Old Mill Pond, Muhly brings back some musical elements, first in powdery form, with occasional found sounds, then with more substantial orchestral layers, until a new dissonance is once again at the heart of the piece. The last part of The Old Tune is much more bucolic, highlighting the contrast between the soft tone of the song and the gruesome story behind the words.

Mothertongue is a much more complex and intricate work than Speak Volumes, and requires much more involvement from the listener, but it is also an astounding tour de force. Here, Muhly brings classic instrumentation, electronics and voices together into a piece of work which is at the forefront of contemporary classical music. Truly magnificent.

4.8/5

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from WORD like a scientist

Nico Muhly - Mothertongue

by Keith Pishnery

I thought that Nico Muhly’s first album Speaks Volumes was a lovely, possibly too intellectual, album. Gorgeously composed, there were parts of it that felt like they were going right over my head. This can happen a lot in this age of “contemporary classical” music coming from labels such Type, Miasmah, and Bedroom Community. However, Bedroom Community has a history of releasing particularly off-kilter juxtapositions of sound. I’ve written at length about the Valgeir Sigurðsson and Ben Frost, two titanically impressive bolts of creativity. Muhly’s second album, Mothertongue appears to be the third part of that album trilogy to me, a strong statement for this fairly new record label. And the reason why I feel this way is that Muhly has injected a beautiful rough warmth to this complex new album. Hinted at in the title, this is an album about voice and how it can be used as an instrument, but not in a Medulla type of way. The cut-up, repeating, layered voices here are used as an instrument along with strings, keys, electronics, percussion, not instead of them. The synergy is remarkable. The opening 4 part “Mothertongue” features Abigail Fischer, a classical mezzo-soprano, having her voice utilized like few other singers of her background. The repeated phrases serve as movements and motifs throughout the piece, twisting, turning, and behaving like a violin or trombone would. Helgi Hrafn Jónsson sings and plays trombone on the next suite of music to a haunting effect. The elegant and antique structure of this suite is simply beautiful, full of fragile piano and formal harpischord. However, the true masterpiece of this album is without a doubt the final suite, “The Only Tune,” featuring label-mate Sam Amidon contributing voice, banjo & guitar to Nico Muhly’s bed of electronic and symphonic noise constructions. There is a wonderful murkiness to this set of music which conjures, to me, a lone man on the porch of a run-down shack, surrounding by the sounds of a swamp alive with wildlife, lamenting the tale of two sisters and their tragic fate. It’s eerie, devastating, and lingers with you long after it fades into silence. The use of feedback Muhly employs here is an interesting device coming from a classical composer of his pedigree. The different elements teeter and brush up against each other to create majestic tension for the entire duration of it’s epic 3 parts. A highly recommended and astoundingly creative sophomore album. Go to this page for more information about buying options including digital + physical bundle deals.

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From The Times

May 23, 2008

Nico Muhly is the boy with the heart of Glass

He’s Björk’s pianist and Philip Glass’s protégé, but it’s Nico Muhly’s music that really impresses, finds Simon Reynolds

Nico Muhly’s apartment is a six-floor climb in Chinatown, New York. During the ascent, the out-of-breath visitor passes a garment sweatshop and a seedy gentleman’s club. Sealed behind a steel door, the young composer’s home is a haven of refinement.

Muhly, a willowy 26-year-old, has even prepared lunch – a first for this reporter. As we wait for the food to finish cooking, we chitchat about the parallels between music and cuisine. “Where they connect for me is the idea of making something of use,” Muhly concludes. “You’ve been to those restaurants where it’s like, ‘This is petrified squid vagina, with a foam of infant’s tears’. At the end of the day, you have to eat the food, so it can’t be that unpalatable. Likewise, I’m not going to make music that you need to have a degree to take apart.”

As heard on his new album, Mothertongue, Muhly’s work is immediately understandable, even when it is deploying the musique concrète sonorities of whale meat or drawing inspiration from 16th-century texts about sea monsters. Like his mentor Philip Glass, on whose film soundtracks he has assisted for years, Muhly crosses with ease between the worlds of classical (writing ballet scores, organising Carnegie Hall programmes of his work, discussing a future opera for the Met) and pop (collaborating with Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, session work for Björk).

“There’s a lot of wilfully ugly music out there, or just unbeautiful music, that I don’t feel needs to exist,” he muses. “A whole category of music that is not preferable to silence!” As much as it draws on the ecstatic flickering patterns of Seventies minimalism and the radiant tones of 16th-century choral music, the loveliness of Muhly’s music seems to be an expression of his personality.

Quick and darting could describe Muhly’s conversational style: he talks rapidly, a mercurial flow scintillating with insights and witticisms. “Nico’s so full of energy,” enthuses John Berry, the artistic director of the English National Opera, who is in discussions with Muhly about him composing a stage piece for ENO. “He’s one of this younger generation of composers who’ve spent a number of years crossing between genres. Composers who come up through the traditional route of music colleges and the conservatoires don’t have the flexibility of someone like Nico, who’s equally able to work with orchestral music and electronic music.”

It was Muhly’s keyboard skills – computer and piano – that secured him an apprenticeship at Philip Glass’s film soundtrack company when he was still a second-year student at Columbia University in New York. But Muhly’s true passion is for English church music of the 16th and 17th centuries: composers such as John Taverner, Thomas Weelkes and William Byrd. The ardour was ignited in his early teens when he sang in a boys’ choir in Providence, Rhode Island.

Although it started as a youthful crush – “I just felt this very serious emotional connection to the music” – as Muhly developed as a fledgeling composer he began to articulate intellectual reasons for the path he had chosen. “I liked the fact that this was music for worship, that it didn’t call attention to the composer at all, whereas the Romantic tradition in music is so manipulative.”

The most anxiously ecstatic sequence of Mothertongue is called Hress, an Icelandic word describing someone who’s overjoyous, absurdly excited and “up for it”. Muhly learnt it when it was applied to him by laid-back Icelanders when he went to record the album there. If Anglophilia is Muhly’s deep, abiding passion, his rival infatuation is for the tiny island that gave the world Björk. It was through doing some piano playing for her that he hooked up with his record producer and principal collaborative foil, Valgeir Sigurdsson, her studio engineer for many years. Since then Muhly has been a regular visitor to Iceland.

Hress isn’t the only Icelandic imprint on Mothertongue. There’s the whale meat too – which you can buy in the supermarket in Iceland – which contributes to the sound-palette of The Only Tune, Mothertongue’s stand-out piece, based around a macabre folk song. “It’s been done in so many versions,” says Muhly, clicking on his computer so I can hear one by Jerry Garcia. “But they’re all so ploddy and traditional, and I’m like, ‘Listen, it’s bitches killing each other!’ It’s awful and violent.”

Hence the idea of using sound-textures evocative of carnality and carnage: tangled human hair being combed, the scraping of butcher’s knives, raw whale flesh. “It was marinating in a bowl, so there was fluid and it made these slurpy sounds as we sloshed it around,” recalls Sigurdsson. “That’s what we recorded.” So did Muhly eat the “instrument” at the end of the recording session? “No, by that point, the meat was disgusting! But it was just scraps I’d cut off a bigger steak. And that, I stir-fried with a little ginger and some soy. It was delicious.”

Mothertongue is released on Monday May 26 2008 by Bedroom Community. www.nicomuhly.com

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from UNCUT

Nico Muhly, Mothertongue (Bedroom Community)

Phillip Glass’ brightest protégé?

Madrigals by Tudor composer William Byrd, and the minimalism of Glass and Björk all leave their mark on the second full solo work by this 26-year-old NYC composer. Recorded with Icelandic producer Valgeir Sigurðsson, the three extended sound collages here are radically different in conception but are lent unified coherence by the central role of the various singers, all deployed at the extremes of human vocal expression. The title track is the most Björk-like; “The Only Tune” recalls Glass’s “Music In 12 Parts” and “Wonders” uses fragments of old English text to thrilling operatic effect.

rating 4/5

   

by Nigel Williamson

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from The Independent

Nico Muhly, Mothertongue (Bedroom Community)

Tuesday, 13 May 2008

Nico Muhly is a Juilliard-trained composer whose contemporary classical pieces are infused with the spirits of minimalists such as Reich, Riley and Glass.

This second full-length release comprises three multi-section pieces revolving around the human voice. On the title track, hints and wisps of piano, celesta, harp and strings adorn quietly chattering voices in a manner akin to Reich: it’s like listening to a spider’s web being spun, a weightless, gossamer series of overlapping threads.

Both “Wonders” and “The Only Tune” are sombre creations based on antique sources – the former using harpsichord, horns and swells of synth to illuminate old writings, the latter featuring Sam Amidon deconstructing a traditional murder ballad against droning organ and noise-collage. Weird, and intermittently wonderful.

By Andy Gill

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from MAPSADAISICAL

Nico Muhly, Mothertongue (Bedroom Community)

May 14, 2008 in album reviews

Perhaps it is a sign that I’m getting old, but these days the world seems to be full of people who are younger, better-looking, and more talented than me. This is particularly true in the case of Nico Muhly, and not only does he get to hang out with her Bjorkness, but to cap it all he is also probably a better blogger than me too.   I’m currently teaching my cat some (admittedly fairly advanced) principles of rocket science, and when she has stopped licking her arse and finishes building the damn thing, I’m strapping myself to it and firing myself into space. If anyone knows an easier way of ending it all, by all means tell me.

Muhly’s abundance of talent lights up the sky like fireworks from the start of his second album for the sparky Bedroom Community label. That opening “Mothertongue” suite fizzes into life with its display of classical and electronic elements swirling around a torrent of words – phone numbers, mnemonics, US states and their capitals. Everything is initially diffuse and overlapping haphazardly; gradually it begins to take a diffuse shape, and comes to resemble the results of Steve Reich collaborating with Gyorgy Ligeti on one of his gibberish opera pieces. Later Muhly weaves found sounds of jarringly mundane origin (someone showers and cooks breakfast) into this glorious tapestry.

How do you follow that opening? You would have to be pretty confident in your own ability to go for something which blends medieval English music with a poetic description of the Icelandic landscape, and to set this all amongst more verbal jabber, and some disconcertingly queasy brass; but that would be the “Wonders” suite. It gets even better with his outstanding and intense deconstruction of folk song: in the three-part “The Only Song”, labelmate Sam Amidon sings a haunting tale of a girl drowning her sibling. His ageless, unjudgmental banjo and voice are set amongst some less forgiving soundscapes: ominous electronic eruptions and icy winds which shatter and scatter the narrative. There is something almost hauntological about the sounds of ghostly breath and traces of childlike melody which flicker amongst the dark arrangement, as if the song was possessed by the spectre of its subject matter.

As accomplished as Muhly’s debut was, I wasn’t quite ready for him to unfurl the full length of his ambition in the way he does on Mothertongue. He reaches for the stars and damn near gets there; he certainly gets closer than I ever will given the current rate of progress with this rocket of mine.

Camp out at Bedroom Community waiting for the release date of May 26th.

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from PITCHFORK MEDIA

New Music: Nico Muhly: "Mothertongue" (Excerpt) [MP3/Stream]

The four-movement title sequence from Chinatown-based composer Nico Muhly's forthcoming LP, Mothertongue, exhumes the detritus of memory. Muhly plumbed his mind for old, useless phone numbers, serial numbers, street numbers-- all the context-dependent codes we accumulate over a lifetime-- and turned them into a secret, subliminal, and ultimately unsolvable cipher. This condensed excerpt from "Mothertongue" begins with the insectile buzz of a mind digesting itself, as mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer unravels sonorous strands of digits with religious fervor. Its palette includes rose-scented Romantic-era strings and mighty modernist synthesizers, and it has the same celestial, ululating quality of Music in 12 Parts by Philip Glass (with whom Muhly has worked in various capacities). Many classical composers seem like the Wizard of Oz; the glowing godhead of the music distracts us from the man behind the curtain. But Muhly always wants to be perceived, and here, we witness the junkyard of his memory being spun into something at once utterly ordinary and utterly strange.

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