What about your own listening? I believe Sibelius is someone you constantly go back to.
That is a funny thing, it changes a lot. I get into seasonal moods. I have been listening a great deal to the Brahms music for clarinet, including the quintet that has been transcribed for viola, which is on my morning listening. I have been listening a great deal to the later works of Joni Mitchell, the really weird ones where she kind of lost her mind! And there’s always Bach’s Cantata’s, I try to listen to a cantata to a day.
That is one of the most romantic things I have heard all year.
Ha! It’s very studied! [Laughs] I buy a ton of music, so there is this constant influx of things. Whenever albums come out I tend to buy them before I forget, then they pile up, and then I forget, and then it’s so great when I find them again. That thrill of the Tuesday morning pile of new music is exciting. It is the availability of it that makes me almost as happy as what it is. I now confess to being a digital consumer of almost anything, maybe it is because I travel so much. My relationship with reading was becoming untenable, because if I was going on a four day trip, I would bring six novels, which I would have idiotically purchased in hardcover, and now with airport fees it’s terrible. I would be running to the airport with three bags. It’s the same way with CD’s, I would have to bring a folder with certain ones in, and it was like Sophie’s Choice or something before I would get out of the door, to decide which ones I would bring [laughs], it was all very emotional. Now things are with me all the time.
Surely there are certain records that you hold dear, and literally want to hold in your hands? Records are so important as artefacts, and it is impossible for me to even consider the compressing, digitally, of literature.
There are some. Although the records that I bought with any money I had when I was a teenager were all these Steve Reich records, before they released the box set. Those still have some totemic value, though I am not sure where they are, I think they are at my mothers.The frisson I get from the object I actually also get from playing that particular recording, I just have to hear the first three notes of the Octet and I think “oh I remember buying that in Boston”. With books I am the same way, I found it so hard to bid farewell to my well inked paperbacks, but then two hours later I was so happy, I felt that if I bought another book my apartment would literally fall into the river, as there is just no more room [laughs].
The problem is when you really believe that music and literature reinforces the incoherent sense that life has some meaning, all you want to do is consume it, and then that leads to more, and then you end up dead under a pile of “well inked paperbacks”.
[Laughs] Exactly! For me, the transfer from real to digital was less emotionally vexing than I thought it would be. The new Alan Hollinghurst book came out and it was instantly downloaded to my iPad and I was reading it within seconds, and I just think that is amazing, it was like I needed a train and it just turned up. I do know what you mean though, I do miss the actual “thing”, but there is perhaps more romance in the missing, the absence of it, than actually having it in my house. When I am ninety-five years old and reminiscing about my volume of Trollope it might be more tragic if I actually had the thing [laughs]. Right now I am enjoying a period of spacial austerity, where I am basically trying not to buy any more shit [laughs].
Moving house can force that kind of spacial austerity, I recently did, and threw away so much, it is terrifying how much you can accumulate.
Didn’t you feel lighter and more purified, now that you have thrown away that insane Nigerian literature you bought in 1997? [laughs] Sometimes though, this new technology is site specific too. New York is somewhere you can get away with using this technology in public, maybe if I turned up in one of your old man pubs in Dublin with my tumbler of white wine and my iPad casting bright light on all the patrons, I might be out of place [laughs], and that would be correct.
You started some of your musical journey in a choir when you were younger, yet you do not appear to sing anymore, why?
Do you know, I do not sing now at all. One thing I have done is sung through all of the operas I have written, all of the parts, to make sure that they make sense vocally, but that is done is such a private way – everyone is banished from the home… the dog even has to leave, so I don’t really sing and I am not sure why.
Yet when you were in Dublin with Whale Watching, you really took control of managing proceedings, you were so natural and funny, and it came to mind that a natural progression for you would be to sing again, at some point in the future.
Oh my goodness, could you imagine me as a crooner? [Laughs] I don’t know, maybe I don’t sing because I know so many wonderful singers, and there is such a surfeit of great voices around me that I have never felt the need to raid mine own [laughs], but perhaps, one day…
Crash Ensemble will perform three of Nico Muhly’s works, including a new commission, at Young Americans in Liberty Hall on Friday, November 25th.
