WHO IS HE?
A 27-year-old Vermont-born, NYC-based wonderboy who’s something of a sensation in contemporary classical and vanguard pop circles. In addition to a day job as Philip Glass’ hired hand, Muhly has lent his skills as a composer and arranger to everyone from Björk to Will Oldham to Antony Hegarty (of Antony & the Johnsons) and is working on a (purportedly lurid, true crime–inspired) commission for the prestigious Metropolitan Opera. Oh, and he recently released his second solo album, a stunning three-movement work of bricolage-like compositions called Mothertongue. Whew.

SPEAKER’S CORNER
Pay close attention to the title of that CD: the artist studied English along with music, and his fascination with the minutiae of language (which is fully evident on the marvellous blog at www.nicomuhly.com) plays a substantial role in how he approaches music.

“I do have an obsession with the detail and governing forces behind all language,” he notes. “Language for me has this erotic tinge. Specifically, English works in a great way because it’s so flexible. Take Indian English, for example. I like the way it’s evolving and incorporating new influences. Think of people who work for a call centre for Dell in Delhi, how their English could be influenced by Texans who call for technical support.”

Keep Muhly’s language-lust in mind when listening to opening track “Mothertongue Pt. 1: Archive,” which features mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer reciting mundane details of her life (previous addresses and zip codes), layered over oboe, strings, harp and, later, the sound of showers and frying eggs.

THE EARLY BIRD
Since he was a wee kid, Muhly’s had an affinity for the primal sounds of early ecclesiastical and baroque music; listen hard enough, and you can hear traces in his very contemporary work. He claims his attachment to early music has to do with the way it implicitly communicates emotions.

“If you take romantic music and draw an arrow from Mozart through Wagner, the emotion is constantly visible as this large glob of information that governs the narrative. It’s the driving force, whereas in early music, particularly in the Anglican tradition, the emotion was understood. It comes out through devices and tricks, like repetition and shit. It’s the difference between, say, someone who wears an elaborate costume and the sketchy neighbourhood drunk who tells a great story.”

THE SPEED OF SOUND
Muhly receives a lot of respect from high places, especially considering he’s a relative young ’un in classical music. For his part, the compositional whiz claims he’s amazed that people know his name.

“I have this built-in thing, ingrained pretty thickly in me from the classical tradition,” he laughs. “Basically, if you’re remotely ambitious then that’s a bad thing. One of the difficulties about being a classical musician is that you have a sense you’re participating in a giant canonical discussion; now that I’ve left the academy, it kind of feels like I’m playing to the winds, or like a small group of friends are having our own circular conversation. It’s a shock to me that anyone’s paying attention!”

AAAHH! NEW MUSIC!
As an artist who straddles a spectrum that encompasses classical, indie rock and the rarefied world of new music, Muhly’s courting a rather dizzying demographic range. But he’s aware that even fans who might be enamoured of his work with, say, Bonnie “Prince” Billy aren’t necessarily gonna shell out to see his Mothertongue performances, especially if those shows are filed under the heading of new music.

“I think the length of a lot of what’s called ‘new music’ scares people,” he says. “And a subinterest of length is form. Form is a big, structural, helpful object — it’s like how we understand what a meal is, that it ends with dessert and there’s wine. In music, there’s a resistance to any perversion of that. Though even mainstream pop, rock and indie audiences demonstrate an enormous willingness to listen to things that have really clear-cut formal structures, like Philip Glass.

“I borrow structures from the past and build upon them to work around that. I try to create a space that has enough fricative possibilities. It may not be a house-shaped unit, but there are surfaces you can rub up against. It’s like when bougie people build a house within a barn.”