Part 1

Name: Nico Muhly
Occupation: Composer, pianist
Nationality: American
Current release: Nico Muhly's new album No Resting Place is out via Linn. It features works written for and performed by The Tallis Scholars under the direction of Peter Phillips.

If you enjoyed this Nico Muhly interview and would like to know more about his music and current tour dates, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, bandcamp, and Facebook.

For more on the Tallis Scholars, we recommend their homepage.



The press release for No Resting Place contains a quote by Peter Phillips about you “understanding the sound of The Tallis Scholars.” How would you describe that sound which I'm sure also influenced the music you wrote for them over the past decade?

The way I’d define their sound is muscular and crystalline, practical and historically informed. The makeup of the group (four high sopranos, two altos, two tenors, a baritone and a bass) creates a very top-heavy ensemble: very bright and precise.

They also are used to each singing their own lines, where the traditional sense of foreground and background is discarded in favour of the thrill of polyphony.

Peter holds a particular interest in Renaissance polyphony. How much of that interest do you share?

I share a huge interest in Renaissance polyphony — If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have written all this music for them. My first relationship to this music was as a chorister myself, singing Tallis and Taverner and Tye and the rest of the titans of that period.

However, the first recordings I heard of that music were Peter’s; I remember the Western Wind recording being particularly meaningful to me as a young person. Similarly, their recordings of the Byrd masses …



So my education as a musician, and my education as a human being were intrinsically linked up with that ensemble.

What do you still remember about the composing process and live premiere of Recordare, Domine?

Recordare, Domine was the first piece I wrote for The Tallis Scholars, and it was so long ago that I barely remember anything specific about it! However, I remember being a little freaked out by the commission, because of course a commission is a challenge rather than a reward, and it felt like being handed the keys to a very expensive and complicated motor-car.

I remember being quite moved when I heard them rehearse it in the middle of all the other rep (the specifics of which I’ve forgotten, but it would have been Renaissance polyphony) and secretly congratulating myself on having made something in high-relief from the other pieces, but somehow from the same tradition.

After working with a group of creatives for such a long time, personal connections inevitably form. Do you now enter a new commission for the Scholars as part of the group – or still as a “respected outsider”? What, to you, is the ideal bond between a composer and the musician(s) playing their music?

This is a good question and one with which I grapple often. I think that repeated exposure to the same musicians in the composer/interpreter framework brings you closer to the kind of familiarity which is so productive for all parties. I think by the time I was writing the more recent pieces (A Glorious Creature, Prosperitie) I felt very much part of the family and hope they feel the same.

I do think that often with some musicians or ensembles, there is a kind of coup de foudre where it takes an instant to be close collaborators; the same is sometimes true with new friends, don’t you find?

I also knew Peter and many of the singers socially before we started working together, which is always a nice feeling: a sort of deepening of a relationship.

When you're writing a new piece for an artist, how do their personality and preferences enter the creative process, exactly? And: is there a conflict between writing to write a piece that will stimulate a specific performer and wanting a piece to get performances by different performers?

This is also a good question and I have a good (I think) answer for it. You want to tailor-make the piece for the performers and commissioners, for sure.

Thinking about instrumental pieces I’ve written, there is a process I go through where I basically interview the players and ask them what they like to listen to, what they like to play but don’t play often, what they really don’t like to play, what sorts of challenges have been worthwhile and which aren’t.

What I don’t love doing is making something so specific that only they can do it, because that’s a little bit ungenerous. To extend the tailoring metaphor to its limits, I feel like you can tell clothing designers who themselves can really sew from ones who can’t — and this is reflected not just in their couture line but the pret-a-porter collections as well.

What does the process of working on an interpretation with Peter and the ensemble look like in practise?

I’m not going to lie to you: they work fast! Many of these pieces were put together incredibly quickly, sort of in a day or less.

Obviously the individuals are preparing their parts on their own, but something interesting about Renaissance polyphony is that I feel you can only get so far on your own, and really need to process how everything works in consort.

The first performance of No Resting Place was wild; the first tenor took ill, and his replacement had to learn the piece the day of ...

One of the key phrases often used with regards to interpretation are the “composer's intentions”. I've asked this question to many musicians with intriguingly different replies, but as the one with the intentions, what is your own perspective on this topic?  

My sense is that my job is to create a document which conveys my intentions as precisely as possible. I aim for maximum clarity, but still leaving room for the interpreters to bring a bit (or a lot!) of themselves to the process. If I didn’t specify something, they can do with it what they will.

Sometimes I’m very specific about where I want breaths in vocal music, but elsewhere it’s much more their decision. Many of the 15th and 16th century scores from which they sing are quite unspecific — tempo, even the starting pitch in a modern context.

And of course they aren’t new music specialists who crave the sort of granular articulations and inflections many of my colleagues deploy (although I’m sure they could do it handily!)

I am infinitely fascinated by radically different or even “wrong” interpretations – the tempi of Toscanini, Kempff's Goldberg Variations. Are there extreme interpretations that you enjoy as well? Do you personally draw a line – and if so, what happens when we cross it?  

Yes — and I tell younger composers this all the time, because you will always have bad performances of your music, and should treat those as learning opportunities. Why did it go wrong? Is there some way you, the composer, could have been clearer?

Sometimes, in the case of a radical interpretation (which in my mind is quite different than “wrong”), there is much to be learnt as well. The example I always give is Gould’s recording of the Mozart d-minor fantasia which is so slow as to suggest it was almost electronically manipulated.



There is a lot to love in there, even though it’s so wildly at variance with what I think is the inherited performance practice.

There is a lunatic who makes these solo guitar arrangements of completely random things — the Stravinsky Mass, the Bruckner motets — which are so incredibly weird that they approach a kind of brilliant outsider-art place, and I find myself turning to them often.

There are really interesting background stories and concepts for all pieces on the album. For you to get started, do there always need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

The pieces here are, as you say, filled with back-story. In my mind, the one which is the most concrete in terms of concept and form is No Resting Place. The big hurdle was: once I’d decided to include modern texts, how could I fully interlace them with the Latin text and the Hebrew letters?

The breakthrough for me was to have the Hebrew letters abstract (sort of like singing an illuminated letter B, almost literally), but then to have that same music appear over the final lines of the modern English as a sort of handshake across millennia. It sounds sort of grand when I type it out, but it felt like, for me, an artistic breakthrough to figure out how to use something technical to create what I hope is a very emotional response.

This is one of the few pieces of mine I will put on my headphones for pleasure, for one reason or another.