COUNTERTENOR

NICO MUHLY, COMPOSER

PROGRAM

My Days

Four Traditional Songs

Lorne Ys My Linkige

Principles of Uncertainty

Old Bones

MY DAYS

NOTE

My Days is a ritualised memory piece about Orlando Gibbons written for two ensembles whose recordings informed so much of my musical development. I feel like I spend half of my life trying to trick string players to play like Fretwork and vocalists to sing like the Hilliard Ensemble, so it was with enormous pleasure that I composed this piece. The text is derived from Psalm 39, which Gibbons himself set, as well as an account of Gibbons's own autopsy, which is a poignant 17th century semi-anonymous text. One of the most thrilling things about the sound of five violas da gamba playing together is the sense of their phrasing being derived from vocal music, but made somehow electric and ecstatic through ornamentation and the friction of the strings. The piece has an idée fixe based on a minor scale with two possible resolutions and many ornaments. In between iterations the voices, in rhythmic unison, intone the psalm. It isn't until the autopsy text arrives that the voices begin to split into more elaborate Gibbonsy verses and responses. A series of semi-improvised fragments on the text "Take thy plague away from me" introduces the third section of the piece where plucked strings create a halo around the text "hear my prayer, O Lord." The piece ends with the ornaments wildly exploded over the voices singing two words, endlessly repeated. — Nico Muhly.

FOUR TRADITIONAL SONGS

NOTE

I selected these four songs after spending many hours obsessing over Alfred Deller’s Vanguard recording of British folksongs. One in particular struck me as heartbreakingly poignant: his unaccompanied rendition of the Bitter Withy. I tried to imagine what a highly stylized but understated accompaniment might sound like, and that forms the fourth song in this collection. The Cruel Mother, about a woman who kills her children and is then visited by their ghosts, is a particularly gruesome murder ballad, and works over a large vocal range. Searching for Lambs has a wonderfully irregular footprint, which required very little interference from me, and A Brisk Young Lad is one of the most unforgivingly sad ballads in the catalogue. This collection is dedicated to Iestyn Davies. — Nico Muhly.

LORNE YS MY LIKINGE

NOTE

Lorne Ys My Likinge is a setting of the 19th Chester Mystery Play, which imagines Mary Magdalene, Mary of Jacob (the sister of the virgin), and Mary Salome (the mother of James and John) at Christ’s tomb. There, they weep, and are confronted by two angels with the faces of children. Like many passiontide texts, this play is simultaneously violent, still, empassioned, and mystical. I tried, as Britten so wonderfully did in his Abraham and Isaac canticle, to capture the drama of this moment as well as the more shimmeringly tense presence of the divine. The two voices here do not actively sing one role or another; indeed, they swap lines with one another, and sometimes one voice will create a halo of wordless sound around the other’s more declamatory text. In addition to a more traditional accompanying role, the piano interjects with electrical jolts, most notably at the beginning of the setting. Te angels sing in a much more chromatic style — I’ve never entirely bought the idea that angels should be peaceful choirboys; instead, I’ve always imagined them as frightening, mysterious, and highly stylised. Te piece ends in a state of suspended animation, with Mary Magdalene asking why she herself is not dead and buried. The piece is dedicated to Iestyn Davies and Allan Clayton, both extraordinary singers, musicians, and friends. — Nico Muhly.

PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY

NOTE

Principles of Uncertainty is my second collaboration with illustrator and author Maira Kalman. Her book by the same name is a series of meditations on her own life as an immigrant, as a New Yorker, and as a keen observer of the world around her. There is a surreal logic to Maira’s writing I tried to encompass in this suite of four simple songs. Originally scored for countertenor, banjo, violin, cello, and piano, tonightmarks the première of this arrangement for lute, piano, and three viols. — Nico Muhly.

OLD BONES

NOTE

Old Bones combines texts taken from the media around the rediscovery of Richard III's bones with fragments of poetry in praise of Syr Rhys ap Tomas, who is said to have killed the king. Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society gave a series of extraordinary interviews in which she humanises the mythology surrounding Richard III, and insists on our noticing the details of his daily life: "The scientists say you can't see character in bones – but for me, you kind of can." The poetry, too, operates mythologically as well as practically: a young man has come to protect the community, but suddenly he is a rose, a star, a hawk. Old Bones begins with a news report, delivered as a sort of recitative, and moves through several episodes of lute patterns before landing on a stylised processional music. The piece ends with the phrase, "Everyone else was looking at old bones, and I was seeing the man.” — Nico Muhly.

CREATIVE TEAM

PANEL

AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR — MAIRA KALMAN

COMPOSER — NICO MUHLY

CONDUCTOR — JEREMY GILL

GUGGENHEIM CURATOR FOR PERFORMANCE & MEDIA — NAT TROTMAN

MUSICIANS

COUNTERTENOR — ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO

HORN — NICOLEE KUESTER

PIANO — NICO MUHLY

TROMBONE — DAVE NELSON

VIOLIN — COURTNEY ORLANDO

TRUMPET — STEPHANIE RICHARDS

CELLO — PAUL WIANCKO

LIGHTNING DESIGN — IAN KING

VIDEO ENGINEERING — RYAN AINSWORTH

CREATIVE TEAM

SUPPORT

Produced in association with Beth Morrison Projects.