Nico Muhly, "Mothertongue"

I spent much of my final undergraduate semester in the music library, hurriedly downloading entire collections of contemporary classical composers. By the end of my time at Brown, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk had become absolute favorites. I loved how energetic their (very different) minimalisms were, and I loved, particularly, how they found ways to push joy up through other textures in their music.

That each often (or always, in Monk's case) chooses to use the human voice as an instrument for this purpose makes them a good starting point for talking about Nico Muhly’s second album. Mothertongue (2008, Bedroom Community) is a beautiful exploration of the intersection between human voice, found data, and music. I’ve been following Muhly—who studied under Philip Glass at Juilliard, and is somehow only 26 years old—ever since another friend introduced me to his first album, Speak Volumes (also released by Bedroom Community), late this winter during a visit to Iowa City.

Muhly’s first collection of pieces carves out a wonderful variety of terrain. “Honest Music” is a memorably intense piece for solo viola; “It Goes Without Saying,” maybe my favorite piece, has a more patient and meditative but equally rewarding release; “Pillaging Music” dances with playful (or sinister?) Reich-like syncopation. The last piece on Speak Volumes is a “duet” between viola and Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnson’s). Here’s an attempt at a description. Two-and-a-half minutes of solo viola begins, then…some small cooings. Antony’s voice enters the space, immediately enlarging it, then drops out. Strings begin to be tapped. An organ enters. Antony’s voice hangs from edges and drops. Strings, voice, tappings. No organ. When the organ re-enters, strings and voice bend toward it. The organ bends away. Gorgeous harmonies last just long enough to grip you—then lose themselves. Then build. Return.

Towards the end of the piece, Antony’s voice is by turns bird-like, computer, human. It’s pretty astounding, and you have to hear it.

I was happy, then, to hear that Muhly was exploring voice in this second collection. It’s the dominant element in Mothertongue, which features three different vocalists on three separate multi-track sequences. While it’s hard to top Antony, I think Muhly manages to do something moving and different in each of the three sequences he gives us here. 

The first four tracks comprise “Mothertongue,” the title piece and my favorite of the three. The minimal building blocks of the first track, “Archive”—strings of letters, zip-codes, city-names—sing and chatter together, along with some wandering strings and an occassional spine of bass fuzz. Towards the end, the orchestration becomes more lush, introducing piano and harp textures (and the occasional, obligatory clarinet—someone please tell me why this instrument always sounds so perfect). “Archive” transitions almost unnoticed into “Shower,” in which a single voice (mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer) ascends over a now foregrounded chatter. You have to listen to this music on headphones. Muhly uses a variety of “non-instrument” sound snippets throughout the album—there’s water dripping & falling here, and a cup of coffee is brewed and poured to open the third track—but they never overwhelm the whole. Recorded noises work so wonderfully inside the snippets of voice, fuzz, and careful orchestration that they’re less noise than…becoming-musics.

What else could we ask from any piece that uses found or recorded sound material? That its instrumentation then take on an eerie, overheard-sound dimension? Oh, we get that too. The fourth track, Monster, is probably the most startling gorgeous of the album. A build-up of xylophone(?), strings, and morse-like fuzz blips occasion a desperate, insistent return of the zip-codes—suddenly, startlingly human. It’s fantastic, powerful stuff.

The other sequences require, I think, a bit more work to access, but if you’re there for the first four tracks of Mothertongue you’re more than willing. The record transitions pleasurably, if jarringly, to the Renaissance-sounding harpsichord and voice (featuring Icelandic artist Helgi Hrafn Jónsson) of “Wonders.” Muhly has a real affinity for older choral music, and his ability to inject this sensibility into the contemporary uncovers a bit of the uncanny in each. It’s what makes these middle tracks work. There’s compositional continuity, too—one voice set against a curtain of voice-blips and chatter, along with deliberate instrumentation (this time, some horns and the aforementioned harpsichord). The sequence apparently explores an actual complaint against a 17th century organist named Thomas Weekes. Go figure. (It always takes me about a billion listens to actually process music lyrics, let alone this kind of thing.)

The combination of archaic source and “new” sound is further charted in “The Only Tune,” which features the voice of Sam Amidon (whose debut album All is Well, also from Bedroom Community, was among my most-listened to albums this winter/spring.). The text here is the story—unleashed a syllable at a time (literally)—of a girl who pushes her sister in the river to drown. Nice. Amidon’s voice is great, but it’s a bit distracting in this context, at least if you’re used to his other work. His folky wail takes up so much space on its own that it can tend to overwhelm Muhly’s careful orchestration. Even if the elements seem to be competing for stretches, the sequence still yields some great moments. The chaos and disintegration of the middle track gives way to Part 3, in which the elements really actually do find their stride aside one another. (This works nicely with the text: suddenly, when you least expect it…redemption. The story tells itself, without disintegrating, comes into its own. It’s all very clever.)

On the whole, Mothertongue is more than clever: it's absorbing, challenging, and moving. It also manages to both more cohesive and more complicated than Speak Volumes…which is saying A LOT. I’ll be listening to it for weeks to come.