Home / Quotes / Quote by Nico Muhly

Quote by Nico Muhly

“Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it.”

Quote by Nico Muhly

Author

Nico Muhly is a contemporary musical composer known for his unique modernist style and cross-genre collaborations. Born on August 26, 1981, Muhly has a passion for music from a young age and received systematic musical education at the Juilliard School in New York. His works span opera, chamber music, chorus, and electronic music, often blending classical and modern elements with explorations of diverse cultural backgrounds. more

You May Also Like

“Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality.”

Needs Writing Together Emotional Crowds Mentality Orchestra

Author:Nico Muhly

“With chamber music you can get people who work on the music for months, rehearsing it every day for a couple of hours, and if they get it in a different way than you do, which is entirely possible, it's not as a result of anything other than their good musicianship.”

People Ifs Way Different Hours Results Months Couple Different Ways Chamber Rehearsing Musicianship Chamber Music

Author:Nico Muhly

“As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.”

Way Want Feels Two Play Jobs Decision Musician Opposites Composer Contradictory

Author:Nico Muhly

“Riding a horse is a relationship with a foreign creature, and with musicians it's a similar thing: "OK, I'm going to put something on the page that will spook you into rushing." Little games you can play.”

Littles Play Games Creatures Musician Pages Horse Riding Rushing

Author:Nico Muhly

“There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the page that encourages it to be played in a certain fashion.”

Way Looks Certain Violence Fashion Pages Notes

Author:Nico Muhly

“When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.”

Writing Use Performances Tricks Something New Bad Performance

Author:Nico Muhly

“I'm trying to phase out my availability on the phone. People call you when you're walking down the street and say the most random stuff.”

People Trying Stuff Streets Walking Phones Phases Availability Random Stuff Most Random

Author:Nico Muhly

“I think my generation is a lost generation in a way.”

Thinking Way Lost Generations My Generation Lost Generation

Author:Nico Muhly

“I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known music to be available.”

Way Ideas Known Available

Author:Nico Muhly

“Because I had been in conservatory for so long, I was jealous of my friends in bands.”

Long Band My Friends Jealous Conservatory

Author:Nico Muhly