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Quote by Nico Muhly

“My urge, when I go to the store, is to buy everything. And it's the same when I'm composing. My first instinct is basically to bring the whole store home, and not make a decision about how things play out.”

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

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“Whenever I get asked to write orchestra music or music that is for a lot of players, I try to make it a little sad.”

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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