Eerily Composed.(composer Nico Muhly's 'Mothertongue')(Critical essay)

Nico Muhly, a composer, was bounding through Chinatown, his hands thrust into the pockets of a black jacket, and a too small Icelandic knitted cap pulled halfway down over his ears, heading for the market under the Manhattan Bridge. Muhly, who is twenty-six, had a violin concerto that needed writing, but he also had a pot of Bolognese sauce that needed cooking. Negotiating his neighborhood like a Parisian matron, Muhly bought ground beef from one butcher and two kinds of pork, lean and fatty, from another. He bought a head of celery and, for good measure, some ducks' feet to use in making stock.

Muhly learned to cook as a child, and he finds the alchemy of the kitchen consonant with the composer's art. His own kitchen is in a modestly appointed loft on the sixth floor of a building sandwiched between two storefronts on Division Street. The apartment, which Muhly shares with a roommate, Liz Gately, who has been his best friend since high school, has aged plank floors, single-glazed windows, and a gas heater mounted on a wall perilously close to a coat hook; white Christmas lights, strung along the walls, provide illumination. On one side, the loft overlooks a rooftop day-care playground. At intervals, the apartment fills with the sound of urgent, piping voices, and little heads can be seen bobbing up and down just beyond the foldout couch.

Returning home, Muhly shed his jacket and started chopping garlic. He is tall, and has the wholesome good looks of the nice one in a boy band, with wide-set eyes, a trace of freckles, and dark spiky hair that, even by day, sometimes bears a dusting of the glittery makeup that he wears to certain performances. He turned to the stove and started sauteing ground beef and onions. English choral music played on his laptop.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English composers of religious music, in particular William Byrd and John Taverner, are among Muhly's chief influences, though he also draws musical inspiration from the spare repetitions of Philip Glass and Steve Reich and from the off-kilter rhythms of songs by Bjork, whose recordings he has worked on. "Quiet Music," a solo for piano by Muhly and played by him on his debut CD, "Speaks Volumes," which was released a year and a half ago, has the haunting, fragmentary quality of an anthem heard from stone church steps through heavy ecclesiastical doors. Another piece on the album, "Keep in Touch," is a duet between a swooning viola--recorded with alarming intimacy, so that the scrape of bow on string is bared like a scar--and the aching vocalizations of Antony Hegarty, the lead singer of the indie band Antony and the Johnsons. "He paints the sky with his work," says Hegarty, who appeared with Muhly last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a concert of his own songs, which Muhly helped arrange for the Brooklyn Philharmonic. "The melody and notes are almost invisible, and he thinks in terms of these panoramas of shifting energy, which at their best are so beautiful."

Philip Glass, for whom Muhly has worked since his sophomore year of college, at Columbia, says that he finds in Muhly "a curious ear, a restless listening, and a maker of works. He's doing his own thing." (Although Muhly is much in demand as a composer in his own right, he still has a day job, which includes feeding Glass's film-music manuscripts into a computer program that can play the scores.) Following the model of Glass, Muhly prefers to have his work performed as often as possible, and in as many different contexts as possible, rather than refining his compositions within the academy. In the past year, American Ballet Theatre staged a ballet, "From Here on Out," on which Muhly collaborated with Benjamin Millepied; the Boston Pops premiered his composition "Wish You Were Here"; and he made his Carnegie Hall debut as a composer, when a program of his works, which he paired with Renaissance choral music, was performed in Zankel Hall. "In the classical world, it's, like, bad, or too popular, to produce a lot, but you learn such a lot by listening to a piece and, literally, not being able to stop it," Muhly told me. "It feels to me more like food, in that sense. People need to eat. You may as well make them something to eat."

Just as, thirty years ago, Glass and his peers experimented with new modes of performance--"Einstein on the Beach" lasted five hours without intermission, during which the audience was invited to wander in and out--Muhly has an easy familiarity with contemporary media and an openness to being heard through novel means. He recorded "Speaks Volumes" with Valgeir Sigur[eth]sson, an Icelandic musician and producer best known for his work with Bjork, and released the album on Sigur[eth]sson's label, Bedroom Community, rather than on a traditional classical label. (Muhly's second CD, "Mothertongue," which he also recorded with Sigur[eth]sson, will be released in May.) Muhly makes some of his recordings available on his Web site, Nicomuhly.com, and on his MySpace page. "People five years older than me are always deeply confused about what MySpace actually is, and people five years younger are deeply into it, but people my age are, like, 'Yes, this is essentially where pedophiles are, and there is also music there,' " he says.

"I am convinced right now that anyone who is doing stuff that I just adore--I am going to wind up having access to it, whether through a commercial enterprise or through the Internet," Muhly says. "There are people who don't need the traditional structure of 'I heard this concert,' or 'I heard it on NPR.' " He can be similarly ecumenical about the distribution of his own time and energy. In the past several years, thanks to his work with Sigur[eth]sson, Muhly has spent a great deal of time in Iceland, and has become a proficient student of the language, an avid user of Reykjavik's municipal geothermal bathing facilities, and a connoisseur of local delicacies such as puffin-meat tidbits wrapped in bacon. Last year, the members of an Icelandic rock group asked him to write them some choral arrangements--but the only recompense they could offer, they said, was to make him a mojito. Given the expense of foodstuffs in Reykjavik, where so much is imported, this was a large gesture. "The limes and mint--that must have cost them a hundred dollars," Muhly, who was only too happy to oblige, says.