The new album No Resting Place, released on Linn recently, is the latest such excursion - showcasing the music of Nico Muhly through works written for The Tallis Scholars, and drawing on inspirations as diverse as the Biblical Book of Lamentations, the Windrush settlers, and the diary of Captain Scott that was retrieved after the failure of his Antarctic Expedition.
I was lucky enough to be able to speak to both Nico and The Tallis Scholars' conductor Peter Phillips about some of the music on this album.
How did your paths first cross, and how did that first composition (the Recordare from 2013) come into being?
Nico Muhly: Peter and I were trying to figure this out! I think we met socially through Simon Wall, one of the tenors, but it wasn't like an introduction - we just existed in the same spaces for a while. And at a certain point Peter must have decided it would be interesting to have a piece from me.
Peter Phillips: Honestly I can't remember how it started - nor who paid for that first piece, which might give us a clue!
NM: I think it might have been the Lincoln Center? But anyway, I think this is all a good sign. If you remember the introduction too well, then it means that you're not actually friends.
What about this specific album? Was it just a case of waiting until Nico had written you enough music to fill the duration of a CD?
PP: We approached it that way, yes - but equally, once we'd got four or five of the other pieces together, Nico then wrote the remainder.
NM: It was A Glorious Creature that was the final piece. What happened was that we'd amassed about twenty-five minutes of music consisting of shorter pieces, of which the longest was Rough Notes. Then along came the opportunity to set this giant cycle-piece of the Lamentations, which is No Resting Place, and then the point at which we were able to push things over the album-length line was the Tallis Scholars’ fiftieth anniversary, which is where A Glorious Creature came from. That was also a great opportunity for me to write something that was less of a downer!
Nico - in the sleeve-notes you mention having been deeply interested in the poetry of Thomas Traherne, whose A Glorious Creature opens the album, for several years. What kinds of qualities in his writing attract you as a composer?
NM: First of all, in this case it's prose rather than poetry, and like other writers of that time the two things go back and forth. Personally I find setting prose that has the heart of poetry a lot easier than setting poetry - poetry already has its own rhythms. And what I love about Traherne is that he's occupying a sort of metaphysical space, but also his writing's incredibly musical.
So with A Glorious Creature what you have is really three simple gestures; the first is the idea of radiance, and rays extending - which is incredible, so you can just have a single pitch and then explode out from it, which is how the piece opens. Then there's this 'yet regardeth all', getting microscopic and scientific - every mote in the air, every grain of dust - and that, to me, suggested a very specific kind of chromatic music. And then the third part is a sort of fusing of the two.
And again I think the fact that he's thinking both cosmically and in great detail is very musical for me, and most of his writing that I've been setting does something like that.
Peter - as someone with such a special focus on Renaissance polyphony, what is it that tempts you away from that towards other genres (as with this album, and your past forays into Tavener and Pärt)?
PP: I chose composers whose music I thought would go with the Renaissance music that we would inevitably be doing in the concerts where they would be appearing. So I didn't want there to be a big gear-change between one style and another. I've never really defined to my satisfaction why it is that Nico and Arvo Pärt write music that flows so well from Renaissance to them and back again.
Those are ideal concerts as far as I'm concerned; I didn't want to put on concerts where we'd sing a piece of Palestrina and then there'd be something utterly different and jarring. Audiences may like that, but I prefer it this way. And I suppose I always commission a cappella music that's got counterpoint and proper melodies in it, not just 'effect chords' (which I must say I'm really bored with...). And Nico doesn't write like that - the moment that we got going, I realised that his music would match. Because it's so well-written for the voice; it goes with Palestrina, Tallis, composers who instinctively knew how to write beautiful vocal lines. Those are the composers I want to encourage, and Nico does it supremely well.
So it sounds like you do now incorporate some of these contemporary composers into your standard programmes - how have audiences responded?
They react well to it. John Tavener doesn't quite fit into this idea - he did start the process, and some of his pieces fit, such as The Lamb, and a setting of the Lord's Prayer that he wrote for us, but he never really wrote in quite the same way. More recently I've enjoyed having a piece by Nico or Arvo in almost every concert - and lately Matthew Martin as well, who also understands how to write for voices in a contrapuntal way. And it takes a bit of learning - so many composers don't get this. This modern way of composing on computers maybe inhibits thinking in terms of counterpoint of tunes and melodies that we want to sing.
NM: One of the tricky things is that you almost have to grow up with this music, or at least know how it feels from inside with that level of polyphony.
So until you've really sung, or really grasped, what it feels like to be, say, the fourth voice out of eight in a big piece of complicated material, you can't entirely understand it. And the way that I set the Hebrew letters from the Lamentations, and in fact the way I've written most of the pieces, is to write it out on as wide a piece of paper as I could, to keep the integrity of the line. I'm always thinking about line. Since I was a kid I've been singing this music, but also listening to Peter's interpretations of it. I remember buying, with my pocket money, a recording of the Western Wind Masses. And when you're a pre-teen that's thrilling - first of all it's polyphony, second of all they're all bangers! And you have to do some treasure-hunting for the cantus firmus. There's a bit of a game in it.
Nico - several of these pieces seem tailored specifically to the voices of the Tallis Scholars - with those SSSSAATTBarB scorings. What was it like to write for that combination, with four distinct soprano parts available to you?
It's written specifically for them, no question - it's completely tailor-made. What it means is that you have a somewhat top-heavy instrumentation. For me, having four sopranos is no problem; it immediately sets up the challenge of how you join them together and treat them as a block if you need to, but then also let them do their own thing. And that can happen through canons, or through big clusters (though I'm less interested in doing that myself). I find that the fact that it's skewed in that direction reminds me a bit of Stravinskian spacing. You often have him choosing unusual spacings, the way the Symphony of Psalms has no upper strings, though that's kind of the opposite scenario. Either way, it makes you think about line and about spacing in a really interesting way.
The fact that they're quite high sopranos also helps. You can have a very large span between the low and the high. And something that for me comes a bit from the American minimal tradition (you see it a lot in Steve Reich) is that you can have a lot of moving information in the upper voices, while the lower voices actually give you context, where you see harmonically where you are. That becomes a big dramatic effect, and it's something I do all the time in No Resting Place - if you store a lot of the emotional information in the higher voices and then acknowledge it in the lower voices.
PP: This all reminds me of the music in the Eton Choirbook - Browne in particular, where there's a quatreble voice, producing this very high texture with effectively two treble parts and two mean parts. That's very much what Nico seems to be aiming at sometimes.
NM: Absolutely. And I think Browne is the one that I think about the most, especially his works in the Eton Choirbook. It's just magical architecture, there's nothing else like it. And then also to have the foremost interpreters of this material, it seems like an obvious choice. Also, because The Tallis Scholars aren't musicians who do contemporary music all the time, acknowledging the history of that material means that it's pretty readable and is in dialogue with what they're used to doing.
PP: We came to Nico's music as Renaissance specialists; we hadn't done very much modern music before that, other than Tavener, and then Arvo and Nico came at about the same time.
Nico - how early on in the process of gestating the Lamentations did you know that you wanted to set up this parallel between the Biblical text’s allusions to suffering exiles and more recent injustices around race and immigration?
Oh, right from the beginning. It wasn't like I got to the end and then decided to insert an extra angle. It's very hard, the line's very fine, when writing something that's deliberately relevant today. (Though personally I think composers like Browne are relevant today...!) But I think when you're dealing with the specific text of the Lamentations, it felt like a natural fit. There was then a big puzzle to solve, which was how to avoid having it sound like the kind of jarring modern juxtaposition Peter was talking about earlier.
And so for me, the way that I conceived of it from the very beginning was that there had to be not just a musical connection but a twinning between the pure abstraction of the Hebrew letter and whatever the ending of the modern English utterances were. They always link back, and you end up with these sort of musical rhymes. I felt that I wouldn't get away with it if it felt like it had just been plonked in. It had to be woven into the fabric.
When Peter asked me if I'd like to write some Lamentations, it immediately struck me that the Hebrew letters are a gift to composers. It's some of the earliest pure, abstract music in the Western canon. If you grabbed a random person off the street and asked them how the Couperin Lamentations went, the thing they'd sing first would be one of the Hebrew letter settings. But yes, once I'd made that decision then the rest all made a lot of sense.
What does the future look like for your collaboration? Are there future projects planned that you can give us any hints about?
PP: I'm sure there are - just give me a breathing space! We've done a wonderful hour of music, which is quite a lot (and indeed it costs a lot to sponsor and record such a thing). So we've come to the end of a project.
We don't do that much modern music in our programmes - I do maintain about 70% Renaissance unless someone requests a concert just of Nico.
NM: I don't know if even I would want a whole concert of just this music! I think the trick would be to do this and then do something like Robert White's Lamentations.
But certainly it's the end of a project, not of the collaboration.
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
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