Transcripts

ABIGAIL FISCHER: [CHANTING]

EUAN KERR: Nico Muhly's most recent album, Mothertongue, consists of three choral pieces. They include 16th century texts and early colonial songs mixed with chamber instruments and the sounds of someone making breakfast. One piece features mezzo soprano, Abigail Fischer. Muhly wrote the piece for her. He says he wanted to use her vocal range in a new and interesting way.

NICO MUHLY: What I wanted to do was build her an archive, like a library of memories to run down ecstatically. So she's chanting her for her phone numbers, and she's chanting all the addresses she ever lived at.

ABIGAIL FISCHER: [CHANTING]

(SINGING) 2624 Sunset Boulevard, Houston, Texas

29 Woodward Avenue, Rochester, New York, United States

124 Raymond Avenue, New York

26 Kent Street, Rochester, New York

EUAN KERR: Muhly is pulling in fans from all over at a time of rising interest in new music. Longtime collaborator, violist Nadia Sirota, puts it down to the way younger people are sharing a broader range of cultural influences. She says that having a common experience is an entry point that makes new music more accessible to younger audiences.

NADIA SIROTA: And even though, like Nico, for example, is somebody who's spent just a ton of time studying classical forms and all this stuff that's sort of very, very heady and very high-level, master's degree-style schooling, they're still going to be some kind of access or handhold to what he's doing because of just the fact that--

NICO MUHLY: I'm 27.

NADIA SIROTA: You're 27.

EUAN KERR: And the accessibility of the internet, Nico Muhly says, has been a huge boon to contemporary classical music.

NICO MUHLY: Before, it seems like the access to new music was limited to people who had access to new music. In a sense, it was a sort of self-fulfilling community. Whereas now, a 20-year-old in Minnesota has access to the same kind of music that I do as a 27-year-old in Manhattan.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EUAN KERR: Muhly will join Sirota on keyboards to play his composition "Keep In Touch" in Minneapolis. It's a piece he wrote for her some years ago.

NICO MUHLY: That piece is one that now Nadia plays. You probably played it more than any other piece of music you've ever played.

NADIA SIROTA: Yeah, definitely. I probably played this piece in concert 150 times.

NICO MUHLY: Yeah, it's outrageous.

NADIA SIROTA: Yeah.

NICO MUHLY: And so by now, it feels like it's just as much hers as it is mine. And that's the best feeling as a composer, really, when you can write something that someone else can own.

EUAN KERR: The concerts of the Southern Theater in Minneapolis are generating great excitement as local music fans come to see a rising star. But Muhly seems genuinely surprised.

NICO MUHLY: It's an honor to play outside of your hometown for me because the-- I mean, I'm always amazed when people turn up to see me play in New York. I'm like, don't you have anything better to do? Shouldn't you be at dinner or something? So the idea that people in other places would be interested is amazing and very exciting.

EUAN KERR: This is the first time Muhly and Sirota have played together as a duet, and they're looking forward to it. When asked what audiences should expect at the Southern, they say good music and a good time. Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio News.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[CHANTING]