In Sunday’s (6/29) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Elizabeth Bloom interviews 32-year-old composer Nico Muhly, who “has firmly established himself in the contemporary classical music world…. His attitude reflects a versatile background…. He has arranged music for Usher and written a 4,000-word review of Beyonce’s [December 2013] surprise album. ‘I like [genres] fine, just not when they’re applied to me,’ he said.… His opera ‘Dark Sisters’ … deals with a woman in the fundamentalist Mormon Church who struggles with the polygamist life she has been forced into.… The orchestral music, he said, is meant to evoke the natural environment of the American southwest, where the story is based.… This multidisciplinary facility seems to translate to his ideas about the music industry. He thinks, for example, that classical music could learn from how pop uses music software and recording studios…. Muhly believes that the notion that classical music is dying, or at least in trouble … [is] misplaced.… ‘There’s a resilience to making art that is going to way outlast everyone who’s freaking out about the money,’ he says…. ‘I think the financial model as it exists now is probably wrong.’ ”
Posted July 1, 2014
