From scoring Oscar-winning films to helping out Bj�rk, Nico Muhly is in demand all over the globe ? and he's still only 29. The US composer tells Tom Service why his first opera is based on a Manchester knife attack
To go for a walk with Nico Muhly is to experience another way of seeing the world. Five minutes into our stroll through central London, the 29-year-old US composer is telling me how some priest friends of his are planning to reintroduce an ancient Anglican rite to church services. Then, spying a Japanese restaurant, he points out the oddness of its sign being written in an Indian script. This is followed by a ticking off when it becomes apparent that I am unfamiliar with the niceties of Udal law, a Norse code of conduct that still functions in Orkney and the Shetlands.
Then, when we see a poster for Sing-Along-A-Wickerman, he tells me he dressed up as the classic horror movie's salmon of knowledge for the same show last year. "And I did pretty well. I even sang the violin part for Willow's Song, which surprised some people." This is the unforgettable moment when Britt Ekland grinds her way along Edward Woodward's bedroom walls.
All this takes place before we even get to the restaurant. Given his boundless, omnivorous tastes ? not only has Muhly written orchestral pieces and choral masses, he is also the favoured collaborator and arranger of Bj�rk, Antony Hegarty, Philip Glass and Grizzly Bear ? it seems appropriate that he has suggested eating at St John Hotel, specialists in "nose to tail" gastronomy. Muhly is living in London for now, in a garret above the Strand, as he prepares for the premiere of his first full-scale opera this month. Called Two Boys, the show, a co-production between English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has been three years in the making and was inspired by a real-life event in Manchester in 2003: the stabbing of a 14-year-old boy by a 15-year-old he met through the web.
It's not a simple story. The 14-year-old created a cast of characters in chatrooms, incorporating an international spy-ring and gruesome murders, in a bid to persuade the older boy, with whom he was infatuated, to kill him. Fortunately, he survived the stabbing.
"It was already really operatic," Muhly says. "He invented separate styles for all the characters, like different ways of spelling, even different speeds they typed." Having created the show ? with librettist Craig Lucas and director Bartlett Sher ? Muhly is now not sure where fact ends and fiction begins. "It's like an episode of Law and Order: you start with something real and turn it into something else. To make things fit an operatic model, you have to invent some things and take others away."
He is clear how he wants the opera to feel on stage, though. "There's something really specific I'm going for. It should be a combination of The Turn of the Screw and Prime Suspect. That was one of the ways I thought about how to strike the tone during composing: what would happen if the kids from Britten's Turn of the Screw had the internet?"
Muhly decides on the first tranche of our nose-to-tail odyssey through the St John menu: a smorgasbord of fish soup, pig's cheek and snails. I start to wonder where this culturally voracious character was formed. I begin with his surname, somehow redolent of everywhere and nowhere. "It's Bavarian originally, and morphed into M�ller and then back to Muhly when my ancestors moved to America. I like that it reads as foreign to everyone."
His first name comes courtesy of his French painter mother, his father being a documentary-maker and former Egyptologist. Muhly was an only child, and the family were always on the move. His love for English choral music flourished when he sang as a boy treble in a high Anglican church in Providence, Rhode Island. When he was 13, the family moved to Italy. Did he attend an international school? "No! A Roman public school. Totally. I didn't have any Italian ? and then in two months, I had learnt it. You have to do it that way. Anyway, Italian is a pretty generous language to learn like that. But I probably couldn't do it now. It was just the way my head was wired."
And still is. Muhly is as fecund in conversation as he is in his music. "I think in language and then it turns into music. The relationship between them is like a reversible coat. The language is the structure on which the music hangs. I don't know what the hell is going on with that. I find it much easier to start thinking about something bizarre in language, like the kind of 'r' sounds they make in Beijing. I think about that for six days, then a piece of music comes out. Maybe I was just put together incorrectly and I should go to the shop and get fixed."
Maybe he shouldn't. This innate virtuosity with ideas and sounds means he's as fluent in Icelandic and Faroese as he is in English and Italian, and as comfortable writing a film score for Stephen Daldry's The Reader as he is working on Bj�rk's Medulla. Or composing concertos, cantatas and operas. "I'm so excited about the next four years," he says, "because I've got some really good arrangements, a ballet, some orchestral stuff, and my other opera." This opera, called Dark Sisters, is about a woman trying to escape from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints sect. "I don't like getting sucked into doing just one thing," he adds, describing arranging as "like going round to someone else's flat to cook. I don't need everyone to applaud me the whole time. I have enough outlets for my total vision in concert pieces."
Pike and leek pie arrives, a dish Muhly greets like an old friend. I tell him how I felt listening to the CD of his hour-long ballet score, I Drink the Air Before Me. A good place to start if you're new to Muhly's music, the work is a dizzying mix of choral sweetness, minimalist energy, electronic manipulation and lyrical invention, all pulled together by an emotional and dramatic thread. "I've always loved extreme string-playing," he says, "either the early viola da gamba style or the full-on hyper- romantic manner. That obsession with motor [driving rhythms] and creating a veiled emotional content hasn't really changed since before I went to the Juilliard School. The other influences are pretty traceable, like my interest in early choral music, because I just love it."
Muhly has been called a successor to minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, not least because he worked as Glass's assistant. But for him, it's not a question of style, of being a "minimalist", or any other label. "It just so happens that the things I do occasionally land on recognisable stylistic islands. If you write any kind of music because you feel you should, rather than because you like the way it sounds, that's wrong."
A dozen tastes of heaven
Muhly talks of his natural love of "things that are severe and decadent ? like this place". And, as we end our meal, St John's brutal but beautiful culinary aesthetic tips towards the decadent, with half a dozen madeleines for dessert. "Little foretastes of heaven," says Muhly. But in writing Two Boys, he needed severity more than decadence. "You have to be in command of every moment, editorially, when you write an opera. There are so many people involved, so you have to be clear about the structure. There are three big pillars in the opera: the very beginning, a solo piece for Sue Bickley [who sings detective Anne], and a huge sequence of passacaglias that ends the whole thing. Because I can't bear long operas, the first act has to be less than an hour, and the second shorter again."
The piece comes out at 100 minutes, the perfect length for a thriller. Rehearsals are going well, Muhly says, even if it's "pretty scary" watching it come together. "It's great now the children in the cast have arrived, so I'm not the youngest person in the room any more. It was insane: there were 100 people and I was like, 'Hey y'all!'" He does an impression of an excited teenager meeting the operatic thoroughbreds of ENO.
But he's right to be excited. Muhly has more worlds of music at his feet than any other composer today. Back in his garret, he puts the finishing touches to a version of a Tracy Chapman track for a transgender performer friend in New York, plots a six-part cantata, and muses on the future of film scores. And then humdrum everyday life suddenly intervenes, as Muhly wonders why it's impossible to find anywhere in central London that does laundry. "What is it with this place?" he says. "I mean, it's easier in Phnom Penh."
Nico Muhly's new album Seeing Is Believing is out on Decca on 6 June.
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