Nico Muhly: "Marnie", "Register", and Rock

I thought Muhly’s perspective and honesty about his work was interesting and refreshing. Although I am someone who isn’t as familiar with opera as I’d like, I still appreciated his creative ways of storytelling, such as having Marnie’s past selves appear throughout the work and function as a collective character. I thought this to be an effective way to avoid the stereotype that he described of attractive female characters in opera either being portrayed as “temptresses or crazy,” and instead showed the depth of the evolving character. Additionally, the use of the male dancers choreographed to be staring at her throughout the show, even in the short video he played, seemed to be effective in illustrating her perspective as well as addressing “male gaze.” Finally, I would be interested to learn more about how the chorus is able to achieve his goal of functioning as both a literal group of people within the show as well as a more figurative group of “spirits,” which might necessitate a full viewing of the work. To me, these techniques seem fairly inventive, but would be interested in hearing from someone with more background knowledge in the history of opera and contemporary opera.

Muhly’s pragmatism also resonated with me. The first example of this was when he said that when he was writing Marnie, he was always trying to do three things: 1. The orchestra was obeying a dramatic function; 2. The orchestra plays colors that the people on the stage might not be familiar with; 3. Pairing singers with instrument(s) in the pit. I am personally trying to work on writing in a more goal-oriented way and so this was interesting to hear, especially how objective #3 doubled as a way to make the orchestration process “less daunting.” I also appreciated his story about how he and the creative team (director, librettist, etc.) got together to create a list of agreed-upon “knowns” by starting very specific and working to bigger picture concepts as a way to make sure everyone was on the same page. Finally, when discussing switching between his contemporary commissioned musical works and rock/pop musical works, he divided it up into practical differences and artistic differences. The practical differences being that with commissioned work, there is a lot of time to compose and contemplate the work whereas in the rock work, there is a much smaller time window. His artistic perspective is that both types of composition are flexing the same muscles but in different ways and ultimately compliment each other.

Finally, I thought that his compositional process for the organ piece “Register” was very interesting and really appreciated him going through the music in detail as part of his presentation. I intend to check out both his piece as well as the Gibbons piece that it was derived from.

The only things I wish he would’ve touched on more are the gender dynamics in “Marnie” that he briefly mentioned to towards the beginning of forum and his rock/pop work. I say this because I am curious if the gender-commentary aspects of the work stop at what is mentioned above or if there is more he could discuss. Coming from fairly complex opera and organ compositions, I would be interested to hear more about his work in rock/pop and listen to some examples.

I always appreciate composers who are willing to talk honestly, clearly, and show that they’ve prepared content to present and so overall, I really enjoyed Nico Muhly’s presentation.