Mothertongue

We Say...

Review by Justin Davidson

In a recent blog post, Nico Muhly, the golden boy of New York composers, described listening to a befuddled GPS with a serene, disembodied voice that sent him ping-ponging endlessly back and forth: “Go straight to Ninth Street. Recalculating. Go straight to Eighth Street. Recalculating. Go straight to Ninth Street. Recalculating.” It’s the sort of accidental incantation that Muhly responds to, and his new album, Mothertongue, babbles and burbles with delight in the sounds that syllables make. He’s not interested in making sense: The title piece, with its layered soprano murmur of addresses and numbers, literally makes music theater out of the phone book. With a collector’s avid tenderness, he savors bits of found music and arranges them into pleasing, subtly surrealistic displays.

Mothertongue is a confident, inventive disc by a talented composer, which is not the same as saying it is a great CD. Its great virtue is the enthusiasm and sensitivity with which Muhly organizes sounds and styles. Its limitation is Muhly’s reluctance to leave anything out. He writes pieces in which complex chattering mixes with folk naiveté; bits of music history turn up like shards of ancient pottery, placed alongside fragments of urban noise. It’s all alluring, colorful, mysterious, and cluttered. The organizing principle by which Muhly disposes his bric-a-brac seems to be a kind of generalized, slightly mocking nostalgia. The prayerful, wordless chant that enters in Part 2 of the title piece, Mothertongue is not a religious moment — it’s the musical equivalent of a little plastic saint. The wordless singing and spoken chatter evoke Meredith Monk, Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, and John Lennon’s “Revolution 9,” all manifestations of an avant-garde that was already passing when Muhly was born (in 1981). He deploys these gestures as a picturesque technique, the way Mozart suggested great antiquity by invoking Bach. Your parent’s novelties are your retro references. What’s wonderful about Muhly’s music is also what’s so disturbing about it: the way he uses other people’s innovations, weaving them into beautiful, billowing fabrics that always feel more arbitrary than their source.