1.

I’ve been listening to Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue a lot lately. Specifically, I’ve been listening to the third of three pieces that comprise the album, “The Only Tune”, and I’ve been doing so in a way that borders on the obsessive. Mothertongue, as works go, marks an interesting shift for Muhly in comparison with the pieces collected on his earlier Speaks Volumes. On “Keep In Touch”, heard on the former album, the voice of Antony Hegarty gradually enters, singing wordlessly and mournfully over strings. His voice, though, seems intact: one could reasonably assume that Hegarty’s vocals heard here were a linear translation of what was initially recorded. The use of vocals on Mothertongue mark a significant shift: Muhly has embraced manipulation, and the vocals that appear on the album’s three pieces — particularly “The Only Tune” and “Wonders” — are manipulated and edited as confidently as anything emerging from the laptops, sequencers, and decks of a top-flight producer.

“The Only Tune” reunites Muhly with Sam Amidon; Muhly had previously provided orchestrations for Amidon’s All Is Well, released earlier this year. I’ve written about the album elsewhere; essentially, the combination of Muhly’s slow-building arrangements and Amidon’s restrained, moving delivery made for a wrenching, immersive experience; one in which centuries-old lyrics sounded fresh and revitalized. Amidon’s delivery is peculiar: he’s able to wring tiny moments of pain out of a seemingly deadpan delivery. It’s this aspect of his vocals that Muhly slowly dissects over the course of the piece, slowing down and vivisecting lyrics, stanzas, images; essentially releasing the subtext and elemental horror found in traditional lyrics: murder, betrayal, and the fashioning of something primal and shocking. It’s hard to imagine this piece working without Amidon’s peculiar delivery, but “The Only Tune” becomes a grander work than a more straightforward delivery of its source might have been.

2.

In a piece originally written for the Guardian, Mulhy praises the work of the composer Son Lux, noting the sacred undertones of his work and placing him in a longstanding tradition of Anglican music. Lux’s album At War With Walls & Mazes was recently released by anticon., a record label best-known for a progressive, collaboration-friendly strain of hip-hop. It’s a hard album to categorize: Muhly is spot-on in his assessment, but it likewise doesn’t seem out of place released by the same label responsible for 13 & God, a collaboration between members of the German avant-pop group The Notwist and anticon. founders Themselves.

While the blurring of lines between rock and classical has been well-documented in recent years, the case could be made that a similar process is unfolding between hip-hop and classical. Besides the aforementioned Son Lux, I’m thinking of Alex Ross jolting an audience at Sound Fix last November by playing an excerpt of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre (”Tancas serradas a muru”), wherein a looped, loping beat underscores Dawn Upshaw’s vocals. I’m thinking of dälek’s collaboration with Anti-Social Music (reviewed by Daphne Carr in its live form here) and their more recent split 12″ with Austin’s My Education, in which Arvö Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” is re-interpreted.

3.

That said, some of this debate makes me think back to one of my first points of exposure to 20th-century classical composition. I’m going to admit my general lack of knowledge of the subject first and foremost — what information I do have largely comes through the patience of good friends who’ve been willing to help with the (sizeable) gaps in my knowledge. Between that and my occasional references in this space to my misspent alt-rock youth, it’s probably not a huge shock that the aforementioned first point was, in fact, the mid-90s recording of Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Which I initially picked up because, hey, it had Tom Waits on it, and proceeded to rediscover it about a decade later.

All of which does lead me to wonder, in a circular way: are the folks checking out Nico Muhly’s work due to the Antony/Will Oldham/Björk/Rufus Wainwright connections — i.e. those of us who come more from the rock/pop side of the equation — delving more into the world of classical as well? And on the flip side, how many of the fairly substantial number of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound fans will note Bradford Cox’s abundant praise for Pauline Oliveros and use it as a cue to pick up some of her work?