Crossing Lines: Composer Nico Muhly talks about dancers reimagining his music | classical music

WWhen I write music, one of the main challenges is knowing how to notate the rhythm in a way that is clear to interpreters. When I hear a phrase in my head, it breaks free from the confines of bar lines, but in practice, it eventually needs to be compressed into recognizable shapes and containers. Every composer has his or her own strategy (some avoid bar lines altogether, or use alternative notation strategies outside of traditional Western systems), but it’s always a negotiation: Does the way the composer scores the tempo match the best way it appears on the flutist’s music stand?

I have distinct memories of when I was 13, hearing a piece of music (specifically, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements), basically memorizing it from the recording, and then being completely shocked when I finally saw the score. “Where does the pessimism lie?!” Stravinsky’s sense of time and my understanding of the same thing were at odds in a way that I still find exciting: the idea that there are infinite superimpositions of a practical system (notation) on a medium (sound) that the audience often experiences without the score. Understanding that notation of rhythm is artificial but crucial requires personal precision and empathy for future interpreters.

Watching dance rehearsal as a musician addicted to music is surreal. You can have 30 people in the room, and only two of them will get the score. What is astonishing is that the choreographer has imposed a completely different and invisible form of notation in the form of counting, which, in concert with the music, becomes what the dancers memorize and bring into their bodies. What I find most interesting is how the choreographers’ counting system interacts with the score: if my notation system feels like dividing a loaf of bread into slices this or that size larger, the dancers often feel larger, more structured numbers. I could have 16 little bars of different lengths, equivalent to about 30 seconds, which they would hear and feel in a mysterious but magical way, as two cycles of 11 equal beats. When you’re eavesdropping, you’ll hear the dancers say, “Okay, this is it.” no D conversation After the three octets, then five…six…seven…” which is a wonderful alternative mapping.

I don’t find this reality to be at odds with my sense of time. In fact, with over 20 years of experience working with choreographers, I’ve found myself learning a lot about phrase lengths and the precise narratives they entail. I can spend months paying attention to small details and can easily lose a greater sense of form, which choreographers and dancers have as a matter of physical instinct. We have a shared vocabulary (“line” or “phrase” comes to mind) but I am often humbled by their fluency in hearing a larger heartbeat in one way or another.

I think of this relationship as a very magnified way in that we are all mostly tied to the Gregorian calendar, but there are superstructures and microstructures that are unique to different societies. Just last week, I had a meeting with the Director of Music at Oxford Church, and we talked about a multi-year project and not a single date was mentioned – it was just “Epiphany” or “the Thursday before Trinity Sunday”. This year could have little appeal towards public holidays, birthdays, Yahrzitz. The demands of the garden and its various plantings and crops can become the dominant way of dividing time.

Most of my work in dance involves commissions where dance and music are developed together, sometimes in a circular way where I will submit some drawings, videos of movement will appear in the inbox, more drawings, etc. I’ve found that the best way to work in that environment is to have the world’s quickest conversation about structure—Benjamin Millepied, my senior collaborator, and I trying to figure it all out over a meal—followed by a list of things we each want to try. giant passacaglia For me, a sextet of guys just for him. A section with just metal instruments for me, and an incredibly kinetic sequence of action against the harsh, harsh music for him.

This month I have the pleasure of having three works by three very different choreographers: Michael Keegan Dolan, Maude Le Bladec, and Jules Cunningham. It goes without saying that their work is incredibly different, but what I find most fascinating about the process is watching them compare their sense of time to the music.

For example, Michael Keegan Dolan took a piece of music set in a traditional murder ballad called “The Two Sisters.” The narrative of the poem is still there, sung live by singer Sam Amidon, but what Michael has done is impose a kind of ritual, drawn from his visceral theatrical engagement with any source material. It amplifies and compensates for popular music styles in a way that I couldn’t do with music alone.

Jules Cunningham has been working with a range of drone-based pieces. The solo lines are notated so that the rhythms are tight within the phrases, but there is space between them for playing. Jules’ note to me after the first reading with the band was that they wanted a little more He breathes Before phrases: a comment indicated by a light exhalation. It is a musical request (happily fulfilled!) that stems directly from their embodied experience of moving to music. We use the same term in rehearsals (“Can you just take a little breath between bar 13 and 14”) but it usually comes from a more distant or abstract musical instinct, often given top-down from the conductor or composer.

Maud Le Bladec has created a piece in which her three dancers commit to the music in an incredibly precise way. All three movements of the music are very fast, but sometimes, fast music can be very slow, and slow music can hide a fast pulse. Their movement captures this, and in response, the Britten Sinfonia is invited to bring this fast-within-slow energy to their performance, “envisioning” the quasi-vibrato even though the notes they are playing are much longer. It is an informed interpretive strategy by bodies – and, for me, it is also a welcome change from the theoretical and sometimes arbitrary practices that can govern modern performance.

Next time you find yourself in a dance performance, opera, or musical, take a moment and pay attention to how well the movement connects to the music. If the music seems to be in relaxed four-bar cycles, does dancing enhance, resist, or complicate this? If music seems to float in outer space, does dance provide a scaffold for it?

When I first moved to New York in 1999, I found myself dancing more than going to the symphony. Often, my first experience of hearing a live piece of music was choreographed: I can’t think of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto without seeing Balanchine’s choreography in my head; There is such a huge catalog of chamber music that I cannot imagine it without seeing anything wonderful that Mark Morris has made of it. I have also found that the music that choreographers are drawn to can be found in a different corridor than is found at any given moment in concert halls and opera houses. Their sense of music that you force upon them is rooted in the body, and the immediacy of that connection makes me hear the music differently, and know it in a more complex and richer way.