A Quote by Nico Muhly

Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality. — © Nico Muhly
Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality.
I'm not always the best at picking out what goes together. I always want to be presentable, but more than that, I want to be different. I've never just wanted to follow the crowd. I think that goes back to when I was a boy. If everyone was doing one thing, I'd do something different.
With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.
The easiest thing I do is assignment songs. They tell me what they need me to write. I can do that fairly quickly. Writing for an orchestra is difficult. Writing songs [on your own] is most difficult of all. Though [writing for] the orchestra is close.
Young Asian people who come up to me have a certain vibration, and I receive it, and I understand it, and I feel emotional just talking about it. I'm here for you. And I'll continue doing everything I can to fill something that I know you need right now that we don't yet have as a community.
There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
There are two types of conductors. One is the good conductor who can do passionate music but also listen to the singers and do the orchestra. And then there are great conductors, who have their own opinion on the music, who are ruling everything - and not listening much to the singers, but the orchestra play amazingly.
I hate being called lazy, so when everybody gets up at half seven in the morning, I'm up at the same time. Everyone goes to work and I'll do a few hours of writing, then I'll mess about for a bit and come back to it. By the time I go home I'm done. I think it's really good to keep that kind of a routine with writing. I find that when I don't do that, it's really hard to get back into that headspace of writing.
When you're not writing, you're not doing anything else either because everything you do goes into the writing.
I was a warm-up DJ for many years so I know how to build a crowd, what record goes with the next, it's all about understanding the dance floor and how the energy and flow should go coordinating to what the crowd want or might need.
(T)he world is broken up into pieces, and...it's up to everyone to help put it all back together. It's about recognizing the spark of life in everyone and everything, and gluing those shards back together.
Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.
Sometimes I'll hear some music in my head or I'll go to the piano and mess around and come up with a tune, or be on the guitar and come up with some chords - or I'll come up with lines, or just some words, or just a sentence. It could be the title of a song. I do that all the time. I write titles of songs a lot. And sometimes I'll end up writing a song that I don't have a title for and I'll say, "Oh, this goes with that title".
I think emotion is just anything that is emotional, you know, people can feel with music. Music is already so emotional, like the strings, the chords, and the notes and the melodies and stuff. And then you throw on a topic that everyone can relate to. That's gonna be real music.
We have to keep our strong mentality every time, with a good emotional balance to support everything, whether an opponent provokes you or not, because the opponent is doing his job as well.
Sometimes there's that perfect moment when the crowd, the music, the energy of the room come together in a way that brings me to tears.
This is just the way it goes: there's always a cycle with music - it goes up and it goes down, it goes risque and it goes back, it goes loud then it goes soft, then it goes rock and it goes pop.
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