Nico Muhly

Early years

Muhly was born in Vermont and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Bunny Harvey, is a painter and teacher at Wellesley College, and his father, Frank Muhly, is a documentary filmmaker.

As a child, Muhly sang in the choir at Grace Episcopal Church in Providence, and he started to study piano at 10.

Muhly went on to study at the Wheeler School in Providence. He then attended Columbia University where he received an undergraduate degree in English, and the Juilliard School where he completed a master's degree in music. He also studied composition with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse.

Musical works

In 2005, Muhly was commissioned by Colorado Academy, a private school in Colorado, to write a song for the opening of their new Fine Arts building.

Muhly worked in collaboration with Björk on the DVD single "Oceania" in 2004, and he worked with Philip Glass as an editor, conductor, and keyboardist.

In 2006, he released his first album of works, titled Speaks Volumes. In 2008, he released his second album, titled Mothertongue.

In 2009, Muhly did choral and string quartet arrangements for four of the songs on Brooklyn-based indie rock band Grizzly Bear's third album, Veckatimest, and he worked with Antony and the Johnsons on the albums The Crying Light and Swanlights.

In a 2007 interview with Molly Sheridan on NewMusicBox, Muhly explained that while he considers himself a classical music composer, that does not preclude his working in a variety of musical genres: "It's essentially like being from somewhere. I feel like I'm very proudly from the classical tradition. It's like being from Nebraska. Like you are from there if you're from there. It doesn't mean that you can't have a productive life somewhere else. The notion of your genre being something that you have to actively perform, I think is pretty vile."

Muhly worked on two commissions for the UK-based Britten Sinfonia, performed in January and February 2010. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival commissioned "Drones & Piano" for pianist Bruce Brubaker, which premiered in May 2010.

Muhly's opera Two Boys, a collaboration with librettist Craig Lucas and directed by Bartlett Sher, premiered in June 2011 at the English National Opera and made its Metropolitan Opera debut on October 21, 2013. According to a 2008 New York Times article, the opera is based on a late-1990s British case involving a 14-year-old boy taking on the online identity of women to try to get someone to kill him, without success. However, in a 2008 interview with The Advocate, Muhly stated that the opera is based on the true story of an online friendship between two male teenagers, one of whom kills the other. The opera was re-worked both before and after its 2011 premiere. The first recording of the piece, from the Met production, was released on Nonesuch Records in 2014.

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Commissioning Club, Cantus, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Alfred P. and Ann M. Moore commissioned Luminous Body, also a collaboration with librettist Craig Lucas. The piece premiered on September 9, 2011.

In 2013, he toured with Glen Hansard. They performed together with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Eindhoven and Amsterdam.

His 2008 musical collaboration, Confessions, with Faroese singer-songwriter Teitur was released in 2016 by Nonesuch Records.

Arrangements and orchestrations

Recordings