Nico Muhly

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.

— Nico Muhly

I think my generation is a lost generation in a way.

— Nico Muhly

I'm pretty clear about what I'm capable of doing.

— Nico Muhly

Because I had been in conservatory for so long, I was jealous of my friends in bands.

— Nico Muhly

I'm trying to phase out my availability on the phone. People call you when you're walking down the street and say the…

— Nico Muhly

For me the best kind of film music is liturgical music. Liturgical music is essentially a million scores for the same film.

— Nico Muhly

I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known…

— Nico Muhly

Every couple weeks I'll listen to Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, just to check in, to see how it's doing. It's doing OK.

— Nico Muhly

Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a…

— Nico Muhly

Whenever I get asked to write orchestra music or music that is for a lot of players, I try to make it…

— Nico Muhly

In really fancy restaurants they never point to the bathroom, they just gesture toward the bathroom or they'll lead you to the…

— Nico Muhly

There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way…

— Nico Muhly

Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending…

— Nico Muhly

Even more than in the concert hall, in church there are things you can and cannot do, just out of respect. You…

— Nico Muhly

With chamber music you can get people who work on the music for months, rehearsing it every day for a couple of…

— Nico Muhly

Riding a horse is a relationship with a foreign creature, and with musicians it's a similar thing: "OK, I'm going to put…

— Nico Muhly

My urge, when I go to the store, is to buy everything. And it's the same when I'm composing. My first instinct…

— Nico Muhly

When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick,…

— Nico Muhly

As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but…

— Nico Muhly