“The Only Tune Pt. 3: The Only Tune“
from the album Mothertongue
2008
iTunes
In classical music, recording is supposed to be nothing but a transparent transmission of this event. The focus is on the work rather than the process. Not so with Muhly, the latest New York wunderkind composer come to save classical from the bore it’s been. After his first album, Speaks Volumes, Muhly went whirlwind with pop avant-gardes from Björk to Antony, and scrapped the overhead live mike of the classical world for a smarter studio technique. The result is more like film music in production, even if classical in form and unclassifiable in texture. The title three-movement work “Mothertongue” floats by as a mix of Glass-shimmer strings with deep-space keyboard bass lines and disembodied chirps of text scripted straight from the soprano’s mental address book. Muhly’s love of the English macabre appears as Renaissance vocal music in odd, stately harmonies grounded by Wicker Man pastoral harpsichord and the occasionally offside sample for the episodic “Wonders.” It is on the final suite, “The Only Tune,“ that Muhly reveals his greatness. A folk song about a girl drowning her sister gets retold in three voices by singer Helgi Hrafn Jónsson. Each setting twists the story further, with help from Jónsson’s excellent flexibility. The tune ends in a cool Sufjan-like moment of folk-pop reverie, a miniature wonder unhinged from genre expectation and comfortable in its realized ambitions.