As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.
Nico MuhlyEven more than in the concert hall, in church there are things you can and cannot do, just out of respect. You would never have the sound of someone being nailed to a cross, or the sound of a child being born, because everybody knows the story. We know that we're meant to feel a complicated raft of things.
Nico MuhlyThere's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the page that encourages it to be played in a certain fashion.
Nico Muhly