Nico Muhly

My most recent music discovery: Nico Muhly, whose music sounds like a combination of some of the more interesting elements in Byrd, Tavener, and John Adams. I'll refer you to a little feature about him at NPR Music, where you may find a recording of his Senex Puerum Portabat — originally an antiphon for Candlemas, but reënvisioned for Christmas with the addition of the Hodie Christus natus est text and some festive trombones. Also interesting is the Bright Mass with Canons. Elsewhere, Muhly makes a good case for Renaissance polyphony:

In Romantic music, every note — every detail of orchestration — is illustrative of the composer's emotional journey; in the audience, we're obliged to follow the itinerary outlined for us. At its best, this feels like an adventure. At its worst, it's like being stuck in conversation with a man muttering professorially into a pint of beer. I would get frustrated playing Beethoven sonatas, thinking: "Yes, I agree that it is raining very hard, and we were talking about this at great length before that sweet part when you wanted to talk about your girlfriend and you cried a little bit, but why can't you just hide under that tarpaulin there instead of staying out in the cold and gnashing your teeth?"

By contrast, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes and Tye were like the dinner guests on whom you had crushes as a child, not because of any particular story they told, but because of the way they told those stories — the turns of phrase, the little obsessive details, the localised, rather than structural repetitions. The content of the stories could be in another language, but the little gestures — the musical equivalent of subtly tapping the table twice to reinforce a conclusion, smoothing out the tablecloth before the punchline of a joke, a well-timed sip of wine with eyebrows cocked - were the stars of the show, they were like the things you remember when people you love have changed, or moved away, or died.