Nico Muhly

Nico Muhly, born 1981 in the United States, composes orchestral, choral, and chamber music, operas, and scores for stage, film and television. He has received commissions from the Metropolitan Opera (Two Boys, 2011, and Marnie, 2018, both co-productions with English National Opera), Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York Philharmonics, and his choral works have been performed by Chanticleer, Stile Antico, the Tallis Scholars, and by the choirs of Westminster Abbey, Southwark Cathedral, King’s College Cambridge, Clare College Cambridge, St John’s College Cambridge, Magdalen College Oxford, and Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, where he is composer-in-residence.

The Barbican, King’s Place and the Philharmonie de Paris have featured him as composer, conductor, pianist, and curator, and his collaborators have included choreographers Benjamin Millepied, Justin Peck, Kyle Abraham, and Mark Morris, as well as musical artists Sufjan Stevens, Björk, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake and Paul Simon. His work for the screen includes scores for The Reader (2008) and Kill Your Darlings (2013), the BBC’s Howards End (2017) and Pachinko for Apple TV+ (2022-2024).

He has written concerti for violist Nadia Sirota, organist James McVinnie (Register), violinists Pekka Kuusisto (Shrink) and Renaud Capuçon, piano soloists Adam Tendler (Sounding) and Alexandre Tharaud, piano duo Katia & Marielle Labèque (In Certain Circles), trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth (Doom Painting), and a flute, trombone, cello & percussion Concerto Grosso for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and vocal solos for Iestyn Davies, Renée Fleming, and Nicholas Phan. Recent large-scale solo works include The Street, written with librettist Alice Goodman for harpist Parker Ramsay, and The Bell Études for pianist Conor Hanick. He has worked with visual artists Maira Kalman, Yu Hong, and Oliver Beer, and has created site-reactive works for the National Gallery, London, the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Initiative at the Venice Biennale, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and written articles for the Guardian, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. Recordings of his works have been released by Decca and Nonesuch, and he is a founding member of artist-run label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008).

His name is pronounced [‘ni: ko] [‘mju:li].