Idle Hours

The other day I spent two hours or thereabouts in my doctor's office waiting to have my ear reamed out. The outer waiting room was quite full, so I expected that my visit would not be in and out, and I was right. I spent a good long time in the outer waiting room, before I was moved to the inner waiting room. Why two waiting rooms? Is it that if all the waiting folks were in one large room, the patients would be disheartened by the sight, so that the patients must be divided up? Then, onto another wait in the treatment cubicle. I almost had the doctor once. He was in the doorway with my chart in his hand, but the nurse called him away to another cubicle. He smiled and said, "Sorry," and put the chart back into it door pocket. They don't call us patients for nothing.

Finally, he came in and reamed out my ear and told me that I would need a cauterization - a minor procedure - to keep me from having to have my ear reamed out so often. Did I want to do it right then? I considered briefly, and said that I wanted to think about it for a bit. The procedure is scheduled for a month from now, after I have thought about it.

The good news is that I had the February 11-18 combined issue of the New Yorker along, with the annual Eustace Tilley cover, a little different from those in years past. One of the articles that I read is Eerily Composed; Nico Muhly, Generation Y Maestro by Rebecca Mead.

Nico Muhly is a young - 26 years old! - composer. From the profile, I get a picture of a charming young man, someone I'd like to meet and get to know.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English composers of religious music, in particular William Byrd and John Taverner, are among Muhly’s chief influences, though he also draws musical inspiration from the spare repetitions of Philip Glass and Steve Reich and from the off-kilter rhythms of songs by Björk, whose recordings he has worked on.

The article is intriguing on different levels, but what captured my attention was the young boy's immediate connection with liturgical music:

When he was eight years old, Muhly began to learn the piano, on an old upright in the basement of the Rhode Island house, but it was not until a friend at school invited him to join a church choir that his musical affinities truly began to emerge. “My mother was horrified: she would come and hear us sing, but grudgingly,” Muhly says. (His mother is half Jewish, and his father comes from a Lutheran family; both are more likely to celebrate the solstice than any Judeo-Christian religious observance.) Muhly, however, loved the repertory of Byrd, Weelkes, and Orlando Gibbons. “I found myself immediately at home in it musically,” he says. “I was really entranced by early music, and how the lines worked. It felt so much more emotional than the Romantic stuff I was playing as a pianist—Chopin, or Schumann, or Tchaikovsky, which always felt sort of Hallmarky.”
....

Muhly says that, even as a boy, he was fascinated by the emotional function of church music as opposed to that of concert music. “Church music is more directional music, pointing upward,” he says. “And the satisfaction of a job well done is the only one you are going to get. When you finish the piece, you don’t look at the audience and smile; you don’t graciously bow. And the composer vanishes, too, in addition to the performers. If you are really good, you disappear.”
....

Since moving to New York, seven years ago, Muhly has regularly attended St. Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-third Street. In 2005, he composed a “Bright Mass with Canons” for its choir. “The organ writing is very colorful and very brilliant, and what is so attractive to me is that he is using ancient techniques,” John Scott, the director of music at St. Thomas, says. “Canon, where voices imitate each other and sing the same music but not at the same time, came to its fruition among early-sixteenth-century Flemish composers. Nico Muhly is in a sense coming from there, but it is dressed up in a very contemporary musical language that has aspects of minimalism.”

Muhly’s youthful anti-clericalism has been tempered by time: though Scott told me that he and Muhly have never discussed questions of faith, he added, “I suspect that he is quite serious about it.” Muhly told me, “I am quite serious about church music. Musicians have always enjoyed a ‘question-free zone’ about faith, because religious music can help people explore their relationship with the divine, which I think is a much more powerful altruistic act than making a big scene of your own personal relationship. I started going to St. Thomas here, and it wasn’t even a question for a second that I wanted to live a life that includes liturgical music as a major part.” (My bolding)

To me, that's a rather fine statement of faith.

You can listen to Muhly's music here.

Any doctors out there reading this, take note that I love my doctors, and my wait was due to surgery which took longer than expected, which I quite understand.