wideo

A nice little video from the New York Phil featuring Nico talking about his new CONTACT! commission. He comes off as just a little crazy, but in a good way. One of the more fun things about interviewing Nico for my thesis is that once he gets started talking about something he likes, he will go off onto very useful and interesting tangents. This is great for the musicologist, since it not only allows one to get a good sense of his personality (and creative thinking process), but also leads to nice little nuggets of information about a piece that wouldn't come up in a more standard interview.

Here's Nico, from one of my interviews, on percussionists (one of my favorite quotes which didn't make it into my paper, for obvious reasons):

Percussionists want to make composers happy because they only have 20^th century rep, but percussionists also want composers to write really practical stuff, and if you’re going to ask for some crazy thing, all you need to do is know how to talk about that...and they’ll do whatever you want, they’ll put their head underwater and rub the ball mallet over their scrotum or whatever...as long as you write it out in a way that makes total sense to them, then they’ll do it.

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And not to become the resident editor for lazy orchestras, but at 3:56 in the video, "Pillaging Music" should have two L's.