Commissioned by Planting Fields Foundation, Oyster Bay, New York, and dedicated to Conor Hanick, "Pastoral" is an elegiac work set in three sections: 'Aubade,' 'Calls,' and 'Chorale,' and the sheet music is available exclusively for Piano Day.

Find the sheet music at https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/se/ID_No/841839/Product.aspx?utm_campaign=Piano-Day-2022&utm_source=blog

Nico Muhly - Pastoral performed by Conor Hanick

Performed by The Rhythm Method at NYU Steinhardt
April 2022
Mixed by Tyler Neidermayer

Abridged program note:

It's so fascinating to me why certain people come into our lives, why they enter at the moments they do, why certain ones leave lasting imprints. Related to this, bell hooks’ all about love is a book I resonate with deeply, bringing love to light; how we experience it in our private lives, but rarely discuss so openly and fearlessly in the world we face as soon as we walk out the door. Among the countless noteworthy quotes hooks includes, I was particularly struck by the one opening Chapter 3, “Honesty: Be True To Love”:

“When we reveal ourselves to our partner and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery—that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are…This kind of unmasking—speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges—is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch more deeply.” -John Welwood

In this piece, the strings constantly strive and reach for this touch; they pass it between one another in developmental re-contextualization, but moving both forward and back, as development is not always linear. There are four movements fluidly connected; they bleed, build, breathe and find new meaning in each other:

Reaching - Imagining

Heartracing - Beginning

Embracing - Depths

Reaching - Self

Though the movements seem linear - progressing from imagining love, beginning it, experiencing the depths of it, and revisiting that first imagining in the context of self-love - they operate in an oscillating cycle. The piece predominantly rests in a Feldman-like stasis, but there is much activity embedded within incessant displacement of musical elements, including register, voicing, bow speed and pressure, dynamics, trills, timbre, vibrato, glissandi and harmonics. In exploring how to embody text in sound, I aimed to italicize sound on a scale from frailty to warmth, using these various elements of sonic manipulation to convey that lean, that stressed emphasis, of spoken words. Though the movements convey the heart at its fullest, they also trace the threads of heartbreak that shape and reveal us in that underlying sonic bed of fragility, breakage, and realness.

There are many different kinds of love…partnered, familial, friend, self...and the development of what those mean over time and life lived. This piece is inspired by various stages of partnered love: newness and exploration, transition phases and milestones, the depths of all that love truly embodies and every moment in between, as well as self-love, which is just as much of a development with oneself. The first movement expresses that initial reaching, trying to imagine who you will love in life while those people are usually beyond imagination until you meet them. The second movement is more physically active, presenting a sharp contrast to the surrounding glassy blurriness with heart-racing intensity. The third movement is sonically wed to the first and fourth, but explodes out of the glassy blurry confines into concentrated, steadfast warmth and shimmer. The final movement is essentially an echo of the first - both being titled “Reaching” - but coalescing the self with how others color it; the lifelong shift between our initial untouched palette and where we come to be after having mixed our palettes with another.

this kind of unmasking

The Lost Chord -Tom Hazelton at Chicago Stadium

Performed by the Frost Recording Ensemble

Vermilion Wanderer

for viola and mixed media (2022)

Christian Ryan, composer
Alycia Wilder, viola

performed live, May 13
@ St. Anthony's Cathedral, Detroit MI
for Other Tones 003

Other Tones (live)

Second Viola Study (live, OT003)

music for the short film, "Ophelia,"
directed by Daniel McKernan & Sophia Lamar (2022)

music composed by Christian Ryan
Alycia Wilder, viola

Music from "To An Imaginary Ophelia"

Benediction of the Blessed Saceament-April 14

Light Down (2018)
After the traditional folk song LOVING HENRY

Light Down takes its title from the opening line of the traditional murder ballad Loving Henry. The folk material, the story of a woman murdering her adulterer lover, is quoted in the alto flute. The ensemble interjects through a catalogue of orchestrational colors - a scrape on the tam-tam, a cluster in the piano, or a drone on the open strings of the cello. A series of sections based on patterns frame the ballad. This piece is dedicated to noexit, whose artistic directors always elicit particular delight in the macabre.

Light down, light down, loving Henry, she said 
And stay all night with me 
There’s a chair for you and a chair for me 
And th candle’s a burning free

I can’t light down Lady Marget, he said 
And stay all night with thee
For my only little gallin the Arkansas land 
Will wait long for me comin home

Then bending over th horn of his saddle 
He kissed her one, two and three
She took a sharp knife all from her side 
And pierced him both wide and deep 

Ride on, ride on, loving Henry, she cried 
And ride beneath th sun
And your only little gal in th Arkansas land 
Will wait long for you comin home

I can’t ride on, Lady Marget, he cried 
And ride beneath th sun 
For don’t you see my own hearts blood 
A tricklin down, does run

Some takin him by th lily white hands 
Some takin him by th feet
They throwed him in th dark river side 
That runs so wide and deep

Lie there, lie there, lov’n Henry, she cried 
Till th meat rots off your bones
And your only little gal, in the Arkansas land 
Will wait long for you comin home

Loving Henry
As sung by Joan O’Bryant Wichita, Kansas
June 21, 1958
Max Hunter Folk Song Collection Missouri State University






Live Recording
March 2018
No Exit New Music Ensemble
WOLFS Gallery
Cleveland, OH

Light Down (2018) - flute, string trio, piano & percussion

Étude (2011) 
for piano

by Buck McDaniel


Buck McDaniel, piano
Waetjen Auditorium
Downtown Cleveland, Ohio

Étude (2011) - piano

Yoko Ono singing at Evensong December 23 1973 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City

Light Down (2018) - flute, string trio, piano & percussion

buck_mcdaniel