“All composers draw upon various musical styles. Very few are completely original. The challenge is to fashion the diverse influences into a distinctive voice. It is hard to describe what makes a composer’s voice authentic. But you know it when you hear it. Nico Muhly has a voice, a Muhly sound.” —The New York Times

Nico Muhly is an American composer and sought-after collaborator whose influences range from American minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. The recipient of commissions from the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and others, he has written more than 80 works for the concert stage and is a frequent collaborator with choreographer Benjamin Millepied. As an arranger, he has paired with Joanna Newsom and Antony and the Johnsons, among others. He has composed for stage and screen, with credits that include music for the 2013 Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie and scores for the films Kill Your Darlings; Me, Earl and The Dying Girl; and the Academy Award-winning The Reader. For his CAP UCLA appearance, Muhly presents a performance in three parts: first a collaboration with composer Thomas Bartlett, comprising a set of songs built around two-piano transcriptions of gamelan music; second, an archival project of gems from over 40 years of Philip Glass’s catalog and finally, a cycle of his own drone-based compositions which he describes as “both severe and lyrical.”