JAVS Spring 2013

“M EET P EOPLE & H AVE A N ICE T IME ”: A C ONVERSATION WITH N ADIA S IROTA AND N ICO M UHLY

because I think we both share a lack of really specific capital C, capital A “Career Ambition,” and it’s more like project ambition. NS : yeah, but what I think, with regards to entrepre neurship, is that that’s literally all it is. Like, for me I realized that I would feel successful if my entire life I get to continue to do cool projects with my friends. That is a successful career for me. NM : Right, me too. I think there are a lot of people, particularly soloists, who have in their mind this arc of how their career will look and that there are these points you have to hit along the way. They’re like, “A solo recital at Carnegie Hall,” there’s a “this and a that”—and that that’s something you achieve—like, the getting of the concert itself is the achievement. NS : That works for some people, and good on them—but that mindset implies that there is a them who are the people who run music and they can make you successful and they can approve of you or they can not approve of you, and really it’s all just people—there’s no them; there’s no classical music committee or whatever. NM : And in fact, one of the interesting things about what you and I have learned is there are just “allies,” and that’s kind of all you get. But it operates at the level of the individual. NS : It very much does, and I don’t know if that’s like, [because of ] the Internet or whatever, but I’m very happy with what I get to do right now because it all feels very much like friendship blossoming into everything else.

Nico Muhly performs with Nadia Sirota at a December 7, 2012, concert (photo courtesy of Peter Butler)

by Alexander Overington

At some point in October I received an e-mail from composer Nico Muhly wondering if I would perform as interlocutor for an interview he and violist Nadia Sirota had been asked to submit to “a viola publica tion.” When we gathered on November 14, 2012, to attend our sixth performance (collectively) of Thomas Ades’s The Tempest at the Met, we stopped first for a pre-concert meal at Blue Ribbon Sushi on 58th street, where Nadia promised we’d “eat the whole ocean, slow ly.” Over a few bottles of saki and an almost criminal amount of uni, we discussed careers, commissions, and the viola.

NM : First of all, cheers and thank you.

NS : Cheers!

NM : What we should talk about is entrepreneurship as an idea—because I think this is really interesting,

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