Nico Muhly: A Study in Breadth, Nuance and the Music of Pachinko

January 8, 2025

Arielle Paul

Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+

If a word could describe Nico Muhly’s career and approach to music, breadth is befitting. A word that, in its essence, allows for space, range, scope and amplitude of comprehensiveness – all emblematic of Muhly and his work. Though he considers himself an orchestral composer, his music spans genres. It supports a plethora of creative mediums, from films such as The Humans and Worth to series like Howards End and, most recently, Pachinko. He’s recorded original solo albums along with numerous collaborations – Sufjan Stevens, The National, Anohni, James Blake, Paul Simon – composed chamber and sacred music, and written for the ballet, opera and even a scent and sonic immersive performance experience for the Guggenheim Museum. 

“Really, what you want to do as a composer is write not necessarily for your colleagues who are musicians in the same kind of mad scientist world but for the smartest people who do something else.”

Looking at his upbringing and education in New England, this diverse scope makes sense. Born to an artist and teacher mother and a documentary filmmaker father, his exposure to the liberal arts began early on.

“We had the kind of house that had a piano in the basement. Neither of my parents is musical, although they knew a lot about music and art, so they asked if I wanted to learn to play. It was something to do,” Muhly said. 

Soon after, he joined the boys’ choir at Grace Episcopal Church in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was first exposed to the world of sacred music. “I kind of plunged into it,” he said, “and then suddenly I thought, what about writing music of my own?” He begged his mother to bring home scores from the music library at Wellesley College, where she taught, which he studied intently as his informal education as a teenage composer. After two years of summer music intensives in the Berkshires, he began a five-year dual-degree program at Juilliard School and Columbia University, leading to a Master’s degree in music and a Bachelor of Arts in English, respectively. 

Esteemed as this was, reconciling the schedules of the two different schools, which are not walkable and didn’t share a timetable, and figuring out how to balance departmental requirements was an education in and of itself.

“It was a shit show. Really, really, really, really complicated,” he said. “You have to really want it to make it work.”

In this logistical tug-of-war, he practiced the art of solving puzzles in ways few composers experience with a siloed music education. A rare managerial skill set emerged in blending the conservatory experience with a liberal arts education at two of the most acclaimed institutions in the world, one that Muhly believes made him a better composer and collaborator. While he deems Julliard as a “pretty straightforward” rigorous education in a highly specialized field, Columbia exposed him to something he can only now articulate.

Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+

“Really, what you want to do as a composer is write not necessarily for your colleagues who are musicians in the same kind of mad scientist world but for the smartest people who do something else,” Muhly said. “Someone who is incredibly rigorous about political science or being the most athletic, or agile mentally about comparative literature or learning languages on the brink of extinction.”

While learning about anti-colonial resistance in the late 19th century may not have much to do with Shostakovich, he relished having “breadth of experience” in something that had nothing to do with music. And just as he learned to master logistical puzzles, he discovered overlapping patterns and correlations between these two worlds: the language of storytelling. 

On a technical level, this has served with things like close reading scripts and librettos and having a critical thinking and analytical background when interpreting a creative work from a macro perspective. “For my initial pass, I can sort of zoom out and start moving things around in my head. A muscle one learns in a liberal arts education,” said Muhly.

“There’s a version of the score that could say the instant you see him, he’s a predator, and reads that character as fundamentally horrible with brief forays into something resembling moral behavior.”

However, navigating greater substructures in collaborative environments is another attribute of storytelling he credits to this breadth of education, one he was exposed to “almost by accident” and has offered an ability to understand and work with another storyteller’s perspective. 

“Working with a choreographer on a ballet, things are kind of happening right next to one another at the same time, whereas with a filmmaker, things are more reactive,” he said. 

For Muhly, different collaborative dynamics call for varying approaches and sensitivities when writing music. In other words, no single playbook or one size fits all. This extends to variances with scoring for the screen itself, where being intuitive to what’s needed for a scene overrides any attachment to doing things in one single way. 

This was the case with Muhly’s score for the Apple TV+ series Pachinko, created by Soo Hugh and based on the 2017 novel by Min Jin Lee. His discernment and sensitivity as a musical storyteller allowed him to remain on his toes and navigate perspective with the fluidity and nuance necessary for a series this complicated. With multiple time jumps, locations, languages and complex characters, the score does “some heavy lifting” to support the story as a sonic binding agent between time periods denoting change or continuity. 

Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+

He also chose to “create musical information that doesn’t tell the audience exactly what they should think or feel,” he said. Instead, we are left to exist in a space with “a little bit more anxiety.” Scoring scenes with the character Hansu, for example, a wealthy fish broker who begins an affair with the series protagonist, Sunja, was as complicated as the character himself. 

“There’s a version of the score that could say the instant you see him, he’s a predator, and reads that character as fundamentally horrible with brief forays into something resembling moral behavior. But I don’t want to tell you my interpretation when you watch this. I want it to remain in this nuanced space, as the filmmaking suggests,” explained Muhly. “Music in something like this can be incredibly manipulative.”

“’The Family,’ is a prime example of this “as it doesn’t resolve from bar to bar but suggests the next bar, then the next bar. So there’s this sense of unresolved continuity, which I felt was musically poetic.”

 
His score considers from scene to scene which character’s perspective to interpret while sometimes taking the more macro view, writing in a way that leaves the audience to navigate the emotional underbelly of what’s happening in the scene at large and form their own perspective. He subscribes to a crab-like way of writing, as Muhly calls it, where musical resolves don’t necessarily lead to one specific place and create a tension of opposites as a mechanism to make space for interpretation. 

“Not foreshadowing too heavily, not being too prescriptive, not giving away too much about what a character should be feeling or how the audience should be feeling,” he explained. “It’s a technical musical way to achieve a vagueness that also has content.”

Instead of the music taking a narrative of its own, it’s allowing the listener to roam around in an emotional space where they can breathe and interpret. A more didactic approach that puts the onus on the audience to decide for themselves how they feel a la Bertold Brecht. Similarly, he allows himself the freedom to interpret and change course with the same fluidity he offers his listeners. 

With Sunja, for example, he decided to mostly stick with her perspective throughout the series while things happened around her. However, this wasn’t always the right choice, as was the case during the season two premiere, where Sunja’s older incarnation is in a grocery store with her grandson, Solomon. After being insulted by the grocery clerk, who messed up her order, Solomon explodes in her defense, with an outburst clearly building from pent-up events earlier in the episode. As the strings subtly build tension, an erratic cacophony of dissonant wind instruments crescendo to support the untethered chaos of the moment. Muhly went back and forth with whose perspective to take musically, Sunja’s or Soloman’s, ultimately landing with her grandson. 

Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+

“Every time I tried to score it where I was with her emotionally, it felt like pity, and it felt like I was making a moral judgment about her proactivity or lack thereof,” he explained. 

Space for interpretation and perspective allows the ability to be creatively flexible, a characteristic Muhly admires and shares with creator Soo Hugh. Namely, her unflinching ability to kill darlings at a moment’s notice if a scene requires significant edits or even a complete rewrite. Times like these send Muhly and music editor Suzana Perić, whom he considers the other most important player in his process, into their “hour of power,” performing musical triage, which he calls a Franken-cue, or delivering a full rewrite. He prefers the latter, finding it easier than conforming snippets of what previously worked into a new form. 

“Soo was absolutely dedicated to the story and characters, and when you’re working with someone who’s that considerate, smart and aware, it becomes fun to make a zillion different versions,” he said.

Among this catalog of cues are suites of music, which Muhly refers to as X-cues, longer form pieces not written to picture but could float above picture and would work in a variety of contexts. Writing these allowed him to make various macro musical decisions, including cues never fully resolving. 

“Harmonically, they always move in that kind of crab-wise way where you never know where your home base is,” he explained. The last track on the season two soundtrack, entitled “The Family,” is a prime example of this “as it doesn’t resolve from bar to bar but suggests the next bar, then the next bar. So there’s this sense of unresolved continuity, which I felt was musically poetic,” he said.

Space and breathing room for multiple possibilities and directions keeps things musically exciting and unpredictable. Allowing the score quite literally to breathe has also been essential when working on a show with subtitles in multiple languages, creating a spacious cadence between action, dialogue and text, which requires time and focus to read. 

Intentional discretion versus gratuitous maximalism was both a choice and necessity regarding the amount of music in each scene and the instruments used in a given cue. Working with a chamber orchestra’s musical and budgetary limits, the sound naturally and quite fittingly reflected the intimacy of moments between the family, which encompasses most of the score. “Philosophically, I often think the music should exist in the same space as the rooms where most things happen,” Muhly said. 

This poetic symmetry between the two mediums is ever-present throughout Pachinko and his other scores, and a testament to both Muhly’s skill and breadth as a composer. Such attributes, however, as proven time and time again, are not garnered solely in the confines of the musical playground, but in a greater conversation with the world around him. This symbiosis is what makes Nico Muhly such a remarkable artist and a fascinating human to know. 

Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+

ALBUM CREDITS

PRODUCTION

​​Music composed, orchestrated & conducted by Nico Muhly 

Recorded, mixed and mastered by Fritz Myers at Reservoir Studios & Platitude Music, NYC 

Music editor: Suzana Perić

Album concept & sequence by Suzana Perić

Assistant engineers: Thom Beemer & Alex Ring Gray

Contractor: Nadia Sirota

Score preparation by Franky Rousseau

Music department assistants: John Brockett, Tom Zylbersztein

Score production services by Platitude Music

THANKS 

Soo Hugh, for trusting the music to do some heavy lifting, and for such a precise vision

Suzana Perić, for brilliant diplomacy and artistry

Zoë Knight & Robert Messinger for steady hands

Trevor Wood for intense detail work

Michael Hill for perseverance 

The whole team at Reservoir Studios

Alasdair Austin & Matt Huxley, first listeners

& Fritz, for elegantly keeping the train on the tracks 24/7/365.

MUSICIANS

Eliza Bagg, soprano
Andy Clausen, trombone
Alexandra von der Embse, oboe & cor anglais
Nico Muhly, piano, celeste, keyboards
Alex Sopp, flute

Clarinet:

Mark Dover
James Shields

Violin:

Caleb Burhans
Alexi Kenney
Clara Kim
Giancarlo Latta
Laura Lutzke
Michelle Ross
Rachel Shapiro

Viola:

Mario Gotoh
Nadia Sirota

Cello:

Gabriel Cabezas
Caitlin Sullivan

Photo: Courtesy of Apple TV+