SLN is pleased to welcome awesome violinist Lisa Liu as a guest blogger. Last month, Mobtown Modern was fortunate to have Lisa play on our final concert of the season. But she almost didn’t make it—something she was quick to attribute to ‘the curse of Nico Muhly.’ I’ll let her explain. . .

Sitting on the sticky floor at Penn Station, with a glazed look on my face, waiting for the gate number to appear on the board… I’m supposed to be placated by an announcement every fifteen minutes of, “please wait for further announcements.” followed by, “please be patient.” It makes me violent. My 2:00 p.m. train never arrived to get me into Baltimore by 4:30 p.m. to rehearse with the musicians at Mobtown Modern . . . lovely people, I’m sure, but I never got to speak with all of them. I was lucky enough to elbow my way to the front of the Amtrak line to get the last spot on a 5:00 p.m. express train that ended up being 40 minutes late. The mission was to get to the hall by 7:45 p.m. for an 8:00 p.m. show. The large man next to me on the crowded train kept insisting that we discuss the life works of Sylvester Stallone for the entire ride. Somehow, I decided, this whole thing was Nico Muhly’s fault.

Our friendship grew out of Juilliard, and revolved around an absurd consumption of dumplings and coffee. He wrote Honest Music for me in 2005, and we recorded it in my kitchen, catching the silences between the grumbling of the refrigerator and the other unidentifiable murmurings of kitchen appliances. A year later, Nico pulled together a budget, and collaborated with Valgeir Sigurdsson to record Honest Music and a handful of his works for Speaks Volumes, his debut album.

Minneapolis

In the fall of 2007, a group of old friends from Juilliard, including Nico, myself, Nadia Sirota and Sam Solomon, along with Sigga Sunna from Iceland, traveled to Minneapolis to perform a collection of works by Nico and Valgeir Sigurdsson. Valgeir was to fly in from Iceland and meet us there to rehearse the night before the concert. Armed with all his audio equipment in suspicious looking bags, he was treated like a terrorist at the infamous Minneapolis Airport and was immediately deported back to Iceland. Valgeir and all his gear were replaced by a few pre-recorded tracks of his music, and we were forced to make last minute revisions and arrangements that could be done without him. There was a lot of tension throughout the rehearsals leading up to the concert, and much of it was comically dumped onto me, with random contests of who could be more racially offensive. In the end, it was definitely between Sam’s and Nadia’s Beijing opera mimicking and Nico’s bombarding of me with erhu sounds off his keyboard every time I’d pick up my violin.

We were running through the program up to an hour and a half before the doors were to open, when I placed my violin on a stool and fumbled around to take off my jacket, too frenzied to remember that my clip-on mic was still attached to the violin. The mic was also accidentally hooked onto a button of my jacket, and as I swung around to throw my jacket down, my violin came crashing to the floor, face down, along with it. Nadia made the most horrific sounding, “Liiiiiisssssaaaa!” roar that still haunts me whenever she says my name. The entire fingerboard popped out of the violin and slid across the floor. As I ran in circles screaming for Krazy glue, Nico calmly dialed the first number that appeared under ‘violin repair’ in the directory and sent me out in a panic to find another instrument. The beautiful people from Claire Givens Violin Shop had two violins waiting for me to choose from, and I made it back to the hall right in time for the show. My violin was thankfully pieced together for the following concert only a week later.

New York

This Honest Music show date was by far the most traumatic-all unrelated to Nico, but I’ll for sure find a way to make it his responsibility. Valgeir was able to fly into New York, and my violin had been returned to me in perfect condition, all just in time for the concert. A huge project I had been undertaking was to help develop a singer whom I truly believed in. I introduced her to all sorts of musicians, producers and songwriters so that, eventually, her own relationships would evolve that would further her career. Looking back, I probably should’ve mentioned that sleeping with everyone along the way would probably be a bad idea. Her husband, fondly nicknamed, “The Android” by our colleagues, finally realized that he didn’t like sharing her with everyone, and threatened to walk away if she didn’t drop out of the band, in which one of her multiple sordid relationships was spiraling out of control. After investing a couple years of hard work into creating an act for her, she broke up the band, and our friendship, the night before the Wordless Music Concert. I was in no shape to perform, but I poured my heart out into Honest Music. Afterwards, I tried to remain somber for A Long Line, also a solo violin worked backed by tape, while Nico, with his demented sense of humor, crashed gongs behind me and cleverly inserted koto, erhu and other ’sounds of Asia’ into my performance. Jackass.

Baltimore

It was 7:45 p.m. and the audience was already seated as I ran in, disoriented and frantic. I hid out in a small room in the side of the performance space where I could change and do a little yoga to calm myself down. Before walking out to perform Honest Music, with no sound check, and then Terry Riley’s In C, without having met any of the musicians or had any rehearsal, I actually felt comforted knowing that this experience couldn’t possibly nearly as stressful as the last two. Despite the hellish commute, nobody was deported, nobody broke-up, and my violin was intact. Although I could never ultimately say, ‘no’ to Nico, there’s going to have to be a lot of begging involved to convince me to perform, Honest Music again.