Update: Nico Muhly and "The Reader"

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The soundtrack for "The Reader", music by Nico Muhly, has been released and available on Amazon. Zach Freeman wrote a review of the music here and says much the same thing about music as I did in my previous post.

And Muhly delivers the goods. With a score consisting of roughly 50 minutes of stripped-down, “less is more” music, Muhly has created the kind of score that expresses passion and emotion with a relatively gentle and gentle delivery. The majority of the album seems to consist of a few strings and a piano. The back-to-back tracks “Go Back To Your Friends” (one of the longest of the album) and “Not What I Expected” (one of the shortest of the album) provide some of the most expressive bits of the album, pushing the strings into faster and more emotional rhythms, though most of the album is more subdued and contemplative. Muhly doesn’t seem to be one for excess, choosing instead to use a light collection of music to express heavy dramatic scenes. It’s an impressive juxtaposition and works remarkably here.

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