The 31-year-old American composer Nico Muhly doesn’t do “this stupid conceptual stuff where it’s, like, ‘I was really inspired by, like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis,’” he told the New Yorker in 2008. His sources are slightly less heady; his 2011 opera Two Boys, for example, is about a teenager who arranges his own murder via online chatrooms. Muhly has an omnivorous appetite for music that fuels a prodigious body of work, covering everything from ballet accompaniment to vibraphone solos. The influences of minimalists like John Adams and Philip Glass, for whom he worked as a MIDI programmer, are noticeable, but so is Renaissance music, and his collaborators have included Björk and Grizzly Bear. So his newest work, a rhythmic adventure for violin and piano commissioned by the Library of Congress, could sound like just about anything.

“Compare Notes” premieres at 8 p.m. at the Coolidge Auditorium, 10 First St. S.E. Free with ticket. (202) 397-7328.