Anna Clyne: ‘I have never been afraid of a good melody’
With her ever-melodious and energetic music, British-American Anna Clyne is one of the most performed composers of our time. In the Netherlands, her music has been played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Phion, and last September saw the release of the CD Abstractions by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop.
Anna Clyne (c) Victoria Stevens
American media call her ‘fearless’ and praise her ‘unusual gifts and methods’. This is not surprising, as the music of Anna Clyne (London, 1980) navigates between extremes of lush, tranquil lyricism, breathtakingly pure vocal lines à la Purcell and harsh orchestral passages full of ‘barbaric’ rhythms à la Stravinsky. All this is spiced with repetitive motifs from minimalism, the drive of rock music and fragments of folk music from different corners of the world.
Art and poetry
When composing, she likes to draw inspiration from works of art and poetry, and she regularly collaborates with choreographers, filmmakers and visual artists. In 2021, she wrote the poignant Between the Rooms for soprano and string quintet for LA Opera about life in isolation, inspired by her experiences during the coronavirus lockdown and the life of the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). This short film opera with choreographer Kim Bandstrup had its world premiere in 2022. Two years later, Nicolas Blanc used her equally exciting cello concerto DANCE as the starting point for his choreography Gateway to the Sun at the San Francisco Ballet. The new CD again testifies to Clyne’s love of the arts.
The five movements of Abstractions, after which the album is named, are inspired by works by five abstract artists. A delicate, organ-like orchestral texture accompanies the soft blue tones of Sara VanDerBeek’s digital print Marble Moon; we hear bright string swirls and thunderous brass in Julie Mehretu’s aquatint Auguries; lovely, Debussy-esque flutes and oboes echo the grey tones of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photolithograph Caribbean Sea, Jamaica. The fierce turmoil of the first movement returns with Elsworth Kelly’s lithograph River II, and motifs curling up from the depths depict the intertwining lines of Brice Marden’s etching 3.
Her interest in music, literature and art did not come out of nowhere, says Clyne: ‘I was an only child and although I did not grow up in a musical family, my parents did play records by bands such as Fleetwood Mac and the Doors. My father strummed songs like Yellow Submarine by the Beatles or This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie on his guitar, singing along perfectly out of tune. My mother was a midwife and amateur artist who cherished a deep love of painting and sculpting. When I was little, she made up tunes to nursery rhymes and poems; towards the end of her life, she started writing short stories and poetry. – When I was twelve, my parents took me to my first Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall.’
Happy coincidence
She started piano lessons at the age of seven, thanks to a happy coincidence: ‘Friends gave us an upright piano with randomly missing keys in the upper register. My mother was a midwife for a woman whose husband, David, was a piano teacher. I soon started piano lessons with him, and I simultaneously began to compose my own music, and he allowed me space to explore my own musical imagination. We looked at chords and melodic ideas in my little notebook and he shared some harmonic and melodic tools. Thus began the journey of notating my first compositions, which I am always grateful for.’
https://youtu.be/tyQqTjlW4P4
‘At first it was just simple piano pieces (my very first being about the sea) and then I began to write duets to play with my other musician friends. I formed a band with one of my closest friends, Carla, who was a flautist. – We named our band the “Ice Blues”, after our favourite flavour of Jelly Belly – a recent import to the UK in the early nineties. It was as this band that I gave the first performance of my music at the Oxford Youth Prom when I was eleven years old. I played on an electric piano, which started to distort around the hall as soon as I struck the first note. Drily: ‘That was my first encounter with the phenomenon of electroacoustic music.’
Chalk dusters and Mars bars
She later went on to use electroacoustic processes in her compositions, but stopped doing so in her early twenties. The cello also came into her life by chance: ‘When I was nine, I received a letter from school offering group lessons for this instrument. When my mother asked if I wanted to take part, I jumped at the chance. I started shortly afterwards, with an extraordinarily eccentric teacher – chalk dusters were thrown for mistakes, and chocolate Mars bars for successes.’
‘Unlike composing, which I can do for hours on end, I have never been able to muster the discipline to study thoroughly. Nevertheless, I played the cello in school orchestras and the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra when I moved to New York in 2002. I also performed in rock bands there, using a contact microphone and experimenting with a portable loop station. But the piano remains the most important instrument for me.’
‘I always start composing at my piano – still the upright instrument from my childhood, which has been faithfully accompanying me for twenty years now. Another dry aside: ‘For one of the flats I moved into in Brooklyn, the two front legs had to be sawn off because otherwise it couldn’t be carried up the stairs. They left a trail of sawdust behind and were neatly screwed back on upstairs.’
Edinburgh
Born in London, she grew up in Abingdon, a town south of Oxford. Yet she studied music and composition at the University of Edinburgh. Why so far away? Clyne: ‘After secondary school, I was actually going to study English in Birmingham, but I didn’t get the required A-level. I did get it for music, and coincidentally, Edinburgh had a place available. I took the train there and immediately fell in love with the city – such a vibrant arts scene! To my immense joy, they accepted me unconditionally.’
‘What I found most appealing was that the programme was so broad. Unlike at a conservatoire, we did everything: playing (piano and cello), composing, technology, teaching, music in the community, etc. It wasn’t until my third and fourth years that I began to focus on composition.’ Her teacher in Edinburgh was Marina Adamina from Georgia, but she also studied composition in Canada for a year through an exchange programme. She cherishes fond memories of her lessons with Adamina: ‘Marina encouraged me to crack open my music in terms of harmony and rhythm. During a stormy, bitterly cold winter, we played through my pieces on the piano at her home, where it was always warm.’
In terms of musical influences, Clyne identifies most with her fellow student composers, she says: ‘We organised concerts together in local art galleries, clubs and concert halls, and we also played each other’s music. And then there were groundbreaking composers who had a huge influence on me. I will never forget hearing Arvo Pärt’s Fratres for the first time on the radio in Edinburgh. As a cellist, and because I have played some of Bach’s cello suites, Bach has also been an important source of inspiration for me and my music. I am inspired, too, by Steve Reich and the New York post-minimalist scene with composers such as Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon and David Lang, founders of Bang on a Can.’
New York
In 2002, she moved to New York for postgraduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music (MSN), where Julia Wolfe had just taken up a teaching position. ‘I was familiar with her work through recordings, performances, and a Bang on a Can Marathon concert, and I will never forget how the string quartet ETHEL gave an exciting performance of her amplified piece Dig Deep in a club in Manhattan.’
https://youtu.be/_qEjNu5Skhw
‘I immediately fell in love with the raw, driving energy and dynamic power of her music and was thrilled that our paths crossed at MSM. I enjoyed our lessons in her loft apartment in downtown Manhattan.’ We shared what we were working on at the time, or looked at Beethoven quartets. One of the most important things she taught me is to trust my intuition, which I also encourage in my own students. I always love to hear her music, especially her large-scale works. Julia really knows how to make an orchestra groove, and when I hear a performance of her music, I often think: yeah, I need more rock & roll in my music!’
After graduating in 2005, she applied for the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival: ‘It’s a three-week festival for musicians and composers from all over the world, and I was accepted. That year, Steve Reich was the guest composer, and he invited us to share our pieces with him. I was far too shy to do so at the time, but when I met him again a few months later at a Bang on a Can concert, I plucked up the courage and gave him the score of <<rewind<< for orchestra and optional tape recording.’
‘To my surprise, not long after, I received an email with the subject line: you are a good composer. He gave me valuable feedback and offered to put me in touch with John Adams and Carnegie Hall, among others. We have always stayed in touch and recently collaborated on a project that will premiere in 2026 on his 90th birthday. One of the many things I admire about Steve’s music is that melody is at its heart. Whether it’s loops in his early tape pieces, hocket in his early piano works with phase shifts, or beautiful long melodic phrases in Proverb.’
Melody and pulse
Melody is a core element in her work. For a long time, melody was pretty much taboo in the world of modern music – as was a recognisable pulse, which she certainly doesn’t shy away from, either. What was it like during her studies? Clyne: ‘As a young composer, I enjoyed experimenting with different styles, but melody has always been central to me – even when it is hidden in the texture, as in <<rewind<<, or more openly present, as in my cello concerto DANCE. I have never been afraid of a good melody.’
https://youtu.be/La22CjPFbIY
‘I also feel very connected to the folk music of my ancestors, which is characterised by strong melodies. My maternal grandmother came from a farming family in Ireland, her husband was born and raised in London. My father’s family is Jewish and originally comes from Lviv, in what used to be Poland but is now Ukraine. The folk music of my Irish, English and Jewish roots is often present in my work, albeit subtly.’
Does she experience a relationship between melody and emotions? ‘Certainly, music, and therefore melody, is directly related to our emotions. As Tolstoy said: “Music is the shorthand of emotions: they are difficult to put into words, but are conveyed directly to people through music; therein lies its power and significance.” However, I do not specifically aim to evoke or express emotions. My goal is to share part of my imagination and take the audience on a musical journey – a momentary reprise from everyday life.’
Lamento
How does this apply to Within Her Arms, the opening piece on the CD, which she composed in 2008 after the death of her mother? ‘Although it is not my habit to express my feelings in my music, this is indeed a programmatic work. Immediately after arriving in England, I followed my instinct to process my grief through composition. I sat down at the piano with a recent photo of my mother and wrote the piece in 24 hours. Throughout the creative process, I felt very close to her.’
Within Her Arms is a thirteen-minute lamento for fifteen solo strings, which slowly circle through and around each other, expressing a sense of deeply felt sorrow, sometimes reminiscent of Barber’s Adagio. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, this also happens to be one of her own favourites: ‘Although the initial music flowed spontaneously from me, I spent a lot of time on the details.’
‘I am proud of it because it perfectly reflects my background as a composer of electroacoustic music – many of the techniques I used in the studio (reverb, lengthening and shortening, pitch shifting, etc.) have been incorporated into my orchestration toolkit. This piece is so true to who I am.’
https://youtu.be/RuqmZKq7YZM
#AnnaClyne #ArvoPärt #BaltimoreSymphonyOrchestra #BangOnACan #JuliaWolfe #MarinAlsop #MarinaAdamina #SteveReich
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