4/8/19 Anna Clyne

by Clarissa Baquiran

This semester of Composer’s Forum has been very inspiring to me because each guest has given a glimpse of their approach to creating music, and Anna Clyne’s perspective is especially fascinating. For the “Night Ferry,” Clyne’s first long orchestra piece, she created a 7-sectioned mural to get a better idea of how to structure the piece, with each section representing 3 minutes. This collage of paint, charcoal, pencil, and illustrations (by Gustave Dore for Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) depicts a myriad of textures and colors, tempestuous waters, and calmer seas. She translated these images to the orchestra, into the rising and falling of woodwinds and strings, rumbling low instruments, and much more. The beginning reminded me of the introduction of Amy Beach’s “Gaelic Symphony,” where the murmuring chromatic figures in the orchestra gave the sense of turbulent waters. I think that this is a great method,- making your own artwork/ graphic score to aid in composition. The visual, and even tactile (considering the textures of the art) approach can yield a lot of inspiration, especially for a large-scale work such as the one that she did.

Anna Clyne also relied on art for her other works, this time not her own. For Abstractions, she selected pieces that were on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art. With visual cues, such as color and texture, she made orchestral choices to reflect what she saw. For “Marble Moon,” the muted blues translated to quietness and stillness through soft strings and high frequency crotales, and a clarinet theme. The jaggedness lines and black-and-white palette seen in  “Auguries” yielded a high energy piece, with fast cascading strings and a long, dissonant theme. The strings were written with an echo effect, which refers another device in composing that Clyne likes to use: achieving electronic effects through an analog means. For “Seascape,” she utilized interesting modes, and written a beautiful part for the harp to evoke Sugimoto’s photo of the Caribbean Sea and sky. In this piece, Clyne achieved the electronic effect of having a long reverb by prolonging certain pitches before changing harmonies. Another one of Anna Clyne’s approach to music is tangible, where she tests her works to see if she can move along to it and be expressive.

I read an online article that Anna Clyne did with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (link), and found a few notable things that I thought I would share with the class. As we learned from her talk, she is “inspired by collaborators…[for it] gives different perspectives on one’s own art form.” We saw this through her piece, “Lavender Rain,” where she worked closely with an animator. Clyne also said, “creating parameters is important because..the world is your oyster,” It’s true, there are a million decisions we can make when we write music, but when we challenge and restrict ourselves, whether it is in instrumentation, mood, etc. we can compose something solid and cohesive. The last quote I will share is this: “The way I approach orchestrations is really sort of like painting sounds, so that the texture becomes an intimate part of the sound of the music itself. I hope everyone tries Anna Clyne’s way of composing music as an exercise at least once and see what comes out of it.