Anna Clyne

Anna Clyne’s prevention was one of the most interesting presentations so far in the composers' forum, she not only played very wonderful compositions with the detailed explanation but also showed how she utilizes technologies within her compositions. The most inspired thing I found was that she composed her pieces start from the pictures, and how she reflected some details of those pictures in a musical language and all the compositional devices she used work so well and make all the movements which have different image working perfectly as a whole piece of music.

For the pieces she composed for the pictures, she observed all the details which have the potential to be related to music, such as the objects, scenery, locations, colors, and curves, and then she would try to use melody and arrangement to depict the scene and mood. One very impressive moment that she played was that she composed the melodic contour depends on the arch in the pictures, she also layered the arrangement based on the overall arch shapes which are amazing.  She also mentioned that the theme of the music was not all about the details in those pictures, there was something about the first impression and imagination from those pictures.

Besides the instrumental pieces, Anna also played a song she composed and was sung by a male singer named Willie, it was a very interesting but unusual piece that the vocal was untempered. However, working with the serious accompaniment together, the result is amazing and fascinating, it sounds very unique and attractive, I cannot believe how great the raw vocal fits the music and how great the mood was built. This song is a great example that how creative a song could be, and how different a song could be.

Anna’s music is very creative, and the idea that she captures the details from pictures and compose from there is so inspired. I’m a songwriter, not a composer, the way I start to write a new song is either from the title or the hook melody, but I never noticed that how creative it can be if the music were written for certain images. In lyrics writing, besides central metaphor, it might be hard to write an image in too many lines, it is usually two to four lines, but it still has the possibility to shape the melody based on the color, setting or even arch within the image. I think it would work very well to make the music and words working together to build the mood, and it also would help the audience to enjoy understanding and enjoy the words easier. For the central metaphor type of lyrics, it could be much easier to apply the same way that how Anna compose the music because there is only one image throughout the whole song, it could start from the melody based on the picture and then add words. It would be a very interesting concept to experiment.