Interview, Anna Clyne on SHORTHAND and Augmented Orchestra

I first fell under the spell of Anna Clyne's richly scored, vividly pictorial music when her album Mythologies was released back in 2020, so it's with considerable excitement that I'm looking forward to the world premiere of her new work The Gorgeous Nothings (inspired by the 'envelope poetry' of Emily Dickinson and utilising Augmented Orchestra technology) at the BBC Proms this evening... 

Earlier this month Anna spoke to me from her studio in New York about how Augmented Orchestra technology works and the possibilities which it opens up, the inspiration which she draws from poetry and the visual arts, some of the friendships behind her forthcoming album SHORTHAND (out on Sony later this month) - and the distinctly low-tech piece of equipment that's a vital part of her compositional toolbox...

The premiere of your new work The Gorgeous Nothings will be the first opportunity for UK audiences to experience Augmented Orchestra technology - how did it come into being and what exactly does it involve?

In a nutshell, the Augmented Orchestra expands the orchestral sound-world in a very organic way, and it’s a collaboration with sound-designer Jody Elff (who’s also my husband). It involves live processing of instruments from within the orchestra in real time, so everything you hear is derived from the instruments themselves – there’s no looping, amplification or pre-recorded elements. I used to write a lot of electro-acoustic music which combines pre-recorded elements with live instruments, but this is something else entirely.

Some examples from The Gorgeous Nothings include a moment where the vibraphone plays a chord and we shift it down an octave so it sounds like Tibetan bells; another where we pitch the basses down an octave to make them sound like an organ, and another where we add reverberations to the voices of the Swingle Singers so it sounds like they’re in a different acoustic space (perhaps a cathedral). In the percussion section we have a bicycle-wheel with a playing-card in it which makes a fluttering sound when it’s turned, and that sound is going to move around the hall like the fluttering of birds…

The piece sets fragments from the ‘envelope writings’ of Emily Dickinson, whose work also inspired your pieces Overflow and The Lost Thought - have you always felt a strong connection with her poetry?

I was introduced to her by the Quay Brothers, who are wonderful animators and human beings. Back in the summer of 2010 they told me I just had to immerse myself in her work because there are lots of similarities with my music, and as soon as I started to dig into her poetry I immediately fell in love with it. There’s a very strong visual aspect to her poetry which really speaks to me: I love how expressive she is on the paper, with capital letters where you wouldn’t expect them and dashes that imply pauses etc.

And there’s also her use of rhythm: her verse often has a hymn-like quality to it which is very musical, but she also plays with that in ways that I find very interesting. That combination of the imagery, the punctuation and the rhythm of the text really lends itself to musical settings.

Is poetry in general a fruitful source of inspiration for you?

I love reading poetry especially; sometimes I’ll come across a poem that speaks to me and I'll file it away in my mind as good material. One example is a poem by the thirteenth-century poet and mystic Rumi called ‘Dance’, which I used to structure my cello concerto of the same name: ‘Dance when you’re broken open/Dance when you’ve torn the bandage off/Dance in the middle of the fighting/Dance in your blood/Dance when you’re perfectly free’. Each movement takes one of those lines and expands upon it.

There’s also a wonderful poem called ‘La Musica’ by the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, which likens music to ‘a naked woman running mad through the pure night’ (as translated by Robert Bly). I used that to inspire my piece This Midnight Hour, which appears on my album Mythologies – I evoked the image by creating cascades in the strings which then fan around the entire orchestra and generate a lot of energy.

I gather that the visual arts also play a vital role in your music - not simply in the sense of sparking ideas, but in terms of being actively incorporated into your working process…

I’ve loved all sorts of creative outlets since I was a child – making music, playing music, painting, pottery…When I was at Edinburgh University I would study graphic scores by George Crumb and other composers who use non-traditional notations: they almost look like works of art in themselves, and in time I was inspired to create my own.

The first time I really incorporated painting into the compositional process was with a piece called Night Ferry, which I wrote back in 2012 when I was Composer in Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Riccardo Muti, who was Music Director at the time, told me that the piece would be programmed with Schubert’s Great Symphony in C and suggested I look to that for inspiration.

But I like to have a blank canvas in my imagination when I’m composing, which means that I avoid listening to music that’s in a similar sound-world…instead, I read a lot about Schubert and discovered that he suffered from cyclothymia (a form of manic depression). That made sense to me, given that his music covers such a wide emotional territory.

The first idea I had for Night Ferry wasn’t a musical one - it was an image of a dark, turbulent wave. In order to translate that into music, I used painting, collage and poetry to form the structure of the piece: in my studio I put seven panels together, each about 25 inches wide, with each panel representing three minutes of music. By the end of the process I had a 22-minute composition and a 15-foot long mural!

In 2016 I wrote a piece called Abstractions which responds to five different pieces of contemporary art, and in that case I actually treated some of the artworks as graphic scores, using them as a point of departure. And I’m currently working on a seven-movement piece called PALETTE: each movement represents a different colour, and the first letters of each colour collectively spell out the title (plum, amber, lava, ebony, teal, tangerine and emerald). It’s a Concerto for Augmented Orchestra, and for each movement I’m creating a 30 x 30 canvas, so as I’m writing the music I’m also creating these paintings in a symbiotic process - exploring gesture, texture, light and dark, colour and form as it relates to both music and art.

Do you feel instinctive connections between colours and specific keys or sound-worlds?

I don’t have synaesthesia, but I definitely associate certain colours with certain orchestral textures and tonalities: flat keys like E flat have a slightly darker quality than a brighter F sharp major, especially when you’re writing for strings. In 2020 I wrote a piece called Colour Field which is inspired by one of Mark Rothko’s massive canvasses; the piece is in three movements – Yellow, Red, Orange - and in each one I explore different sonorities that I personally associate with those colours. For yellow I have these very hazy delicate harmonics; red is much more percussive and vibrant, and orange takes both of those elements and mixes them together.

Was composition something which attracted you from childhood?

I was born in London and grew up in Abingdon, near Oxford. I started writing music when I was seven, and the first time I performed one of my pieces in public was at the Oxford Youth Proms when I was eleven. My best friend at the time, Carla, was a flautist, so I wrote us two pieces for flute and piano: we called ourselves 'The Ice Blues', after our favourite Jelly Belly flavour (Jelly Belly beans had just come to the UK!) The performance was quite memorable, in the sense that it was a bit of a disaster...they put me on an electric piano, which started distorting around the hall but I carried on regardless!

I didn’t grow up in a household with a lot of classical music: my immediate environment was more about folk, jazz and pop. But I always loved sitting at the piano and getting lost in my own imagination: some friends of my parents gave us a piano with randomly missing keys at the top, and I just started noodling around…

My mum was a midwife and one of her patients’ husbands was a piano teacher; he took me on as a piano student and showed me some music theory along the way, but I mostly just explored things by myself. And I wasn’t really aware of many contemporary composers: my school orchestra mainly played pieces by dead white men, so playing that music and writing my own felt like two separate things. I never thought ‘I’m going to be a composer’, even when I got to university: I did a very general music degree at Edinburgh, and it wasn’t until I did my Masters that I really focused on composition.

When you’re not working out ideas at an easel or canvas, how do you typically compose - at the keyboard, or on the move?

I do a lot of my work at the piano, because I need that tangible connection to the sound: especially when I’m writing orchestral music, I like to feel and hear overtones and voicing, and the piano’s like an entire orchestra at your fingertips. Once I have the outlines of a piece in place, I also use Finale software – I have a big monitor set up near my piano, and I go back and forth between the two.

Another vital piece of my orchestration toolkit is a good old descant recorder: because I’m a pianist and string-player I’m aware that I have to be extra-mindful when I’m writing for wind and brass, so I’ll often play through passages on the recorder to make sure they have enough time to breathe!

For your upcoming album, SHORTHAND, you worked with New York-based orchestral collective The Knights on a programme of music for strings: what’s your history with them?

The first piece of mine they played was Within Her Arms, about six years ago; I was deeply moved by their performance and felt an immediate connection with the musicians. A lot of them were at Juilliard together and have been friends for many years, so there’s this real warmth within the orchestra: they bring such playfulness and care to the music.

It’s really exciting that this range and calibre of musicians are coming together for SHORTHAND, and it’s an honour to hear my music coming to life through them, led by Eric Jacobsen. My pieces for Avi Avital, Yo-Yo Ma, Pekka Kuusisto and Colin Jacobsen all grew out of very meaningful relationships that have been developed over many years: there’s so much love on this album!

We’re also thrilled that SHORTHAND is being released in Atmos immersive sound. This format, recorded and mixed by Jody Elff, lends itself especially to Within Her Arms, which is written for fifteen individual string instruments. The score includes an outline for where each musician should be positioned on the stage, and I orchestrated the music accordingly, so that the musical motifs move around the listener. So to listen to this album in surround is really an all-encompassing sonic experience. It allows all of the pieces on the album to bloom in a new way, and it’s been a great way to think about the spatialization of music, which is something that I experimented with for much of my earlier electroacoustic compositions. 

The title-work was written for Yo-Yo Ma: how did the two of you cross paths?

I first met Yo-Yo back in 2010 when I started my five-year residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and he was their Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant. We collaborated on various projects there, then during the pandemic we worked on a piece called In The Gale; my husband Jody developed remote recording technology so we were able to record Yo-Yo from our home in New York and multi-track the cello. When things opened up a bit, we went to Acadia National Park in Maine and filmed Yo-Yo in the forest playing the solo part with pre-recorded cello and birdsong.

Shorthand was originally written for, and premiered by, The Knights and cellist Karen Ouzanian during the pandemic: there was no audience, but it was such an enriching experience to work with those musicians during that time. The Knights and Karen recorded the original version for cello and string quintet as part of their Kreutzer Project, but after the lockdown I was keen to expand it for a full string section: what you hear on the new album is essentially the same piece, just with a richer, rounder sound-world.

Does writing for strings hold a special attraction for you?

All of the works on SHORTHAND are for stringed instruments, including the mandolin. I feel very comfortable writing for strings – the cello is my main instrument, and I have very rudimentary skills on the fiddle. I love the range of sound-worlds which strings can produce: you can create such rich homogenous sonorities, but I also enjoy playing with the juxtaposition of other sonorities such as pizzicato and sul ponticello effects. But the thing I’m most excited about right now is exploring string-writing through the Augmented Orchestra technology: expanding that sound-world through augmentation would be a fascinating thing to do in the future…