Anna Clyne and Marin Alsop on Abstractions

Composer Anna Clyne and conductor Marin Alsop have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration for fifteen years, a period of time that has seen Alsop commission several works from Clyne, alongside the latter’s appointment as Composer-in-Residence with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for the 2015-16 season.

The latest album of her music on the Naxos label combines four works (including two world premiere recordings), three of which were commissions from Alsop. I spoke to both of them about how their professional relationship began, their experience of the Last Night of the BBC Proms in 2013 (when Alsop conducted a new commission by Clyne), and the inspirations behind the four pieces on the album.

How did your professional collaboration begin? 

MA: I first invited Anna to the Cabrillo Festival back in 2010 when I was Music Director there. I programmed a piece Anna wrote called «rewind«, so it's a long association and it just grew from there. Probably a pivotal moment was in 2013 when I was invited to do the Last Night of the Proms for the first time, and they asked who I'd like them to commission for an opening work. I suggested Anna and she did this fantastic five-minute tour-de-force piece called Masquerade. I think that cemented us, and we've done many things since then.

Anna, the first time I really came across your music was the album Mythologies, which, as it happens, features both «rewind« and Masquerade. Can you talk about that process of the Proms commission? What sort of brief do you receive from them? 

AC: Having grown up in the UK I remember going to my first Prom when I was twelve years old, getting my Promenade ticket with my parents! So it was a real honour to be invited to write this piece, also knowing for Marin it was the first time having a woman on the podium for the Last Night. When you are commissioned, you are given the instrumentation, duration, and deadline, but this was the first time that I ever had adjectives in the contract! I forget what they were exactly, but they wanted to make sure I hit the right tone for the occasion. So I felt a little bit of pressure, but it was really exciting.

Marin, do you have any particular recollections from when you first received the score of Masquerade? 

MA: Yes, I thought 'this is bloody hard!'. I do remember it being a lot of notes in a very short amount of time, but once I got over my initial panic I realised that a lot of it was gestural rather than specific things that we needed. And the piece comes together surprisingly quickly. I recently did it with the Chicago Symphony: they were all worried about it, but then they said, oh, that was okay, we’re alright. 

Are there particular challenges you've found with Anna's music (other than just that it’s bloody hard!)?

MA: I think it’s important from my perspective to find the narrative and to really talk to Anna about things, because she's bringing together different worlds, whether it's different temporal worlds, like the worlds of today and of yesteryear, or whether it’s the world of music with art, dance, poetry, or literature. And of course, it's great that she's right here and I can always ask her!

Anna, a lot of your pieces are inspired by extra-musical factors like poetry, paintings, photography. Is that helpful to you in your process to have that initial inspiration?

AC: It is. Composing is such a solitary endeavour, so I like to find collaborators, be they poets or artists. Even though I might not be in touch with them directly, I'm able to access their spirit, as it were, through their art or poems. I love collaborating in general, so I love writing ballet music, for example, where you have a choreographer to have some back and forth with as part of the creative process. But I do find it helpful to have something to anchor on, and I think that's a signature of our recent album, as each of the pieces has something to underpin the music.

You've talked before about your development of the Augmented Orchestra and your electro-acoustic background. None of these pieces on the album uses actual synths or any electronic element: is that something you have toyed with or are you more interested in trying to create those effects acoustically? 

AC: I think a signature of the pieces on this album is that they do owe a lot to my background in electro-acoustic music. When I was a student at Edinburgh University, I was primarily doing electro-acoustic pieces: using tape, finding sounds in the environment like birdsong or cars screeching, taking them back to the studio, cutting them up, stretching them, compressing them, inverting them, pitch-shifting them. All of those processes translate very organically to writing for the orchestra. So for example in a piece like Within Her Arms, it's a very simple melody, but I take certain pitches from within that line and sustain them in other instruments, to get a sort of orchestrated reverb. So even though they're purely acoustic pieces and don't have any electronic elements, they’re very much inspired by those processes.

In a couple of pieces you use the sounds of the performers themselves, from the breathing in Within Her Arms to the more extensive vocalising and stamping of feet in Restless Oceans. Is that something you find musicians tend to engage with willingly?  

MA: Really it depends on the group, but I would say generally I've met with zero resistance and in fact only with enthusiasm! We premiered Restless Oceans at the World Economic Forum with an all-woman orchestra, so their enthusiasm was off the chart. For some reason the singing is always tricky, and it’s hard for musicians not to be perfectionist about what they're doing, so that's the challenge always. 

AC: Interestingly, regarding my collaboration with Marin, it was her idea to have them using their bodies and their voices as part of the piece, so a belated thank you for that!

MA: Ok, I don’t remember that!

And then something you obviously can't get from a recording is that they all stand up on the final note. That must have been a shock for the audience?

MA: Oh yes, I think I did add that for dramatic effect!

Could I ask you a bit more about the circumstances of that World Economic Forum: Marin, I believe you were presented with the Crystal Award there? 

MA: Yes, it was a lovely honour to receive that award from WEF, when they were focussing on gender diversity and equality. I was doing the musical performance, so I thought it would be fun not to mention anything but just to invite female students to come and join me. So it was kind of cool because I remember during the performance, suddenly someone said, it's only women! We hadn’t made a big deal about it, and so it was fun to turn the tables because so often historically it's been only men in the orchestra and nobody ever comments on it. I think the audience and the team there really appreciated it, and it was great to include a world premiere, something that doesn’t happen there often.

I’m aware that Within Her Arms was written in tragic circumstances. Anna, if you don't mind, could you talk about how that creative output helped you through your grieving process?

AC: I was quite young when I wrote it: twenty-eight years old and still finding my feet as a composer. I was very excited to have a commission from the LA Phil for their Green Umbrella series of contemporary music. At the time I was writing a very energetic, turbulent piece, perhaps more in the spirit of Restless Oceans or something like that. I was in New York City and I got a call that my mother had unexpectedly passed away. I was near Carnegie Hall and totally shocked, and some New Yorkers came and asked if I was okay, so it was actually one of those really special New York moments.

I went back to the UK that night and just sat at the piano, where I had a photo of her standing on a bridge from a couple of days before. So I wrote this melody and the piece just poured out. I think it was my way of processing that very unexpected shock, feeling very connected to her even though she had passed away. So it was a beautiful experience even though it was in sad circumstances.

From that melody came the sense of the breath and the different voices: it’s fifteen individual musicians that are spatialised, so you hear this simple motif that dances around the ensemble. So yes, very sad circumstances but it has become one of my most widely-performed pieces and it often connects with people. I'm really excited to have this piece open the album, because the second time I worked with Marin was with this piece, also at the Cabrillo Festival: I remember being quite teary in that performance, because it's very much a community with Cabrillo, you know the performers quite well. 

MA: You need to have virtuoso string players that play beautifully to make it come across, and that's what we have in Baltimore. Of course we had that in Cabrillo as well, but I think the Baltimore Symphony strings are especially outstanding. 

With the other two pieces there’s a link with inspiration from paintings and imagery. To talk about Abstractions first, how did you settle on those five artworks, and were there any common themes that brought them all together? 

AC: This piece is in honour of Rheda Becker and Robert Meyerhoff, who are wonderful people, and Marin, I know they are very close friends of yours. They have a phenomenal art collection, so when I was invited to write this piece for them, it was an obvious point of departure to explore pieces that were particularly meaningful to them. I chose a selection from there and also a couple from the Baltimore Museum of Art. I knew I wanted it to be a multi-movement work, so I chose five very contrasting pieces of art, ranging from photographs to paintings, that had different scales, some small and more intimate, some massive and much more dynamic, artworks that really provided a canvas to explore different musical moods. 

I was particularly taken with the first movement, Marble Moon, which I believe is a superimposition of two photographs?

AC: It is, by a young Baltimore-based artist called Sara VanDerBeek. She found some pinhole photographs of the moon when she was going through her father's box of photos, and it juxtaposes that photograph with one of a statue in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighbourhood, where the light changes the surface of the marble. 

Marin, in terms of your process, does that help inform your interpretation of a score to have these extra-musical aspects? 

MA: Context is always important for us as conductors to understand the creator's intention. Of course, my reaction to a work of art is probably dramatically different from anyone else's. So it also makes me appreciate the incredible depth and profundity of the interpretive process that people can see something or hear something and feel diametrically opposed things and they're all valid, which is the great beauty of music.

And then with Color Field we have more art, this time by Mark Rothko. How did your interaction with the philanthropist and businesswoman Melanie Sabelhaus inspire you and then lead you to Rothko?

AC: Color Field was commissioned for Melanie as a gift from a friend of hers. Melanie is a larger-than-life character! She loves the colour orange (in particular, Hermès orange!). She has fabulous nails, handbags, and scarves all in this wonderful colour, so finding inspiration in colour was my immediate point of departure. I love the artist Mark Rothko, who has these massive paintings often of one colour but comprised of different layers where it really feels like it's leaping off the canvas. He has one that has a bit of yellow and red framing large washes of orange. Then I explored synaesthesia, the perceptual phenomenon of connecting what you see with what you hear, which isn't an experience that I personally have, although I do connect orchestral textures with colours. And also making it a bit more personal for Melanie in terms of her Serbian roots and her love of dancing. So it was all of these little things that I was able to weave into the piece. 

Could you explain what those three colours mean to you and how you depicted them musically?

AC: Starting with the movement Yellow, I wanted to create a bright but hazy quality. I should add that one of the things I’m so excited about with this album is that it reflects my time with Marin, especially when I was Composer-in-Residence at the Baltimore Symphony. One of the real joys of that is getting to know the musicians, so knowing that Jonathan Carney was the concertmaster I was able to imagine him playing the very delicate solo lines in Color Field, soaring above these textures to give it a sort of glittery quality. It's a piece that unfolds very slowly with those harmonic shimmers to it. 

Then in Red, which represents the boldness of Melanie's spirit, I had the driving percussion of the toms, something I haven't really explored before. They really dug into that, and it was fun because they were placed spatially, stage left and stage right, so you feel it undulating in a nice way. 

And then finally Orange, which takes elements quite literally from Yellow and Red and weaves them together to create orange. It was an opportunity to play around with some new things, so it opens with the back desks of the violins playing very slow harmonic glissandos on the open string. That’s also something that comes out of the residency, the ability to try these things out in a safe space, as it were.

I loved that bit with the toms, it felt like some sort of tribal war dance! I’m glad you also mentioned those violin glissandos, which you refer to in the score as a “hazy cloud”, combined with the fascinating sonority of having two vibraphones but with the motors at different speeds. Marin, are there any other aspects of Anna's orchestration that particularly intrigued you? 

MA: Yeah the vibraphone is really cool, isn’t it? I think she’s always trying to push the sound of the orchestra a little bit further. I wasn't surprised at all when she told me about the Augmented Orchestra, because that feels like a natural extension of what she's already doing. 

Anna, you mentioned being Composer-in-Residence: how much do you tinker with either large or small details once it goes into rehearsal and you hear it come to life for the first time? Is there much alteration that goes on? 

AC: Structurally no, but sometimes in the minutiae, especially with dynamics. Marin and I love that: when we are rehearsing a piece, she will make suggestions too with phrasing or sforzando gestures that give a little bit more punch, which are often then put into the score. I love that conductor/composer collaboration as part of the rehearsal process, especially for a new work. Abstractions and Color Field were both fresh off the press, so Baltimore and Marin have a stamp on those pieces, from the first rehearsals and performances to the published edition.