Anna Clyne

Composer Anna Clyne, mostly active in the U.S., writes both acoustic and electro-acoustic music in a variety of genres. During the 2010s decade, she held a sequence of prestigious composer residencies and had her music performed by major orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony. Clyne was born on March 9, 1980, in London. She finished a composition by age 11 and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, graduating with an honors music degree. Clyne moved to New York for an M.A. at the Manhattan School of Music, and she has lived in the U.S. ever since, although she remains active in Britain. Some of her teachers have been Julia Wolfe, Marina Adamia, and Marjan Mozetich. One breakthrough for Clyne was being named the director of the New York Youth Symphony's Making Score program for young composers in 2008; another was a co-composer-in-residence slot with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra beginning in 2010. Unusually, that appointment was extended for two more years after Clyne's initial two-year term. It was the first in a series of prestigious residences that spread Clyne's name and music before various audiences: at the Orchestre National d'Île-de-France from 2014 to 2016, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2015 and 2016, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra from 2017 to 2019, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from 2019 to 2022. Clyne received major awards, including a Hindemith Prize and a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Meanwhile, her music was inspiring commissions from such major orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, and the London Sinfonietta. Major conductors, including Riccardo Muti, Leonard Slatkin, and Marin Alsop, have programmed Clyne's works, which often include electronic elements and contain multimedia aspects. Her music includes orchestral works, chamber music, music for solo instrument and orchestra, solo works, vocal music, and choral music. More than a dozen of Clyne's works have been recorded, and an album containing her two-violin concerto Prince of Clouds, Two x Four, on the Cedille label earned her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. In 2020, Clyne released the album Mythologies, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra performing five of her orchestral works from the 2010s.
© James Manheim /TiVo