First Times with Anna Clyne: Hearing Your Music for the First Time

It’s six months since the ‘first’ First Times article appeared here on Page Turner. We’ve explored what it’s like to hear music for the first time and what it’s like to play and sing music for the first time. We’ve even explored the experience of being in certain concert halls and opera houses for the first time. 

So it seemed about time to ask the ultimate question: what’s it like for a composer to hear their work performed, by real musicians, for the first time?

I’ve been lucky enough to talk to a few composers about this, and let me tell you: most of them do not enjoy the process one bit. ‘When I hear an orchestral piece, it’s always horrible the first time,’ the Swedish composer Anders Hillborg told me in 2016. 

He is not alone. Plenty report anxieties about hearing their work rehearsed, whether or not it will prove playable, and how musicians and audiences will respond. On a thread on Reddit, you can see composers pour out bad experiences and worries around the subject of first performances. 

Anna Clyne – Excitement over Fear 

Anna Clyne gets to hear her music performed more than most composers. British-born but living in the USA, Clyne is the eighth most performed living composer in the world and the world’s most-performed living female composer. 

Anna is known for writing deep, uncompromising yet almost unfailingly embracing music. Her works are often complex and difficult to perform, and increasingly incorporate electronics. In other words, there is plenty for musicians to get their heads around – even in a piece as ostensibly direct as Stride (see below). 

Does Anna feel the fear when it comes to first performances of her own works? Not at all, she tells me on a video call from her home north of New York. ‘I get very excited about it,’ she says. ‘What’s the worst that can happen? Nobody is going to die! I also really enjoy the musical conversation – that musicians feel they have a voice in the process of bringing a new piece to life, that things are not set in stone.’ 

Anna’s attitude flies in the face of the stereotype of the over-sensitive composer who lives in perpetual fear of their work being misinterpreted or ruined. She seems, more, to be fascinated by different takes on her music. ‘Tempo is a musical element I am very sensitive to,’ she says, but that doesn’t fill her with angst: ‘it’s very interesting to hear conductors take works at different speeds, especially a work like Masquerade.’

Masquerade is a flourish-strewn showpiece that was written to open the Last Night of the Proms in London in 2013. I recently heard it conducted by eight different people in a row during a conducting competition in Norway. Anna was there too, and I remember the look of fascination, rather than judgment, on her face as each young conductor tried their hand at this very tricky work that keeps shifting time, speed and colour. 

‘I love that each conductor and each orchestra brings their own personality and interpretation to a piece,’ Anna says; ‘not many composers get to hear their works played so often by different musicians around the world.’  

Clyne’s First Times

For a composer who as a teenager joined the queue at the Proms for cheap tickets, writing Masquerade for the iconic festival brought Anna ‘full circle.’

But her debut as a composer was altogether less successful. The 11-year-old Anna had been invited to perform her own suite for flute and piano at another less famous Proms – the Oxford Youth Proms – only for the electric piano she was playing to malfunction, distorting the notes mid-performance. ‘I didn’t know what to do so I just pushed on through, as I could hear people running around under the stage trying to fix it,’ she remembers. It was not the most auspicious start to one of the most significant composer careers of our time.  

The next step was hearing other people play her music for the first time, in performances she wasn’t involved in. This happened when Anna was studying at the University of Edinburgh, and a professional string quartet was hired to perform works by student composers. 

‘It was an incredible experience,’ Anna recalls; ‘I was just thrilled to hear professional musicians play my music, and I was able to sit away from it and just listen – listen critically – and also enjoy it.’

Fast forward a few more years, and Anna’s first ‘proper’ orchestral work, Rewind, was first performed at the Manhattan School of Music (it was the score she would submit as the culmination of her studies). 

Rewind, available here (excerpt below) in a virile performance from the Greek Youth Symphony Orchestra, was written at a time when ‘Midi’ computer playback couldn’t tell composers like Anna how their music was likely to sound.

‘I could use some basic technology on my very slow PC to play back the strings,’ Anna recalls, ‘so I wrote all the string parts first – these driving rhythms with lots of accents – and then orchestrated the rest manually on top. Of course, now I’m able to hear everything with Midi-playback but I draw on my experience to know that it’s not going to sound exactly like that – instruments and their colours behave very differently in a concert hall to on a computer and a pair of speakers.’  

Refining Techniques

The way instruments and voices balance – as well as conductors’ speeds – are what surprises Anna most when she hears her music performed. Her background in electronic music has influenced the way she layers textures in her orchestral music. ‘It would be unusual for me to have just an oboe playing a melody,’ she says; ‘I would probably colour it with a vibraphone or a muted viola, to tint the colour. And you can’t exactly know how that is going to balance until you hear the instruments in the space. And then you’re dependent on how a conductor and those musicians interpret and play those lines.’

Anna has got to know how the ‘organism’ that is the symphony orchestra works. For evidence of that, check out her mesmerizing double concerto for Pekka Kuusisto and Kreeta-Julia Heikkilä, Prince of Clouds – recorded here (excerpt below) during her time as composer-in-residence at the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Residencies like this one also help a composer get familiar with a particular orchestra: ‘you get to know the personalities of the individual musicians so when you’re writing you can have them in mind,’ Anna says; ‘it feels more intimate and in some ways more enjoyable, to harness their creativity in the piece.’

The same goes for writing for soloists including Pekka Kuusisto and Martin Fröst, who might inspire her to ‘get the music going’ or inform the shape of a piece, even if that piece will subsequently be performed by many other soloists (her solo violin concerto, Time and Tides, was written for Kuusisto). Anna’s piano concerto Atlas – inspired by a book on the work of the artist Gerhard Richter – was written for the pianist Jeremy Denk, who plays it here (see below) with the Aspen Chamber Orchestra.  

Rewind to the First Time

When Anna wrote Rewind, she experimented with a technique in which an electronic ‘rewind’ of a section of the work would play, into which the live performance would then sync. 

It was partly a reference to Anna’s earlier work in electroacoustic composition, in which she had been heavily involved during her time in Edinburgh. But looking back on this period has led to Anna’s development, with her husband the sound designer Jody Elff, of The Augmented Orchestra – a technology created for the merging of current sound manipulation tools with the long established sound world of the symphony orchestra. 

Live electronic processing has led Anna back into the uncharted waters she would have experienced as a composer who had never heard her works performed – partly because she can’t possibly hear the results until they are actually made. 

In June, her new work Looking Glass will be performed for the first time at the Schwarzmann Centre – the University of Oxford’s new centre for the arts and humanities, of which Anna is a Cultural Fellow. In a sense, it has taken Anna back to the drawing board and led her to ‘workshop’ the live electronic processing elements of the piece, with real musicians, at the venue. 

And that brings us back to the fundamental point: how a composer ‘hears’ their work before, well, they’ve actually heard it. ‘Our workshops have proved really critical [for Looking Glass]’ says Anna, ‘and I wish young composers had more opportunities to workshop their acoustic pieces. It’s like anything: when you don’t have the experience or the knowledge, it’s important to try things out and learn what works and what doesn’t work.’ 

That might explain all those terrified comments on Reddit. Even so, however much Anna prepares – and the many instruments hanging round her studio show how deeply she tries to understand the tools she is writing for – she never expects to have everything exactly right first time. 

‘I always have my pen and paper ready at first rehearsals,’ she says; ‘I always make revisions and I really welcome feedback, especially when musicians really get into the minutiae of tempi and dynamics. That’s one of the beautiful things about writing music: you never know exactly how it’s going to sound. It’s not until you’re there with living, breathing musicians that you really hear it come to life.’