Anna Clyne was born in London, England on March 9, 1980. In recent years she has emerged as a formidable voice among the younger generation of composers. A graduate of Edinburgh University and the Manhattan School of Music, she now resides in Brooklyn, NY. She has received numerous commissions, including the American Composers Orchestra, Houston Ballet, London Sinfonietta, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony (where she was the Mead Composer-in-Residence during its 2014-15 season). Among her champions are conductors Ricardo Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Osmo Vänskä, and Marin Alsop. Many of Clyne’s pieces combine music with other arts media. This Moment was composed in 2023 to fulfill a commission from the League of American Orchestras with the support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Its first performance took place on July 14, 2023 in Vail, Colorado with Yannick Nézet-Séguin leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is scored for 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings.
Anna Clyne is a composer with a large, and unorthodox, imagination. While some of her works are experimental, such as creating a series of visual artworks on a panel in lieu of a traditional musical score, she has no difficulty also writing fun show pieces such as Masquerade, performed by the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra during the 2015 season and her Cello Concerto (Dance), performed here in 2019. She also writes for electronic media. In her personal website (www.annaclyne.com), Clyne offers the following “Artistic Statement”:
“My passion is collaborating with innovative and risk-taking musicians, film-makers, visual artists and, in particular, choreographers. Creating new works through a fluid artistic dialogue has consistently fueled my music from new perspectives and has maintained a fresh and exciting creative environment. Inspired by visual images and physical movement, my intention is to create music that complements and interacts with other art-forms, and that impacts performers & audiences alike.”
Clyne also provides her own program notes for This Moment (https://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Anna-Clyne-This-Moment/111449):
“This Moment is inspired by the calligraphy of Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed away in January 2022 at the age of 95. It is a meditation on his words “this moment is full of wonders.”
This Moment is also a response to our collective grief and loss in recent years, and borrows two moments from Mozart’s Requiem, the work with which This Moment was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin in July 2023.
“The meditation on death is a very important meditation. When you meditate on death, you love life more, you cherish life more. We can learn many lessons from it.” - Thich Nhat Hanh
The first moment borrowed from Mozart's Requiem is an ascending chromatic line in the sopranos, and the fugal subject in the basses, from Kyrie. The second borrowed moment is the instrumental introduction to Lacrimosa from Sequentia. The first line of the text, which translates as “Full of tears will be that day”, reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s words that “the tears I shed yesterday have become rain."
Program Note by David B. Levy/Anna Clyne, ©2025