World Premiere:  October 23, 2021
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes with 2nd doubling English horn, 2 clarinets with 2nd doubling bass clarinet, 2 bassoons with 2nd doubling contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, percussion and strings
Duration: 15 minutes

“Anna Clyne,” according to the biography provided by her publisher Boosey & Hawkes, “is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, combining resonant soundscapes with propelling textures that weave, morph and collide in dramatic explosions. Her work often includes collaborations with cutting edge choreographers, visual artists, film-makers and musicians worldwide.”

Anna Clyne was born in London in 1980, studied music from early in life (she recalls lessons “on a piano with randomly missing keys”), began composing at age eleven (a fully notated piece for flute and piano), and received her undergraduate training at Edinburgh University and a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music; her teachers include Julia Wolfe, Marina Adamia and Marjan Mozetich. Clyne’s career has been on a meteoric trajectory since she completed her education — performances by leading ensembles and soloists around the world and commissions from the American Composers Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, Jerome Foundation, New York Voices (a collaboration between the Albany Symphony and the New York State Archives), ASCAP, Seattle Chamber Players and Houston Ballet; selection as a participant in a master class with Pierre Boulez in New York City; director of the New York Youth Symphony’s award-winning program for young composers “Making Score” from 2008 to 2010. Clyne served as Composer-in-Residence with both the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and Trondheim Symphony Orchestra (Norway) in 2022–2023, after which she began season-long residencies with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and the Symphony Orchestra of Castilla y León in Valladolid. For the 2025-2026 season, Clyne is a Cultural Fellow at the new Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Arts and Humanities at the University of Oxford.

As an educator, Clyne taught at the Mannes/The New School in New York City and served as Mentor Composer for the Orchestra of St Luke's Inaugural DeGaetano Composer Institute since its founding in 2019. Her dedication to education and collaboration is especially evidenced by her extended residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2010-2015), when she not only composed six works for the ensemble — including the Grammy-nominated double-violin concerto Prince of Clouds — but also conducted workshops with the Chicago Public Schools and incarcerated youth at the city’s Juvenile Detention Center, joined with Yo-Yo Ma and musicians of the Civic Orchestra, CSO and Chorus to help realize the work of young poets, musicians and composers at such events as the Humanities Festival and Youth in Music Festival, and worked with art therapist Caroline Edasis to develop an innovative collaboration between the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Learning Institute and residents in the memory care unit of the Mather Pavilion Residential Nursing Home. Clyne’s additional residencies, which often involve community involvement, include the Cabrillo Music Festival, Campos do Jodão International Music Festival in Brazil, Orchestre National d’Île de France, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Berkley Symphony and Los Angeles–based Hysterica Dance Company. She has also led seminars and master classes at the Curtis Institute of Music, Columbia University, Manhattan School of Music, Conservatoire de Saint-Maur, Institute of Musical Research at the University of London and other notes institutions. 

Anna Clyne’s rapidly accumulating collection of honors includes eight consecutive ASCAP Plus Awards, Hindemith Prize, Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Clutterbuck Award from the University of Edinburgh, as well as awards from Meet the Composer, American Music Center, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation and International Artist Sponsorship; she also received a grant from Opera America to develop a work titled Eva, about the German-born American post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse (1936-1970), which was workshopped in spring 2018 during her residency at the composer collaborative National Sawdust in Brooklyn, New York. Clyne’s Restless Oceans (which she described as “a defiant piece that embraces the power of women”) was commissioned by the World Economic Forum for premiere by an all-female orchestra at the opening ceremony of its 2019 conference in Davos, and performed again at the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Oslo in 2025.

Clyne wrote, “The central inspiration for Color Field is a person: Melanie Sabelhaus, the honoree of this work. I began the creative process upon first meeting Sabelhaus in New York City, when I learned about her family, her Serbian roots, her work, and the music she loves. She is bold, audacious, generous, and a pioneer for women in business and philanthropic work.

[Melanie R. Sabelhaus has served as Vice Chair of the National American Red Cross, Co-Chair of the National United Way’s Summit on Women in Philanthropy, Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, and trustee of the Johns Hopkins Health Systems, Ohio University Foundation, United Way of Maryland, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. Her philanthropic accomplishments have been recognized with the Outstanding Fundraiser Award of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Girl Scouts Outstanding Woman of the Year, Ohio University’s Achievement Award in Business, and American Red Cross Harriman Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service.]

“Melanie also loves the color orange — in particular Hermès Orange — and thus began my exploration of color. This led me to Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow (1961), a powerful example of the artist’s ‘Color Field’ paintings, featuring red and yellow framing a massive swash of vibrant orange that seems to vibrate off the canvas.

“While I explored creating music that evokes colors, I thought about synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon in which a person hears sound, pitch and tonal centers and then sees specific colors, and vice versa. In the case of [Russian] composer Alexander Scriabin, he associated specific pitches with specific colors, which I have adopted as tonal centers for the three movements of this piece: Yellow = D, Red = C, Orange = G.

“Each movement of Color Field weaves in elements of the life of Melanie Sabelhaus, for whom music has always been in the house. Yellow evokes a hazy warmth and incorporates a traditional Serbian melody, first heard as a very slow bass line, and then revealed in the middle of the movement in the strings and winds. In Red, the fires blaze with bold percussive patterns and lilting lines. In Orange, the music becomes still and breathes, and then escalates once more, incorporating elements of Yellow and Red to create Orange — the signature color of Melanie Sabelhaus.”