Described as a “composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods” by the New York Times and as “fearless” by NPR, GRAMMY-nominated Anna Clyne has been commissioned and presented by the world’s most dynamic and revered arts institutions, including the Barbican, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Los Angeles Philharmonic, MoMA, Philharmonie de Paris, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, San Francisco Ballet, and the Sydney Opera House. Her music has opened events like the Edinburgh International Festival, The Last Night of the Proms, and the New York Philharmonic’s season. The World Economic Forum commissioned Clyne’s Restless Oceans, which premiered at the opening ceremony in Davos with an all-women orchestra led by Marin Alsop.
Clyne is currently Composer-in-Residence with the BBC Philharmonic. Past residencies include the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra of Castilla y León, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, L’Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, Philharmonia Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra.
She collaborates on creative projects across the music industry, including Between the Rooms, a film with choreographer Kim Brandstrup and LA Opera, and the Nico Project at the Manchester International Festival, a stage work about pop icon Nico’s life that featured Clyne’s reimagining of The Marble Index for orchestra and voices. Clyne has reimagined tracks from Thievery Corporation’s The Cosmic Game for the electronica duo with orchestra, and artists like Björk have programmed her music. Other notable musicians with whom she has recently collaborated include Jess Gillam, Jeremy Denk, Martin Fröst, Pekka Kuusisto, and Yo-Yo Ma.
The League of American Orchestras commissioned This Moment with additional support by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. As Clyne describes the work,
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 the Kyrie. The second borrowed moment is the instrumental introduction to the Lacrimosa from the 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.”
