Threads & Traces (new work for mass cello ensemble, LA Phil commission, world premiere)
About this Piece
London-born Anna Clyne is a Grammy-nominated composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. Her work, described as “dazzlingly inventive” by Time Out New York, often includes collaborations with cutting-edge choreographers, visual artists, film-makers, and musicians worldwide.
Clyne has been commissioned by renowned organizations such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Carnegie Hall, BBC Radio 3, Houston Ballet, London Sinfonietta, Southbank Centre, and the American Composers Orchestra, among others. Her work has been championed by some of the world’s finest conductors, including Marin Alsop, Pablo Heras-Casado, Riccardo Muti, Leonard Slatkin, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, and has been performed in venues ranging in diversity from New York’s (Le) Poisson Rouge to Carnegie Hall — hosts of concert halls and alternative venues across the globe.
Appointed by Music Director Riccardo Muti, Clyne recently completed her five-season tenure as the Chicago Symphony’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. She is currently Composer-in-Residence for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and L’Orchestre national d’Île de France and is the recipient of prestigious awards, including a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awards from Meet the Composer, the American Music Center, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and prizes from ASCAP and SEAMUS. She was recently nominated for the 2014 Times Breakthrough Award (UK) and for a 2015 Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, for her double violin concerto, Prince of Clouds.
Highlights for the 2015/16 season include the world premieres of This Midnight Hour performed by L’Orchestre national d’Île de France at the Philharmonie de Paris; This Lunar Beauty by the Britten Sinfonia; Just As They Are by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble; Abstractions, written for Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; RIFT, a ballet score written for Marin Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, in collaboration with choreographer Kitty McNamee; Pocket Book VIII for Roomful of Teeth; Threads & Traces for one hundred cellos to be premiered at Walt Disney Concert Hall; and the U.S. East Coast premiere and the UK premiere of Clyne’s violin concerto, The Seamstress, performed by Jennifer Koh with the Princeton Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, respectively.
(Biography reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.)
The composer has provided the following note for Threads & Traces, commissioned by the LA Phil for the 2016 Piatigorsky International Cello Festival:
“In his book, Lines – A Brief History, Tim Ingold imagines a world in which everyone and everything consists of interwoven or interconnected lines and considers how two kinds of line – threads and traces – can turn into one another as surfaces form and dissolve. The line leaves the trace of a gesture – a shadow from, and a thread to, the past.”