Picture a composer writing a sonata or a symphony, and what do you see? Someone at a desk or a keyboard, scribbling in a frenzy or absently chewing a pen? Anna Clyne, a 44-year-old London native transplanted to New Paltz, in New York’s Hudson Valley, does it her way. Inspiration comes at her over multiple channels, and dictation from the Muse seems not to be one of them. Instead, she re-invents her process project by project. It’s not some technical ism that watermarks her catalogue but her resourcefulness as a musical Scheherazade. The stories her music tells—now spine-tingling, now gravely contemplative—have won her commissions from top orchestras, Grammy nominations, and more than 11 million plays on Spotify, not to mention exposure at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Sometimes a piece takes shape around pre-existing art: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” filtered through the sensibility of Franz Schubert; Gerhard Richter’s 5,000-page Atlas scrapbook; or a gargoyle carved into the scroll of a Baroque violin she found in an Oxford thrift shop. Other times, her creativity plays out in a parallel medium before finding its musical form. Clyne has been known to “test” a new piece in the strict privacy of her studio by getting on her feet and dancing.
