Anna Clyne

Anna Clyne (born 9 March 1980, in London) is an English composer, now resident in New York City, US.

She has worked in both acoustic music and electroacoustic music.

Clyne began writing music as a child, completing her first composition at age 7.

Her first composition to receive a public performance was at the Oxford Youth Prom when she was 11.

She formally studied music at the University of Edinburgh, from which she graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Music degree with honours.

She later studied at the Manhattan School of Music and earned a MA degree in music.

Her teachers have included Marina Adamia, Marjan Mozetich and Julia Wolfe.

Clyne was director of the New York Youth Symphony's "Making Score" program for young composers from 2008 to 2010.

In October 2009, Clyne and Mason Bates were named co-composers in residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), as of the 2010–2011 season.

She took up the residency in 2010, for a scheduled term of 3 years.

In January 2012, her CSO contract as co-composer in residence was extended through the 2013–2015 season.

In 2013, the concert overture Masquerade was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 to open the Last Night of the Proms, where the BBC Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Marin Alsop.

Clyne was announced as the composer-in-residence for Orchestre national d'Île-de-France from 2014 to 2016, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's 2015–2016 season, and The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra from 2017–2019.

Clyne was nominated for the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her double violin concerto, Prince of Clouds.

Works for soloist and orchestra form an important part of her output, as is also evident from The Seamstress (2015), a single-movement violin concerto that incorporates a whispered recitation of the poem A Coat by Yeats, and the five movement cello concerto Dance (2019), commissioned by Inbal Segev and recorded by her in 2020, which has received more than eight million plays on Spotify.

Clyne has done several cross-genre collaborations, and has also worked with Yo-Yo Ma, Pekka Kuusisto, Martin Fröst, and Jess Gillam.

Clyne has been described as a ‘composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods’ in a New York Times 2015 profile and ‘fearless’ by NPR.

Clyne has explored her fascination with visual arts in several projects: five contemporary artworks inspired Abstractions (2016); Color Field (2020), takes inspiration from the artwork of Mark Rothko; and a film collaboration with Jyll Bradley, entitled Woman Holding a Balance (2021).

In 2018, the music critic Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim selected Clyne's composition, Lavender Rain, for a New York Times feature on "5 Minutes that Will Make You Love Classical Music."

Clyne was appointed Associate Composer with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from 2019–2022.

In 2022–2023, Clyne is Composer-in-Residence with both the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra.

For the 2023–2024 season she will be Composer-in-Residence with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

Various arts institutions have commissioned and presented Clyne’s work, 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.

A CD of her orchestral music, Mythologies, was released in October 2020.