London-born Anna Clyne is a Grammy-nominated composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. Described as a “composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods” (The New York Times), Clyne is one of the most acclaimed and in-demand composers of her generation, often embarking on collaborations with innovative choreographers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians. Clyne’s Within Her Arms opened the New York Philharmonic’s 2021–2022 season. Other recent premieres include PIVOT, which opened the 2021 Edinburgh International Festival; A Thousand Mornings for the Fidelio Trio; Strange Loops for Orchestra of St. Luke’s; Woman Holding a Balance, a film collaboration with Orchestra of St. Luke’s and artist Jyll Bradley; and In the Gale for cello and birdsong, created with and performed by Yo-Yo Ma. Clyne served as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, and Berkeley Symphony. She is currently the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s associate composer through the 2021–2022 season and a mentor composer for Orchestra of St Luke’s.
I composed Restless Oceans for Marin Alsop and the Taki Concordia Orchestra for performance at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. The piece received its world premiere at the opening ceremony in 2019, where Alsop was presented with the Forum’s prestigious Crystal Award in recognition of her championship of diversity in music. This work draws inspiration and its title from Audre Lorde’s poem “A Woman Speaks” and was composed with this particular all-women orchestra in mind. In addition to playing their instruments, the musicians are also called to use their voices in song and strong vocalizations, and their feet to stomp and to bring them to stand united at the end. My intention was to write a defiant piece that embraces the power of women. Restless Oceans is dedicated with thanks to Marin Alsop.
—Anna Clyne
Hannah Kendall’s work has been widely celebrated. She has created pieces such as Disillusioned Dreamer (2018), which the San Francisco Chronicle praised for having a “rich inner life,” as well as The Knife of Dawn (2016), a chamber opera that received critical acclaim for its involving and claustrophobic representation of the incarceration of Guyanese political activist Martin Carter. A new production was presented at Royal Opera House in 2020. Her work has been performed extensively and across many platforms. She has worked with the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, The Hallé, Ensemble Modern, and London Sinfonietta. In addition, she collaborates with choreographers, poets, and art galleries, crossing over to different art forms and celebrating the impact these unique settings have on sound. She is currently composing an Afrofuturist opera for experimental vocalist and movement artist Elaine Mitchener and is the recipient of the 2022 Hindemith Prize for music composition. Born in London in 1984, Kendall is based in New York City as a doctoral fellow in composition at Columbia University.
Tuxedo: Vasco ‘de’ Gama takes its title from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s iconic 1982–1983 artwork Tuxedo, a collection of 16 diagrammatic block pieces that come together to form a figure adorned with Basquiat’s trademark three-point crown symbol. It highlights reoccurring notions of majesty in his output, as does the tuxedo itself, which is a garment associated with luxury and elegance. A multitude of Basquiat’s thematic preoccupations are displayed in the intricate hand-drawn and hand-written iconographic detail, encompassing a variety of histories. Indeed, his reference to Vasco da Gama (written as “Vasco de Gama”)—the first European to voyage to Asia by sea—offers a commentary on exploration, and the seeds of globalisation and multiculturalism—two important themes regarding the year 2020. The music moves between bright and buoyant moments of high energy and expansive stillness, underpinned by the incorporated harmonicas that also function as a nod to the blues. Basquiat often drew attention to historical and contemporary matters of the African diaspora. In a similar fashion, I have included a transcription of “Wade in the Water,” a traditional African American spiritual, for music box.
—Hannah Kendall
Dai Wei is originally from China. Her musical journey navigates the spaces between East and West, classical and pop, electronic and acoustic, innovation and tradition. She often draws from Eastern philosophy and aesthetics to create works with contemporary resonance, and reflect an introspection on how these multidimensional conflicts and tension can create and inhabit worlds of their own. Being an experimental vocalist, she performs as a khoomei throat singer in her recent compositions. She was recently awarded a CANOA Commission (Composing a New Orchestra Audience) from the American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Reading. Her solo violin and electronic composition Song for Shades of Crimson was premiered by violinist Todd Reynolds at the 2020 Bang on a Can Marathon. She served as young artist composer-in-residence at Music from Angel Fire and composer fellow at Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong. Wei is currently pursuing her doctorate in music composition at Princeton University as a Naumburg Fellow. She holds an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music. After she finished her bachelor’s in music composition at China’s Xinghai Conservatory of Music, she came to the US and earned her master’s in music composition at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
When I was in Tibet, I was told that there was a legendary realm of peace and prosperity governed by wisdom and passion. This place is called Shambhala. It is said that at the bottom of Potala Palace, there is a secret tunnel to the Shambhala. This immediately reminds me of the mandala thangka, where geometric patterns are constructed on a series of concentric squares or circles with numerous entrances. In Invisible Portals, my hope is that it opens up adventurous portals to a place that does not come only from the West or the East, a place where multicultural and multidimensional conversations interweave beyond time and space. Ultimately it takes me to the Shambhala I carry inside.
—Dai Wei
Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music, and realizes sound installations. In addition to composing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics. Matthusen’s work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered. Recent areas of creative inquiry include extensive field recording, which have led to compositions and sound projects in aqueducts, caves, and sites of historic infrastructure.
Matthusen performs frequently on live electronics. She is also involved in interdisciplinary collaborations such as the project between systems and grounds with visual artist Olivia Valentine for live-textile generation and live-electronics, and Kite Choir with artist Firat Erdim. Her honors include the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Grant, and two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards, among others. She is currently a professor of music at Wesleyan University, and teaches experimental music, composition, and music technology.
Prophecy in Reverse began with the prompt to consider notions of sanctuary. As such, it seeks an ebb and flow and moments of musical space, noting that moments of respite and healing can come from surprising interconnections. Structurally, I am curious as to what the word sanctuary evokes. Is it a space? A feeling? A sound? These possibilities and potentialities are powerful as they overlap with one another. Embracing multiplicities of meaning, the piece evolved into a collaboration with poet Danielle Vogel, whose work Sea Margin: a prophecy in reverse, was written in response to early sketches of this piece. Excerpts of this work punctuate each of the movements, either as projected or printed material. I am tremendously grateful to the many creative efforts and layers of expertise that make this piece and performance possible. Many thanks to the American Composers Orchestra for making its premiere at Zankel Hall in a time of enormous precarity, both for the performing arts and public gathering. Special thanks to Derek Bermel and Marin Alsop. Many thanks as well to Ben Melsky and Warren Enstrom.
—Paula Matthusen
Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner, and frequently takes inspiration from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2020 OPERA America Grant. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was a 2020–2021 Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center.
Bielawa consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and virtually during the pandemic using public submissions from six continents. Her music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Centre, among many others.
Bielawa received a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo (librettist Erik Ehn and director Charles Otte), which was filmed at locations across the country and featured more than 350 musicians. She has been a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992, is a co-founder of MATA, and a former artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus. She is recorded on the Orange Mountain, Tzadik, TROY, Innova, BMOP/sound, Supertrain, Sono Luminus, and Cedille labels. Visit lisabielawa.net for more information.
As a fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in 2018, I sought to find instances of the use of sanctuary in a broad range of writings in order to reach a greater understanding of this word’s layered meaning within American consciousness. I explored broadsides, poetry, political tracts and speeches, novels and children’s literature. Sanctuary appears in the rhetoric of both sides of every important American struggle: Abolition, Suffrage, Secession, Manifest Destiny, Temperance, Marriage Rights, Civil Rights, and the thinking of our country’s founders. In all cases, sanctuary carries a sense of the inviolable, it appeals to a sense of the absolute, and it bypasses rationality and addresses sentiment directly.
Sanctuary is in three movements that articulate a journey. The first movement, “Speak,” explores the emotional space within oneself that spins out ever more urgent appeals for succor or deliverance.
The second movement, “Threshold,” takes its title from an anonymous quote in a 1886 biography of Abraham Lincoln: “… I gazed at him through tears, and felt I had stepped upon the threshold of a sanctuary too sacred for human feet.” In this movement I have set entire phrases from the text as melodies, with the word sanctuary always spelling H-C-B-A (transposed freely), a shuffling of the B-A-C-H motif first used by J. S. Bach himself and then, in homage to him, by hundreds of composers since. The cadenza is an expanded utterance of a quote from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): “... the heart … took refuge in that inarticulate sanctuary of music, and found there a language in which to breathe …” What follows is a personal memory of musical sanctuary: playing Chopin’s Etude Op. 10, No. 6, very slowly, to feel myself crawling inside it.
The final word of Stowe’s quote, “Breathe,” provides the title of the last movement, which recalls Bach’s A-Minor Violin Concerto and fills out the joy of finding sanctuary in music.
—Lisa Bielawa