Composer Anna Clyne: ‘Music with melody connects with something very deeply rooted in us’

“When I’m writing music, I’ll imagine that I’m dancing. I like to feel how it is in the body,” says composer Anna Clyne. “For me, music and physicality are interconnected.”

It makes perfect sense, then, that Breathing Statues, Clyne’s 2020 string quartet, is the inspiration for a new dance at the Royal Opera House this month. Inspired by the Grosse Fuge — Beethoven’s most visionary and technically ferocious string quartet — Clyne’s piece takes as its starting point a very physical concept: breath.

“There’s an energy about the Grosse Fuge, it almost feels like rock and roll,” says the 42-year-old during a brief visit to Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, where she is attending a concert featuring her work. “But in one of the movements, there’s a moment when the tumultuous energy suddenly stops and there’s this silence. That sense of pause is a central feature of Breathing Statues: the idea of an ensemble breathing.”

Given this emphasis on physicality, Breathing Statues has an affinity with dance. At the Royal Opera House, though, the dance gestures in American choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s Secret Things will diverge from Clyne’s musical gestures.

“As a non-dancer I would have imagined my music being translated into a physical gesture followed by a physical silence,” says Clyne (who counts tap and swing lessons among her extracurricular activities). “Pam doesn’t do that. She fills those silences with movement.”

Does that bother Clyne? Quite the opposite: “What Pam is doing is adding another musical layer in a way: even if you don’t hear the rhythm [that Pam is creating], you see the rhythm against a different rhythm behind it, almost like a counterpoint.”

While Beethoven sits behind Breathing Statues, Clyne’s kaleidoscopic work has channelled aspects of Irish folk fiddle, Klezmer and electronics, among many other influences.

She has fleshed out the dark emotions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, resurrected the colourful world of the 18th-century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and found ways to give expression to mental illness — all through her music.

Her pieces’ imaginative breadth occasionally comes at the cost of internal cohesion. But there’s no denying the artistic freedom it gives her.

Where did that sense of freedom come from? Clyne says it was there from childhood. Growing up in the market town of Abingdon, near Oxford, she felt no pressure to play an instrument or to listen to any particular kind of music: “I grew up with a lot of folk, jazz and pop music. I loved Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald.”

She started making up music off her own bat, aged seven, on a second-hand piano with missing keys, before taking up the cello at school. Even while studying music at the University of Edinburgh and, later, the Manhattan School of Music, she was never expected to pin her colours to any one mast. “I was very fortunate with my teachers — the wonderful Georgian composer Marina Adamia at Edinburgh, and Julia Wolfe at Manhattan. One of the most important things that Julia told me was to trust my intuition.”

And Clyne did trust it, as far as music was concerned. What she didn’t trust, however, was her bank balance, so she took jobs at a grilled cheese shop run by stoners (“a munchies place”) and at an upmarket florist, where she once found herself decorating the Christmas tree of Noel Gallagher from Oasis.

In fact, she very nearly jacked in the composing altogether: “I bought myself a second-hand briefcase and went to an interview on Wall Street to try and get into investment banking. It didn’t go well. I just talked about music in the interview and at the end they said, ‘Why are you doing this? You should stick with music.’”

Luckily, soon afterwards she received a message from one of her idols: the composer Steve Reich, whom she had met at a workshop and to whom she had sent some of her work in an uncharacteristic fit of chutzpah. “It said, ‘You are a very good composer’ in the subject heading. Then Steve sent an email to the composer John Adams and said, ‘You should check out Anna’s music, she’s the real deal.’”

Clyne smiles bashfully as she recalls this, then breaks into embarrassed laughter. Even now that she has won several prizes and residencies with top-flight orchestras, she still finds it hard to shake her innate shyness. “My natural personality is not gregarious,” she says. Yet her music is so full of confidence: bold, flamboyant and resolutely melodic, flying in the face of post-serialist austerity. “Melody is at the heart of my music, and the older I am, the more comfortable I am to lean into that.”

She believes part of this comes down to the fact that her home of the past 20 years has been New York. “Minimalism and post-minimalism were birthed in America, so there tends to be more genre-crossing there, for example, between contemporary classical music and rock and roll.”

But there’s more to it than that. “I find that music with a sense of melody connects with something very deeply rooted in us. Music is in many ways a universal language; even the way we speak has melodic inflections.”

Does she have misgivings, then, about music with no discernible melody? “It’s fine if it’s the music that you’re driven to write.” She does, however, have misgivings about composers who fail to reflect on the purpose of their music.

“With my composition students,” she says, “I try to help them question what is it they’re trying to say and whom they are trying to speak to.” So whom is she trying to speak to? She pauses. “I don’t require there to be an intellectual understanding in order to appreciate my work. I write my music to share with people.”

More crucially, perhaps, she writes for herself. “Having written music since I was seven, I always wrote for the joy of writing,” she says. “And that continues to be the case.”

‘Secret Things’ runs at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre from February 4-16, roh.org.uk