EP/75: INNOVATING COMPOSITION
Virtual Orchestra: When the Composer Can’t be in the Room
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The pandemic caused many of us to work from home. For most people this wasn’t a big deal but if you’re a world renowned composer who needs to collaborate with a big symphony, a zoom meeting just isn’t going to cut it. Today you’ll hear about a very unique work from home story that inspired a novel workaround. Like many pandemic innovations, it turns out this workaround had lasting benefits long after things have returned to normal.
Joining us today are the duo that developed this technology, Jody Elff and Anna Clyne. Elff is a Grammy Award winning audio engineer and sound artist. He has mixed countless televised network concert events and his orchestral collaborations include the LA Philharmonic and Lincoln Center Festival. London-born Anna Clyne is a GRAMMY-nominated composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music and one of the most acclaimed and in-demand composers of her generation. We reached them in New Paltz, NY.
About ANNA
Described as a “composer of uncommon gifts and unusual methods” in a New York Times profile and as “fearless” by NPR, GRAMMY-nominated Anna Clyne is one of the most in-demand composers today, working with orchestras, choreographers, filmmakers, and visual artists around the world. Clyne was named the 8th most performed contemporary composer in the world and the most performed living female British composer in 2022.
Clyne has been commissioned and presented by the world’s most dynamic and revered arts institutions, 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; and her music has opened such events as the Edinburgh International Festival, The Last Night of the Proms, and the New York Philharmonic’s 2021–2022 season.
Clyne often collaborates on creative projects across the music industry, including Between the Rooms, a film with choreographer Kim Brandstrup and LA Opera, as well as the Nico Project at the Manchester International Festival, a stage work about pop icon Nico’s life that featured Clyne’s reimagining of The Marble Index for orchestra and voices. Clyne has also reimagined tracks from Thievery Corporation’s The Cosmic Game for the electronica duo with orchestra, and her music has been programmed by such artists as Björk.
Several projects have explored Clyne’s fascination with visual arts, including Color Field, inspired by the artwork of Mark Rothko and Abstractions, inspired by five contemporary artworks. In January 2023 Clyne presented a three-part series for BBC Radio 3 called ‘The Art of Music with Anna Clyne’. Recent projects in collaboration with the dance world have included the world premiere of choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s dance set to Breathing Statues for the Royal Ballet in London and performances of DANCE by the San Francisco Ballet with choreography by Nicolas Blanc. Other recent collaborators include such notable musicians as Jess Gillam, Martin Fröst, Pekka Kuusisto, and Yo-Yo Ma.
In 2022–2023, Clyne serves as Composer-in-Residence with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra starting in the 2023–2024 season. Past residencies include the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, L’Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Clyne’s music is represented on several labels and her works Prince of Clouds and Night Ferry were nominated for 2015 GRAMMY Awards. Her cello concerto DANCE, recorded by soloist Inbal Segev, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Marin Alsop, has garnered more than eight million plays on Spotify.
Clyne’s music is published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes. www.boosey.com/clyne Biography reproduced by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
Learn more about Anna and find links to her social channels at: annaclyne.com.
About JODY
Jody Elff is a Grammy Award winning audio engineer, sound artist and designer. Elff has mixed countless televised network concert events. His orchestral collaborations include LA Philharmonic and Lincoln Center Festival. He has made field recordings of folk music in Morocco and Ethiopia, and his work with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble includes recording 3 albums and sound design for hundreds of performances around the world. He is the founder and owner of Little Dog Live, a pioneer in high-fidelity live-streaming services. His corporate design work includes site-specific sound installations for Target and Turner Networks. Elff’s fine art sound works have been presented at museums and galleries internationally, including collaborations with David Lang and Diller & Scofido and Renfro on “Musings on a Glass Box” at Foundation Cartier and “The Mile Long Opera”. He was commissioned to create a sound installation, “Strata” which is permanently on display in Lyon, France. In 2018-2019 Elff was the audio engineer for Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” international book tour, and began 2020 with Oprah Winfrey’s “2020 Vision” tour. Throughout 2020 during the current pandemic, Jody has been aggressively developing many new technologies for working with high-quality audio over distances. This new technology has been recently utilized on broadcasts with Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor and projects for Audible, Netflix, and iHeart Country among others.
Find out more about Jody at: elff.net