Sound and Fury

Composition and premiere: Anna Clyne wrote Sound and Fury in 2019 on a commission from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Auditorium-Orchestre national de Lyon, and Hong Kong Sinfonietta. The piece was premiered by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on November 7, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland, under Pekka Kuusisto’s direction. First BSO and Tanglewood performance: Sunday, August 11, 2024, James Gaffigan conducting. 

Anna Clyne was born in London and studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where she studied with Marina Adamia, before attending the Manhattan School of Music for her master’s degree in composition. At Manhattan she worked with composer Julia Wolfe, co-founder of the New York City-based composer/performer collective Bang on a Can. Clyne was a Bang on a Can Summer Festival Fellow in 2005, and became a vital part of New York City’s new music community; her work featured frequently Bang on a Can programs.  

A busy and prolific composer, Clyne was composer-in-residence, along with Mason Bates, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 2010-15. Among the works she wrote for the CSO was her evocative orchestral work Night Ferry (2012), which caught the orchestral world’s attention. Her violin concerto the seamstress (2015) was composed for the CSO and soloist Jennifer Koh. Conductor Marin Alsop has been a strong supporter, instigating commissions for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival, and for the Taki Concordia Orchestra for performance during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Alsop led the BBC Proms premiere of Masquerade with the BBC Symphony; the BBC Symphony’s recording of that piece and four others, including Night Ferry and also featuring conductors Andrew Litton and Sakari Oramo, was released on the all-Clyne album Mythologies in 2020. Clyne is also active as a composer of chamber, vocal, and electroacoustic music, as well as music for the stage.  

Clyne has written two concertante pieces for solo cello (her own main instrument) and ensemble: Shorthand for cello and strings for Eric Jacobsen and the Orlando Philharmonic (2020) and DANCE for cello and full orchestra, premiered by Inbal Segev and conductor Cristian Ma˘celaru at the Cabrillo Festival in 2019 and later recorded by Segev with Marin Alsop and the London Philharmonic. A new clarinet concerto for Martin Fröst and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra was premiered in January 2023. She had two orchestral premieres in summer 2023: Wild Geese, at the Cabrillo Festival, and This Moment, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Her major piano concerto ATLAS, inspired by the work of the contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter, was premiered in March 2024 by Jeremy Denk with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra led by Fabio Luisi. This season she was composer in residence with the Helsinki Philharmonic and the BBC Philharmonic as well as an artist in residence with the Symphony Orchestra of Castilla y León. 

Anna Clyne’s orchestral works tend to be dynamic and multidimensional. As one might gather from her titles, their inspirations are frequently extramusical—a Mark Rothko painting for her Color Field, performed by the BSO this past spring, the exuberance of the BBC Proms for her Masquerade, performed here in 2022, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (aka, “the Scottish play,” connecting her piece with the commissioning orchestra) in this afternoon’s Sound and Fury. Musical and aural cues from various sources also populate her work, as is the case here with Joseph Haydn’s 1774 Symphony No. 60, Il distratto (“The Distracted”), which she cites in her program note below. Her evident excitement over and substantiveness of her engagement with Haydn is infectious for the listener, as is the music itself; she even engages in a little witty banter with the Classical master across the centuries. The idea of quotation becomes a phenomenon beyond Haydn, seemingly countering his Symphony No. 60’s musical jokes with her own winking quotations from other sources (including from Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which itself famously quotes another composer…). The pre-recorded (or optionally live) oft-quoted Shakespeare soliloquy, read by composer Irene Buckley, is the final element in the network of allusion. 

The composer’s comments on her piece appear below. 

ROBERT KIRZINGER 

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications. 

Anna Clyne writes:

Sound and Fury draws upon two great works of art for its inspiration: Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 (II distratto) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The piece was premiered by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on a program that included this Haydn symphony. 

Il distratto incorporates Haydn’s music for Le Distrait, a play by Jean-François Regnard, so it seemed fitting to draw inspiration from both musical and literary sources for Sound and Fury. To begin, I listened to Il distratto many times and on a single sheet of paper, I wrote down the key elements that caught my ear, which ranged from rhythmic gestures to melodic ideas, harmonic progressions, and even a musical joke (Haydn brings the feverish final prestissimo to a grinding halt for the violins to re-tune). I chose between one and four elements from each of the six movements and developed them though my own lens—layering, stretching, fragmenting and looping. Whilst experienced as one complete movement, Sound and Fury is also structured in six sub-sections that follow the same trajectory of II distratto. 

In the fifth section of Sound and Fury I looped a harmonic progression from Haydn’s Adagio in Il distratto and this provides a bed of sound to support the recitation of “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…,” the last soliloquy delivered by Macbeth upon learning of his wife’s death, and from which this work takes its title. 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, 
To the last syllable of recorded time; 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! 
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
And then is heard no more. It is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing. 

The connection to Shakespeare’s play emerged gradually during the writing process, but especially after watching a recording of a 1979 masterclass with Sir Ian McKellen analyzing this soliloquy’s imagery and rhythmic use of language. Time lies at the heart of it—“hereafter … time … tomorrow … to day … yesterday …” and music provides us with this framework The last line of this soliloquy (“Signifying nothing.”) is incomplete; McKellen explains “the beats of the rest of that pentameter are not there—because the end of the speech is total silence—total oblivion—total emptiness.” So rich in imagery and metaphor, I also found inspiration in Shakespeare’s rhythmic use of language. For example, before delivering this soliloquy, and after learning of his wife’s death Macbeth says, “She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word.” McKellen says: “There’s something about that line which trips—in Hamlet’s words—tick tocks like a clock.” This is something that I play with also—layering rhythmic fragments that repeat and mark the passage of time. 

My intention with Sound and Fury is to take the listener on a journey that is both invigorating—with ferocious string gestures that are flung around the orchestra with skittish outbursts—and serene and reflective—with haunting melodies that emerge and recede. Thank you to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, The Orchestre National de Lyon and Hong Kong Sinfonietta for this opportunity to delve into Il distratto for the first time, and to revisit Macbeth.