Fresh Ears
Hi, I’m Joe. This is a project we’re calling Fresh Ears. It’s a series of pre-concert talks about new music, yes, but really it’s an excuse for us to spend time together thinking about how we listen and why it matters.
People have been making sound, organized or not, for as long as we’ve been trying to talk to each other. Before we had the kind of language we do now, we had noises that meant danger over there, or celebration over here, or I love you, or I miss you. Eventually we started writing some of it down because stories have a habit of growing. You can trace that urge in sound and music from the earliest notated music on cuneiform tablets in around 1400 BCE, to chart notation in the Byzantine Era, to Gregorian chant notation to the five line musical staff as we know it and every variation past that, humans have been writing down the stories of their time along with how they see them, in music. This is why I’m obsessed with notation. I think that the ways in which composers communicate their ideas and themselves through their music is almost like magic; we learn so much about a person and also about ourselves when we engage with the choices a composer or an artist has made; it communicates their values, what’s important to them, how their imagination works, and then it’s up to us to translate this moment in a person’s life into something so fleeting, a sound going up in smoke. There’s an interview with frequent CSO collaborator Conrad Tao in which he describes his approach to music as “the foraging for and leaving of traces”, which I find to be an immensely beautiful idea. As performers and as listeners, I hope that we can find traces of someone’s humanity in their work and reveal something of our own through engaging with it. In the same interview, Tao remembers that American composer David Lang, another CSO regular, once told him about performing his work that “the pieces depend on you bringing something to them. The pieces are a proposal.” I think, too, that listening to new work requires us to bring something of ourselves. Art is, after all, a reflection on and reconstruction of the world around us, offering us the opportunity to glimpse into someone else’s specific brain at some specific time in their lives and hopefully consider our own lives differently.
If you have ever felt like the “new piece” on a program was the thing you had to get through, I get it. There are so many pieces already written attempting to explain why audiences do not like modernism in music. Alex Ross, the brilliant classical music critic for the New Yorker and author of numerous books on music and listening, writes at length in his 2010 piece “Why do we hate modern classical music?”, largely writing about the arguments against contemporary music and how other artistic institutions have navigated the “idolatry” that often puts classical music in a box. He argues:
“What must fall away is the notion of classical music as a reliable conduit for consoling beauty – a kind of spa treatment for tired souls. Such an attitude undercuts not only 20th-century composers but also the classics it purports to cherish. Imagine Beethoven's rage if he had been told that one day his music would be piped into railway stations to calm commuters and drive away delinquents. Listeners who become accustomed to Berg and Ligeti will find new dimensions in Mozart and Beethoven. So, too, will performers. For too long, we have placed the classical masters in a gilded cage. It is time to let them out.”
I agree with what he’s getting at here; I listen to the canon of the repertoire differently when I commit energy to the composers I’ll talk about on this series, and I certainly perform differently. Discovery is perhaps my favorite part of this life; when I was in high-school, my geometry teacher, Ms. Brady, drew attention to the face I made when we’d work through a complex proof. I was astonished to realize that we had ended up at such an elegant solution from a tangled beginning. I still chase that feeling. It’s why I do a little too much research. It’s why I test formats. It’s why I am willing to try something that might not work in order to find the thing that does. If you’re going to show up an hour early, I want to meet you there with curiosity and honesty. I want you to feel like someone on stage knows you are in the room. In this series, I hope that you can find some discovery in this music, and I hope that that inspires you to find more.
So, what happens if you come to Fresh Ears? About an hour before the concert begins, we’ll talk about the night’s new music. I’ll share what I think is worth listening for, I’ll tell you what changed for me in rehearsal that week, and when we can, we’ll chat with the composer themselves.
There is also a little ecosystem around these talks, because if you’ll indulge me in talking about contemporary music, I ought to give you some more to chew on. On the Fresh Ears page you will find short “listen ahead” notes, composer playlists, links to what I think are representative moments with a few lines on what to notice, and quick videos from rehearsal where we talk about what we are figuring out. There is a box for your questions and your reflections. If you like homework, you will be very happy. If you do not, you can ignore it and still be completely fine.
Here is who I’ll speak about this season:
Anna Clyne on Oct 3–4
Lisa Bielawa on Nov 29–30
Daníel Bjarnason on Jan 10–11
Anna Thorvaldsdottir on Feb 6–7
Jennifer Higdon on May 8–9
You don’t have to like everything! Part of the point here is noticing what you like and why, what you don’t and why, and how your reasons change as you get more context or just more time. I’m not asking the classics to move aside. I am saying the present tense belongs in the same room, and that meeting it with an open mind will change how you hear the past, present, and future.
If that sounds interesting, come early. Bring a friend who says they “don’t get” new music. Bring your questions, your skepticism, and your ears.
See you there-
Joe
Anna Clyne
Her 2016 work “Abstractions” will be played October 3-4, 2025, opening the first concerts of Cristian Măcelaru’s tenure as Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.
I won’t speak at length about “Abstractions” here, as I’ll talk at length about the piece and the visual art that inspired it at the pre-concert talks on October 3rd and 4th. For me, if I want to approach a new work with good intentions, it’s always tremendously helpful to look at other works by them to try to get a feel for the tendencies and surprises of a composer’s “language”. I’ll point out some moments that I find particularly striking here with timecodes to help you find the spots, in case you're short on time.
Moments I find to be representative of Clyne’s style:
“Within Her Arms” (2008-9)
This piece, written for Clyne’s mother and inspired by poetry by Vietnamese activist/monk Thich Nhat Hanh, has been likened to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”, because of the immense weight it carries, using sparse, simple musical material. With long, sprawling melodic lines that feel to me like they’re searching for the right tune, Clyne sustains individual pitches of the melody (and echoes others) in the remaining strings to create a sense of melancholy, of lingering, trying to hold the melody in time. You can really hear how she layers this step-by-step from the beginning of the piece to about the 4 minute mark. Around 3:25, there’s a beautiful transition to something to feels sunnier to me, but continues to search. It’s music that feels like I can hear bits of my own memories in.
“«rewind«” (2005-2006)
This piece illustrates Clyne’s beginnings as a composer of electronic music, here realized as an orchestral work. This piece creates a sonic representation of an analog video tape being rapidly rewinded, with skips, blips, and video static all heard in the orchestra. Clyne does these “musical translations” all over her work; in an interview, she attempts to communicate across disciplines so as to “avoid tendencies” in her music. From around 1:00-1:52, you can hear the murmur of what I imagine is static in the strings, blasts of sudden images in the percussion (played on brake drum) and the winds/brass, and the sense of slower moving images being rewinded in the middle voices.
“In The Gale” (2022)
Here’s a particularly gorgeous example of Clyne’s use of electronics. Recorded for Randall Poster’s “The Birdsong Project” (Poster is known for his work as a music supervisor for film; this project commissioned 172 new pieces of music reflecting on birdsong), Clyne and Yo-Yo Ma worked to craft a duet of cello and birdsong, and then filmed the project in Acadia National Park. Clyne also works regularly with producer/audio engineer Jody Elff on their project The Augmented Orchestra (which electronically expands the orchestra via live audio processing), including on this recording with Ma, which was recorded remotely during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further demonstrating Clyne’s cross-disciplinary fascination, this work was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem, which likens hope to birds. You can hear this sense of hope, to me, particularly from around 1:37-2:33.
“DANCE” (2019) *premiere conducted by Măcelaru at the 2019 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music
This work, to me really shows how Clyne can represent poetry so vividly in her work. Inspired by the following poem by Rumi, a poet/mystic in the 13th century, each of the five movements takes its title and musical material from each line of the poem:
Dance, when you’re broken open.
Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you’re perfectly free.
Clyne, in an interview speaking about the piece, says that it was the sense of urgency and the physicality of the text that drew her to this musical translation. Perhaps speaking to the universality of Clyne’s language, the cellist who premiered the work, Inbal Segev, commented that she felt there were elements of Jewish music (Segev and Clyne’s father’s heritage, for whom the piece is dedicated), while Clyne felt there were elements of Irish/English (her mother’s heritage). From around 1:46, you can really hear this sense of being “broken open”, in which the cello soloist sustains tremendously high pitches while the orchestra accompaniment plays mostly low waves of sound, which support but do not affirm the solo line (using numerous intervallic fifths in the harmony to keep the sense of “openness”). It evokes an elegiac sort of dance, to me almost a dance of honor, or a Beethovenian funeral march of sorts, but in Clyne’s way.
“Night Ferry” (2012)
This piece, as with many of Clyne’s works, was inspired by a number of different sources. It was commissioned to be played alongside music by Schubert, so, looking for inspiration, Clyne looked to details of Schubert’s life to see what struck her. She then took Schubert’s cyclothymia, a form of manic depression characterized by severe mood swings that are often associated with a heightened sense of creativity, as the launch point for her own artistic tangent, the painting above this text. Clyne, before writing one note of music, began painting a series of seven canvasses, split into 3 subsections each, each one representing 3 minutes of music. She took the swings of Schubert’s mental health as a launching point for the journey of a boat, taking also from Seamus Heaney’s poem dedicated to Robert Lowell, an American poet who also suffered from manic depression, who Heaney called their “Night Ferry”. From 8:22-15:28, I think you can really clearly trace the soundscape of the painting AND hear the violence/peace of mental health swings, starting from just before the sunset image, through the sunset, the red-to-black portion, and into the clearing.
“A Wonderful Day” (2013)
This is perhaps my favorite work (so far) of Clyne’s. She sets sparse, simple orchestration to purely support the electronic accompaniment, which is a recording of Willie Barbee’s voice, spoken and sung, along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, in a spur of the moment collaboration that celebrates Willie’s humanity, who was then just a stranger on the street. Royalties from this piece are donated to Lincoln Park Community Services, a homeless shelter/services organization in Chicago. I hope we can all see the world in the kaleidoscopic way that Willie and Clyne do.