The Years

The Years is a musical and literary response to our recent moment of enforced isolation, whilst it also resonates with any moment in time. I have drawn from my experiences during the pandemic in 2020, which range from quiet solitude, to the alarm of a system being fractured.
Anna Clyne

Time winds through this work on multiple levels and in multiple guises. Time is always a mystery – its fluctuations of speed, its propensity for layering, at moments, and at other moments looping back on itself. But time during this pandemic has seemed to be almost another medium altogether – fluid and malleable yet static, moving slowly and quickly, simultaneously, in a way I’ve not previously experienced. My hope is that the piece conjures a sense of the passage of time, the ways time works on one, moves through a body and a soul. The voice feels solitary to me, and intimate – the you to whom it is speaking, the listener feels very solitary too. But the declarative form speaks to a sense of communion that somehow makes sense to me in the context of a chorus.
Stephanie Fleischmann

This note can be reproduced in concert programmes with a credit to Anna Clyne and Stephanie Fleischmann.

“Choral and orchestral lines mirror each other, overlapping, interweaving, expanding. Clyne cleverly provides the singers (the excellent SCO Chorus) with rewarding vocal writing, leaving astringency to the orchestra – as in the thunderous, manic second part or the striding expanse of the third to the words “find something lost in the sky”. This absorbing piece deserves a place in the repertoire.” —The Guardian