Pursuing a career as a composer isn’t the most prudent or practical choice—not if you want to make a living. Opportunities to have new work performed by institutions that can pay enough to live on are so scarce that competition is fierce—the people who buy symphony subscriptions generally want Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, not Francois Bayle, Johanna Beyer, or Earle Brown. Living composers almost all get left out in the cold, and even if they can succeed in the classical world, it often takes decades. Today many of them resort to presenting their work in unorthodox settings—rock clubs, art galleries, loft spaces. Sometimes, lacking not just a performance space but also performers, they start their own ensembles to get their music heard.
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In a December New York Times story about the profusion of young composers trying novel ways to be heard, critic Allan Kozinn singled out Clyne and Bates as two who’ve gotten very lucky. Clyne herself won’t rule out luck, but it’s hardly a complete explanation—not given her work ethic and her idiosyncratic, wide-ranging talents. When she first moved to New York after graduating from college in 2002, she pieced together a living waiting tables, making flower arrangements, and picking up freelance gigs as a cellist—she even cleaned the halls in her apartment building in exchange for reduced rent. Not till she moved to Chicago to take the Mead position did she finally quit her last day job.
Clyne grew up in a working-class family with no special investment in music—the records she remembers hearing as a child include Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Lou Reed, and Nina Simone. When she was seven a friend gave the family a secondhand piano missing several keys, and Clyne was immediately drawn to it. Though she took piano lessons from the father of a child her mother had nannied, they were hardly the kind of rigorous training that many classical musicians and composers receive from a young age. Soon she began studying the cello at school, and when she was 11 she and a flute-playing friend began writing simple folklike tunes, calling their group the Ice Blues after a favorite flavor of Jelly Belly. Composing allowed Clyne to create a kind of alternate universe. “It was more about entering another world than escaping this one,” she says.
Another famous fan is avant-garde reedist and composer John Zorn, who asked Clyne in summer 2010 to release something on his Tzadik label. Blue Moth, due February 28, is an impressive overview of her music, filled with exhilarating collisions between electronics and acoustic instruments—played not only by soloists on, say, cello or clarinet, but also by string ensembles, among them New York’s Ethel. The electronic element comes from field recordings that Clyne usually processes beyond recognition—everything from rain and thunder on “Rapture” to sounds from an industrial plant (mechanical crushing and screeching noises, an interview with a worker) on “Steelworks,” which is enhanced by video when performed live.
