Restless Oceans

Program notes

About the Work

‘Restless Oceans’ lasts about four minutes and was written for a particular occasion and a particular group of players. Anna Clyne composed it in 2018 for the conductor Marin Alsop and the Taki Concordia Orchestra, an ensemble made up entirely of women, to play at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019. At that ceremony Alsop was given the Forum’s Crystal Award for her work for diversity in music, and the score is dedicated to her.

The title comes from ‘A Woman Speaks’, a poem by the American writer and activist Audre Lorde, which ends with an image of restless oceans pounding. Clyne has said that her intention was ‘to write a defiant piece that embraces the power of women’, and that she had this orchestra of women in mind as she wrote. She did not set the poem or follow its shape. What she took from it is its tone, proud and unyielding, and one line, which she wrote into the score above the passage where the music gathers for its final surge.

The piece asks the players for more than their instruments. They use their voices, in song and in short shouted syllables, and they stamp their feet; at the end they rise and stand together. In a programme about the sea it is the odd one out, a piece in which the ocean is an image of human force, and it makes a brisk, bracing curtain-raiser.

What to Listen For

The opening is marked ‘with fire and drive’. The upper strings dig in with repeated, heavy down-bow strokes, and the players punch out a shouted ‘Huh’ between them. It is closer to a work song or a protest chant than to a seascape.

A gentler episode follows, though the pulse never slackens. The woodwinds set up overlapping, wave-like arpeggios, and the first violins, the second violins and the violas come in one after another, each section singing a melody as well as playing it, until the single lines have become a chorus. The driving music returns. Later the clarinet and bassoons begin a quieter tune that quickly speeds up, and this is where the line from Lorde’s poem stands in the score: fast, repeating figures in the upper strings push the rest of the orchestra up a slowly climbing scale in ever larger swells. The winds take over the figure, and the piece ends, in the composer’s words, wildly and with great force, with the orchestra on its feet.