The Years

Text by Stephanie Fleischmann

I wrote The Years in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic - a period of enforced isolation. Reflecting on this unprecedented shared experience, this music ranges from quiet solitude, to the alarm of a system being fractured. My hope was to create music that resonates with that moment in time, but also with any moment in time - both in the past and future.

The Years was commissioned and premiered by The Scottish Chamber Orchestra during my tenure as Associate Composer from 2019-2022. This work also provided an opportunity to bring two sound-worlds that I love writing for together - the orchestra and chorus. The music for The Years contrasts very serene passages with more turbulent and forceful moments to evoke the mood and imagery of the text written by Stephanie Fleischmann; a meditation on the mystery of time.

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