Anna Thorvaldsdottir (born 1977)
Anna Sigríður Þorvaldsdóttir, whose name is frequently spelled Anna Thorvaldsdottir, grew up in Bogarnes, a small town on the south-west coast of Iceland characterized by a landscape of mountains and the ocean that continues to inform her music. She studied composition at the University of California, San Diego, where she earned her MA and PhD. She is currently based in the London area and is composer-in-residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir has written music for solo instruments and chamber ensembles, and sometimes does installations that involve lights as well as music, but her preferred medium is the orchestra for its wide variety of sounds and textures. She has sought to bring out the musical qualities in nature, but not in a 19th century romantic view. Instead, her music suggests the rhythms of the natural world as well as stasis, tectonic shifts as well as fragile crumbling structures.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s 2011 orchestral work Aeriality consists of (in her words) “vast sound-textures combined — and contrasted with — various forms of lyrical material.”
She continues:
AERIALITY refers to the state of gliding through the air with nothing or little to hold on to – as if flying – and the music both portrays the feeling of absolute freedom gained from the lack of attachment and the feeling of unease generated by the same circumstances. The title draws its essence from various aspects of the meaning of the word “aerial” and refers to the visual inspiration that such a view provides. AERIALITY is also a play with words, combining the words “aerial” and “reality”, so as to suggest two different worlds; “reality”, the ground, and “aerial”, the sky or the untouchable.
AERIALITY can be said to be on the border of symphonic music and sound art. Parts of the work consist of thick clusters of sounds that form a unity as the instruments of the orchestra stream together to form a single force – a sound-mass. The sense of individual instruments is somewhat blurred and the orchestra becomes a single moving body, albeit at times forming layers of streaming materials that flow between different instrumental groups. These chromatic layers of materials are extended by the use of quartertones to generate vast sonic textures. At what can perhaps be said to be the climax in the music, a massive sustained ocean of quartertones slowly accumulates and is then released into a brief lyrical field that almost immediately fades out at the peak of its own urgency, only to remain a shadow.
The score of her 2017 orchestral composition Metacosmos includes the following instructions to the musicians:
My music is written as an ecosystem of materials that are carried from one performer — or performers — to the next throughout the process of the work. As you play a phrase, harmony, texture or a lyrical line it is being delivered to you, passed on from another performer — performers — for you to carry on until it is delivered to another. All materials grow in and out of each other, growing and transforming throughout the process.
When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling. It is a way of measuring time and noticing the tiny changes that happen as you walk further along the same thin rope. Absolute tranquility with the necessary amount of concentration needed to perform the task.