Ann Cleare (born 1983)
Ann Cleare was born in County Offaly, Ireland. She studied at University College Cork where she earned an MPhil, and at Harvard University where she completed a PhD in composition. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin.
Ann Cleare composes music for traditional orchestras, ensembles, and solo instruments, but she also works in electronics, sonic environments, and hybrid instrumental design. Her website states that Ann Cleare’s work “explores the static and sculptural nature of sound, probing the extremities of timbre, texture, colour, and form.”
Ann Cleare’s music is less concerned with traditional notions of melody, harmony, and rhythm, and more focused on creating a sonic landscape. Her 2009 composition inner exists in three versions for cello, viola, or violin, accompanied by piano. Here’s the cello version:
She has written:
Inner probes the idea of a subcutaneous space within sound. Through its kinetic activity and autoscopic tendencies, the piece aims to explore internal structures of sound and turn them outward: isolating, focusing on, and revealing sounds in their time and space. The piano and cello are dependent on each other to function. They alternate the roles of what is considered interior and exterior: within harsh timbral worlds there are intricate, smaller worlds at work, and within large delicate worlds, harsh inner worlds exist. Inner worlds grow, escape, separate from, and intrude on, the outer world. Outer worlds encompass, surround, protect, support and dissolve into inner worlds.
Her 2012-13 composition phôsphors (… of ether) separates the orchestra into three instrumental "islands": violins at the top, violas and cellos in the middle, and double-bases and brass at the bottom. “A fourth composite of timpani, percussion, and harp act not so much as an island but as a mobile force, a sonic antennae that can branch its ears and handles outward to all three islands, moving between them, carrying sonic colours, energies, and matter amongst them.”
For her composition eöl (composed 2014-15), she has designed small percussion instruments for accompaniment by clarinet, saxophone, accordion, cello, and double bass. She writes:
The collection of percussion instruments is based around the melding of different metals to create unusual timbres and resonances. These include metallic arm and hand pieces that the percussionist simultaneously wears and plays, and a metallic table instrument with rods that detach on to the percussionist’s fingers.
The title eöl alludes to the Aeolian harp, whose strings are vibrated by wind and hence played without human intervention, but also the Tolkien character, who is a skilled metallurgist.