Program Note

Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b.1977)
RÓ (Serenity) (2013)
安

“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 tightrope 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.

Brokenness relates to subtle vulnerability and fragility but does not indicate a state of being ‘ruined’ or ‘in pieces’ — it indicates a fragile state of wholeness.”

—Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material. It is written as an ecosystem of sounds and materials that are carried from one performer - or performers - to the next throughout the progress of a work. All materials continuously grow in and out of each other — as a performer plays a phrase, harmony, texture or lyrical line, it is being delivered to another performer as it transforms and develops, passed on to be carried through until it is passed on again to yet another. Anna’s music is often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, and the qualities she tends to be inspired by are often structural, like proportion and flow, as well as relationships of balance between details within a larger structure, and how to move in perspective between the two — the details and the unity of the whole.