ARCHORA

Anna Thorvaldsdottir (Anna Sigríður Þorvaldsdóttir) was born July 11, 1977, in Borgarnes, Iceland, and is now based in London. She completed ARCHORA in 2022 for a commission from BBC Radio 3 for the BBC Proms, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, and Klangspuren Schwaz Festival. The BBC Philharmonic gave the world premiere performance at the BBC Proms under Eva Ollikainen’s direction on August 11, 2022, in London’s Royal Albert Hall. This is the first performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The score of ARCHORA calls for 2 flutes, alto flute, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, trombone, bass trombone, tuba, bass tuba, percussion (three players: large gong on D-flat, large gong on D, tam-tam, large bass drums), organ (optional; used in these performances), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses, all divided into two parts). ARCHORA is about 20 minutes long.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir hails from Iceland, growing up only about twenty miles due north of Reykjavik in the small town of Borgarnes, though the trip to the capital took an hour and a half until a tunnel was built under Hvalfjörður fjord, cutting the travel time in half. Her family was musical, and she was exposed to Icelandic traditional music, especially vocal songs related to the ancient literary tradition of the Poetic Edda, and the ubiquitous pop, rock, and electronic dance music for which Iceland is known. Classical music came later. After trying out several instruments she fell in love with the cello, though for lack of a local teacher she studied the instrument with a violinist. She eventually traveled to Reykjavik for lessons and also began experimenting with composing, working with the progressive English-born composer John Speight.

Thorvaldsdottir went on to graduate studies at the University of California, San Diego, where she worked with the composer Rand Steiger. Steiger’s experience combining electronic and acoustic musical sources resonated with Thorvaldsdottir’s physical treatment of sound. She herself has worked with electronic media and, seeking to dissolve the constraints of the concert environment, has also experimented with theatrical elements in her work. Her 2015 chamber opera UR_, which was staged in Germany, Norway, Switzerland, and Iceland, reveals her interest in layering and blending ideas and narratives in an allegorical critique of human progress.

Also in 2015, the New York Philharmonic awarded Thorvaldsdottir the Kravis Emerging Composer Award, resulting in the commission for her METACOSMOS. That piece was played by the BSO in 2020 and by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in 2023, when she was a co-curator and featured composer of Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music. Her work is frequently performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and has been programmed by the Oslo Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, CAPUT Ensemble, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Los Angeles Philharmonic, among many others. The U.S.-based International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) gave a portrait concert of Thorvaldsdottir’s music at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in 2014 and another at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., as well as having recorded two albums of her music. The Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Eva Ollikainen recorded ARCHORA and AIŌN for an album released in 2023.

Thorvaldsdottir often begins the compositional process with graphic representations of a work’s structure and trajectory, creating a quick visual metaphor to stand in for the much longer, more intricate process of composing a piece. Extramusical metaphors may serve to anchor the idea of a piece, although in the end it’s her direct relationship with sound itself that is both the origin and goal of her music. Her smaller ensemble works can be astonishingly subtle and nuanced, encouraging the listener to attend to the most innocuous of gestures, the smallest changes in texture, pitch, and timbre. Those changes are embedded in a musical form that seems often to extend time, to give the listener the chance to stop and listen to those small moments, although of course this is illusory, part of the magic of musical time.

In addition to the complex and unique sound-worlds that Thorvaldsdottir conjures from instruments, there are pockets and passages within many of her pieces that relate to Medieval chant, early polyphony, and Iceland’s folk and church music. The expanded or disembodied sense of time in those musical sources parallels the overarching timescape of her music, which we might relate to geological or cosmic time. On the other end of the spectrum, her scores are detailed and specific in each moment; the ostensible “wholeness” of the music’s audible surface is often created via an accumulation of exacting actions. Each piece balances long-term architectural elegance with the spontaneity of virtuosity.

The orchestra has been Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s primary medium for the past several years, enabling a broadening of the narratives and explorations that underly those pieces. Those explorations embrace concepts simultaneously cosmological and mystical, seeming to acknowledge that whatever science has illuminated, there is yet more to discover, and beyond any discovery we will find, perpetually, further realms of speculation and wonder. When discussing her music, Thorvaldsdottir emphasizes that sense of wonder, of things that can’t be known but that are enlivened by the very process of contemplation. Of ARCHORA, she writes,

The core inspiration behind ARCHORA centers around the notion of a primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm—a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The piece revolves around the extremes on the spectrum between the Primordia and its resulting afterglow—and the conflict between these elements that are nevertheless fundamentally one and the same. The halo emerges from the Primordia but they have both lost perspective and the connection to one another, experiencing themselves individually as opposing forces rather than one and the same.

The “meaning” of the music, in the end, resists direct representation in language, leading the composer to evoke energies, conflicts, ideas we can sense or feel rather than fully know. As the composer has written, “[I]n general I prefer to have a limited programme text as it is important to me that everyone is able to experience the music individually and find their own worlds in it. Also, the inspiration behind a piece is not something I am trying to describe through the music as such—it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere, and material of the piece. The music then stands on its own, on its own terms.”

Thorvaldsdottir’s impulse is akin to those that guided Franz Liszt or Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems, but the particularities of her inspiration are as removed from the 19th-century’s detailed literary allusions as her music is from Romanticism. Her sense of musical time is quite different: although the surface of the music changes constantly, deeper, longer-term sonic processes are also audibly at play, such as long pedal notes and slowly unfolding melodic lines that project a sense of depth and dimension. The sonic power of orchestra has the potential to overwhelm, but matches in many details the intricacy and flexibility of chamber music. While these characteristics are common to most of Thorvaldsdottir’s work, each piece has its own affect and identity, created through attention to every facet of the process. Note, for example, the distinctive instrumentation of ARCHORA, clearly leaning toward the bass end of the orchestra spectrum: the ensemble lacks the penetrating tones of oboes and trumpets; the percussion section consists of gongs, tam-tams, and large bass drums, with nothing to provide a sharp, bright accent. This somber sonic palette helps create a sense of vastness and massiveness.

The composer indicates that the piece is in three connected parts. From its elemental opening on a deep, sustained D-flat ARCHORA gradually accumulates detail—harmonic smears, percussive pizzicato in the strings, and a series of independent, descending chromatic lines. A clear change in the harmonic center marks the start of the second part, which is more transparent, evolving toward more clearly defined gestures. The third part, which is nearly half the total length of the piece, begins with another definite harmonic shift and features clearly tonal, chorale-like passages that are blurred by glissandos, unexpected harmonic and coloristic highlights, and ambiguous, slipping rhythm. Spectral woodwinds in chromatic waves float through and over what serves as a long-drawn-out cadence that feels at once tentative and final.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the BSO’s Director of Program Publications.