The music for that project is an elegy for Ms. Clyne’s mother, who died in 2008. Shortly after the funeral Ms. Clyne was in Oxford, England, where, in the window of a thrift shop, she spotted a baroque-style violin with an elaborately carved scroll in the shape of a gargoyle. She bought it for 5.99 pounds (about $9 today). That violin inspired a series of works written for strings and imbued with a deep sense of loss and mourning. Stylistically, they carry echoes of English Renaissance music, folk traditions and Britten, while possessing the startlingly three-dimensional quality of sound that is a hallmark of Ms. Clyne’s music.

When he worked on “The Violin,” Mr. Dorman said, he didn’t know much about the private pain at the root of the pieces. “The music gave me a feeling of sadness, but my goal wasn’t to illustrate that or give it some sort of narrative,” he said.

The violinist Jennifer Koh first discovered Ms. Clyne’s music through a live recording of “Within Her Arms,” a lament for string orchestra sufficiently poignant for critics to draw comparisons to Barber’s Adagio. “I do a lot of contemporary music.” Ms. Koh said. “Sometimes things reach you and it’s colorful or intricate or structured in an interesting way or the orchestration is wonderful. But the extraordinary thing about Anna’s music is that it is incredibly moving. And I hadn’t had that reaction for a long time.”

Ms. Koh has since commissioned a number of works from Ms. Clyne, including a violin concerto, “The Seamstress,” which will receive its world premiere in Chicago in May. The work is based on a Yeats poem about a coat made out of song and “covered with embroideries/out of old mythologies.” Ms. Clyne did not take up needle and thread in drafting this work, but the cover page of the score features a drawing she made of a seamstress. A vintage Singer sewing machine stands on the mantel of her uncluttered studio, below framed photographs of Stravinsky, Cage and the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, all caught in moments of intense listening.