-
Name
-
Sarah Kirkland Snider
-
Bio
-
Recently deemed “one of the decade’s more gifted, up-and-coming modern classical composers” (Pitchfork), “a potentially significant voice on the American music landscape” (David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer), and “an important representative of 21st century trends in composition” (New York Classical Review), composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” (The New York Times), “groundbreaking” (The Boston Globe), and “poignant, deeply personal” (The New Yorker). With an ear for the poetic and the architectural, Snider’s music draws upon a diversity of influences to render a nuanced command of immersive storytelling. Of her orchestral song cycle, Penelope, Pitchfork‘s Jayson Greene proclaimed: “Snider’s music lives in…an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all.”
Snider’s works have been commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Britten Sinfonia, and National Arts Centre Orchestra; percussionist Colin Currie, tenor Nicholas Phan, and vocalist Shara Nova (formerly Worden); eighth blackbird, A Far Cry, Ensemble Signal, The Knights, and yMusic; Roomful of Teeth, Cantus, and Trinity Wall Street Choir; and many others. Conductors who have championed her work include Andreas Delfs, David Danzmayr, Andre dé Ridder, James Gaffigan, Giancarlo Guerrero, Ryan McAdams, Rossen Milanov, Edwin Outwater, and Leonard Slatkin. Her music has been heard in concert halls around the world including Carnegie Hall, the Elbphilharmonie, the Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and Wigmore Hall; and at festivals such as Big Ears, BAM Next Wave, Aspen, Ecstatic, Colorado, Cross-linx,Sundance, BAM’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Bang On a Can Summer, Liquid Music, 21C Liederabend, New York Festival of Song, Podium (Germany), Oranjewoud (Holland), and Apples & Olives (Switzerland.) Penelope, her acclaimed song cycle inspired by The Odyssey on text by Ellen McLaughlin, has been performed over fifty times in North America and Europe.
Current projects include Forward Into Light, an orchestral commission inspired by the American women’s suffrage movement for the New York Philharmonic to premiere on their season finale concert in June 2020, and an opera on 12th century visionary/abbess/composer Hildegard von Bingen–commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, with a grant from Opera America–to premiere at Prototype Festival in January 2023. Highlights of Snider’s 2019-2020 season include performances of her 27-minute tone poem Hiraeth by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra under Xian Zhang, the Louisville Orchestra under Teddy Abrams, and the Cabrillo Festival under Cristian Macelaru. Louisville Orchestra also performs The Blue Hour, an hourlong work for soprano and string orchestra co-composed by Snider, Caroline Shaw, Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, and Shara Nova, who will also be the featured vocalist at this performance. Snider is Distinguished Guest Composer at the 2020 Winnipeg New Music Festival, which features performances of Hiraeth and Penelope (also featuring Shara Nova) under the baton of Daniel Raiskin. She is also a featured composer at Soundstreams’s RBC Bridges program, which will present a survey of her choral works in Toronto. Something for the Dark, Snider’s popular 12-minute portrait of resilience, is to be performed by the Phoenix Symphony under Tito Muñoz and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra under Vinay Parameswaran, among others. Snider’s season culminates in the world premiere of Forward Into Light at David Geffen Hall, with Jaap van Zweden leading the New York Philharmonic. Snider will also curate a concert of chamber music for the finale of the New York Philharmonic hotspots festival to coincide with her premiere. Forward Into Light will also be heard at Aspen Music Festival, under the baton of Hugh Wolff, alongside the premiere of a new set of songs for Soprano, Tenor, and Two Pianos commissioned by the festival entitled Solitude of Self.
