To listen to a piece of orchestral music is to enter a forest, to walk around there for a while and to get blissfully lost in a world of sound, story and imagination.
Award-winning composer Sarah Kirkland Snider knows well that world of the delicious intangibilities of sound.
“There’s something about the orchestra where I feel like it immerses me in a dream world of sorts,” Snider said. “It’s something about the realm of possibility, the size of the canvas and the palette.”
A new recording captures the ever-shifting moods and colors of that dream world and explores themes of memory, resilience and renewal in four of Snider’s orchestral works. Forward into Light (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch Records) features the title work alongside Snider’s Drink the Wild Ayre, Eye of Mnemosyne and Something for the Dark in ravishing performances by the Metropolis Ensemble conducted by Andrew Cyr.
Though a veteran of the orchestral world—Snider says she fell in love with what she calls “that whole wash of sound” as a young cellist playing in school orchestras—Snider and Grammy Award-winning recording producer Silas Brown took an unorthodox approach to recording the works on Forward into Light. In a recent interview, Snider talked about that approach, which enabled them to achieve the kind of nuanced sound Snider says today’s listeners expect.
“Most listeners have grown up hearing all kinds of music recorded with the modern studio and mixing tools and all of that,” Snider said. “Our ears are very spoiled, and our ears crave definition and clarity and, I think, a sense of an immersive sound world. And for me, the orchestral sound world is so immersive live, I don’t want to sacrifice any of that to the recording experience.”
In the recording’s technical clarity, as much as in the raw materials of Snider’s scores, Forward into Light is a vivid testament to Snider’s gift for orchestration, which places her among music’s finest colorists. The kaleidoscopic instrumentation of the recording’s title work, Forward into Light—inspired by the women’s suffrage movement—tells a tale of challenge and hope in a world in which the only constant is constant change.
A tribute to its commissioners, the Emerson String Quartet, the recorded sound of Drink the Wild Ayre magnifies the string quartet’s warmth of sound without sacrificing any of its intimacy.
The technical processes behind the recording prove particularly spectacular in Snider’s Eye of Mnemosyne, a tribute to the Kodak Girls, who graced ads for Kodak’s early cameras and became icons for creativity and memory. The recording renders the fluid montage of full-orchestra wide shots and intimate close-ups in Snider’s score with remarkable crispness.
The recording’s final work, Something for the Dark, chronicles urban renewal efforts in Detroit, highlighting hope, hard work, challenges, and, ultimately, transformation. This work confirms Snider as a composer of bold strokes, committed as much to storytelling in big sounds as to holding space for detail in diaphanous webs of color.
In the video, Snider shares more about the novel process for recording Forward into Light and about the deeper inspiration for the works on the recording.
Transcript of interview:
Jennifer Hambrick: You have composed music across a wide range of instrumentation, but orchestral sound seems to hold a special place for you, and an especially intimate place for you. If you would, talk about your particular experience of the orchestral sound world.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, so I first fell in love with the orchestral sound world as a kid playing cello in school orchestras. I just loved being in that whole wash of sound. As a kid, I was fascinated by the way all the lines interrelated and the different parts and the colors. And I never imagined that I would grow up to be a composer when I was a kid, but when I got serious about composition and got out from graduate school and started, you know, having an opportunity to write for orchestra, I fell more deeply in love with it. And it’s become perhaps my favorite thing to do. I just really love having a large canvas, a large palette of colors to work with and being able to explore remote psychological interiors and sort of discursive narrative journeys the way that you really only can in orchestral music.
Jennifer Hambrick: So, in a sense, you feel that you are able to kind of write differently for this medium, if I can put it that way, than for other media?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, I think so. I think every—I love writing for all different—I mean, I love writing for solo piano, too, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something about the orchestra where I feel like it immerses me in a dream world of sorts. Like, I feel like I have different kinds of ideas than I do when I’m writing for chamber music or solo instrument. It’s something about the realm of possibility, again, the size of the canvas and the palette. It just ignites new ideas in me, it takes me in different directions than I would have expected. The orchestra itself gives me new compositional ideas. So, I get very excited.
Jennifer Hambrick: In your notes to the recording, you write, “When I began thinking about recording my own orchestral music, I knew I wanted a sonically immersive, dynamic, and intricate listening. experience—one in which the subtlest orchestration details and tempo changes could be fully realized.” How did you accomplish this objective in the recording?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, that’s a great question. It was definitely an idiosyncratic approach to recording for orchestra, a very modern approach in that we had a lot of isolation and separation. We recorded, like, the strings separately from the winds. And we were very careful in the beginning to create this sort of tempo map that built in rubato and fermatas and tempo changes so that everything would feel very natural and musical, so we would sacrifice expressivity, but at the same time, we would maximize our control in the mixing stage. And so the more control you have over each individual element, of course, the more you can control the balances and really be sure to clarify what’s the foreground, what’s the background, which you can’t do when you’re just hanging a bunch of microphones in a theater and recording the overall picture, which is the way that orchestra music used to be recorded. And you know, I’m sure there are some classical music purists that would object to the way that we chose to record this. But in my mind, this is a 21st-century approach to creating orchestra music, and why not take full advantage of all the tools that we have at our disposal? Particularly when most listeners have grown up hearing all kinds of music recorded with the modern studio and mixing tools and all of that. You know, our ears are very spoiled, and our ears crave definition and clarity and, I think, a sense of an immersive sound world. And for me, the orchestral sound world is so immersive live, I don’t want to sacrifice any of that to the recording experience, which is what I think can happen if you just hang a bunch of microphones and hit record. So, yeah, it’s really about trying to replicate that kind of world building that you can get with pop music.
Jennifer Hambrick: Yeah, that kind of came to mind. I’m also thinking of a whole generation of folks who have listened to video game music, particularly through their headphones or through their devices or what have you, with surround sound …
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s part of my thinking, too. Really quickly, my kids—I would often play them recordings of older orchestral music, like Stravinsky or something. And they’d be like, “this just doesn’t sound very good,” because their ears are just so calibrated to other kinds of, you know, greater differentiation in the listening experience. And I feel like if we want to bring kids more into classical music and the recordings of modern classical music, I think it’s important to keep up with the kinds of recordings that their ears are used to.
Jennifer Hambrick: So interesting because what I kind of hear you saying—but please don’t let me put words into your mouth—is that if we were to go into the concert hall to hear an orchestra perform live one of your works on this recording, we might get a very different sound world, we might hear a very different sound world—same piece of music, maybe, but we’ll hear it very, very differently than we will hear it on this recording.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Absolutely, absolutely. And this recording, you know, this is me trying to capture my idea version of the piece, of each piece. And I’ve been fortunate to have some wonderful live performances of these pieces, but they’re all very different from one another. It depends on the orchestra, the conductor, the hall, the acoustics, you know, the players. So, you have very little control as a composer over any live performance. But the benefit of going into the studio is that if you have the kind of separation and isolation, if you approach the recording the way that we did, you really do have a lot of control over what the listener will ultimately hear. And so, I really felt like I could be very painterly, you know, with all of the details and the decision making, which was very gratifying.
Jennifer Hambrick: Interesting, okay. Thank you. You also write in your notes that the four works on the recording “… share themes of perseverance, alliance, and evolution through dark and light—concepts,” you continue, “that have been at the forefront of my mind in recent years.” Could you talk about why those themes—perseverance, alliance, and evolution—have been front-of-mind for you, and also about how the works on this recording converse with each other, if you will, on those themes.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, you know, not to get too into the weeds, but the political situation in our country has been very divisive and difficult for a long time. And there’s been a lot of dark and disturbing things happening. And I think we need reasons to feel hopeful and to remember that humankind has been through a lot and to look back in history and to remember how to learn from the lessons of the past. And, you know, one of those lessons that I think especially that I have taken to heart as a woman who has encountered my own fair share of struggles in this field is the importance of having hope and the importance of believing in the good in humanity and in our own power to make change. And so, for me, these pieces—the forward into light piece is about the women’s suffrage movement. Something for the Dark is a meditation on resilience. And Drink the Wild Ayre also has themes of moving through dark and light. Eye of Mnemosyne is about memory and the way we preserve our understanding of the past. And there’s a lot of – again, in that piece, a lot of literal evolution through dark and light in the sense that it was a piece about – it was commissioned in part by the Kodak Foundation to celebrate the centennial of George Eastman’s birth, and commissioned by the Rochester Philharmonic, which he co-founded. And we were granted access to the Kodak archives, and we focused on the Kodak Girls and the way that they represented hope in a very difficult, dark time through World War I. But this idea of—you know, we need to feel hopeful about things, even in the darkest of times. And so, for me, that is a fascination, a point of fascination, is how we persevere. Whether it’s through difficult political moments or personal grief, you know, the name of the game as a human being really is perseverance. I mean, that’s what life is all about. And so, these are themes that I’m continually fascinated by in music. But because music iso a medium or an art form where, it’s so much about tension and release and storytelling in the sense of sonic resolutions, it gives you a lot of opportunities to think about how to grapple with adversity and challenge and how to perceive ways forward that aren’t necessarily neat and tidy and tied up with a bow, but that maybe perhaps shed some light and some wisdom.
Jennifer Hambrick: Okay, thank you. And if we could just take maybe a few minutes and dig just a little deeper into the works on this recording. Forward into Light –This work is informed by the women’s suffrage movement. Was there anything in particular in the history of the women’s suffrage movement that inspired you to reach for this subject matter, if you will, as the basis for this piece?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, I mean, I think just reading about—again, echoing what I just said, but this idea of, you know, the constant setbacks that these women encountered over more than a hundred years trying to get the right to vote. And how so many of them lived and died without seeing much change, and yet they kept persevering with this movement. You know, many of them endured harassment or alienation from their families or death threats or forced feedings in jail, incarceration, et cetera, et cetera. That’s fascinating to me, how people stay focused on a goal through those dark times. But also, this idea of partnership and collaboration was really interesting to me, the way that these women would work together and these synergistic partnerships that would help each other edge the movement forward. I wanted to take that idea and translate it musically. So, I would have these different motives that sort of interlock and edge each other forward. And then I also have a quote from Ethyl Smyth. She wrote this piece The March of the Women, which became the women’s suffrage anthem. That sort of floats throughout the piece. And near the end of the piece, there’s a coalescence of all these different musical ideas, which are meant to represent the different ideas of the women. So, there were a lot of, like, metaphors from the movement that I wanted to sort of depict musically without necessarily creating, like, an extramusical narrative per se, a programmatic narrative. But I was interested in distilling the emotional and psychological contours of faith and doubt and how we persevere.
Jennifer Hambrick: Okay, thank you. You mentioned your work Eye of Mnemosyne, which is also on this recording, and that it explores the portrayal of women in relation to photographic technology and memory. In your words, the piece—a quote, again—“explores how memory, innovation, and culture refract through the lens of photography.” You talk about the so-called Kodak Girls, which you mentioned a moment ago. So talk, if you could, a little bit more about the sort of more immediate inspiration for this piece and how the piece embodies it.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, so I credit my collaborator Deborah Johnson with this idea. We were commissioned together to create this multimedia orchestra piece, as I mentioned, to celebrate George Eastman’s legacy. And we were granted access to the Kodak archives and she became really fascinated by the Kodak girls and what they tended to represent. And they reminded her of the muses of the Greek goddess of memory, whose name was Mnemosyne. And she had these muses that inspired her. And so, Deborah had this idea to sort of create a piece that tracked the evolution of George Eastman’s contributions through the prism of the Kodak Girls themselves and the ways that they were muses for memory and the way that we preserve our memories. So, it’s a meditation on memory, but it’s also a meditation on what the country was going through at the time, with World War One. There are issues of, you know, loss and grief and battle. Issues—ideas of homecoming and nostalgia and yearning for simpler times and how people pulled together to try to make things better for the country. And the ways that they would use photographs and photography to try to cheer the country up, cheer themselves up. Sometimes putting on a happy, brave face even when it wasn’t necessarily genuine. So, yeah.
Jennifer Hambrick: Okay, thank you. You also mentioned a moment ago Drink the Wild Ayre, one of the two other works on this recording. The title comes from a line in Emerson’s Poem “Merlin’s Song.” I was just curious, did the poem actually inspire the piece? I certainly at least in part inspired the title of the piece. But what is the deeper inspiration for Drink the Wild Ayre?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, so, the deeper inspiration—I was really thinking about the Emerson Quartet, because as I mentioned, they commissioned the piece, and it was their final commission, which I was so deeply honored by. I grew up listening to their recordings so much, and I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would be commissioned by them. It was beyond a dream come true. It was something I never knew was remotely possible, and I was so deeply honored. And I met up with them and got to know them, and they’re four of the most wonderful men, just incredible mensches, wonderful people. And they have this extraordinary relationship with each other, where they were so good together. And I think that’s hard to find over a long period of time. You often have falling outs or, you know, invariably what happened to The Beatles happens to a lot of musical ensembles. And so, here’s an example of four guys who toughed it out for their entire careers and are the best of friends and. So, I wanted to write something about what it’s like to take a journey like that with people, where there’s, again, this evolution through dark and light, good times and bad, but you tough it out together. And Drink the Wild Ayre, yes, it was a nod to their namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I was just thinking about this, how that line is sort of an apt metaphor for the journey itself of collaborating artistically. Drink the Wild Ayre—I’m forgetting now the line that it comes from, but it’s something about “swim in the sea,” it’s basically, like, live deeply and meaningfully, live with a sense of adventure, which is definitely something that they did. So, I wanted the piece to traverse a wide range of emotional terrain. There’s darkness and light. There’s struggle and triumph. You know, it’s only a 12-minute piece, but I wanted to try to encapsulate what I see as the magic of a really wonderful partnership.
Jennifer Hambrick: Sure, the lyricism, actually, there, as well.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah,
Jennifer Hambrick: And last but not least, finally, Something for the Dark, the fourth work on this recording. Commissioned by Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the work explores resilience—again—against the backdrop of Detroit’s history, at least that seems to have been sort of the inspiration for you. What else went into your thinking about this piece and how you wanted it to sound?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, so this piece was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony in 2014. I won a competition o theirs for female composers. And at the same time, one of my best friends had just moved to Detroit and was part of this urban renewal project, where they were converting old bombed-out lots into new homes for very little money and creating organic farms in these burned-out lots and beekeeping. And this wonderful partnership amongst neighbors, where they were really breathing new life into this dead part of the city, or many parts of the city. And I was fascinated by this, and she was constantly telling me stories about it. So, I thought I wanted to write a piece about that, as this metaphor, again, of resilience and renewal. At the same time, I encountered some poetry by Philip Levine, who was a former U.S. Poet Laureate, born and raised in Detroit, and he often wrote about the Detroit working class. And I encountered this wonderful poem he wrote for his wife. It’s called “For Fran,” and it’s about his wife preparing flower beds for the winter and how that becomes a metaphor for renewal and resilience. And the last line of the poem says, “out of whatever we have been, we will make something for the dark.” And yeah, it’s funny because when I started the piece, I actually thought it was going to start with this idea of promise—Detroit in the ‘50s, this idea of boom and success, and that the piece would go through some darkness and emerge victorious again, representing the urban renewal. But as the piece evolved, it actually took a darker course than I expected. And the second half of the piece ends in a different kind of way, but I think it’s actually a more genuine reflection of where Detroit is now and the kind of urban renewal that’s happening. It’s not about trying to reclaim the former glory in the same way. It’s about reinventing yourself into something different, perhaps with greater wisdom and clarity and reality. So, I was happy that the music sort of took me there naturally without my even attempting to impose that narrative. It just kind of turned out that way,
Jennifer Hambrick: Hmm. Very interesting. And fortunate. Nice when that happens, right?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, I think sometimes our subconscious or unconscious ideas are better left to themselves than we sometimes give them credit for.
Jennifer Hambrick: Interesting, interesting. Once again, I’ve been speaking with Sarah Kirkland Snider about her recording Forward into Light, which features four of her orchestral works including the title work, Forward into Light. Sarah, thank you so much again for your time today.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Thank you so much for having me, Jennifer. Such a pleasure.
