Songs Sung and Unsung: Sarah Kirkland Snider's "Penelope"

[ADAM THIS HAS AUDIO] If you've read your fairy tales, then you know how easy it is to get lost in the proverbial woods of life. But if you've read Homer's Odyssey, then you've witnessed the  angst and pain of finding the way back home. In the millennia since the blind seer penned his epic of self-discovery, The Odyssey has inspired any number of other masterpieces; even within recent years, Charles Frazier's stunning novel Cold Mountain and the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? have transplanted Homer's story into times and contexts closer to our own. These modern-day Odysseys  prove that the human instincts to lose oneself in the dark thicket of the world and to seek - through all manner of travail - a return to the the soul's true abode are as eternal as the march of time itself. Just as timeless are the anxieties of those in our lives who witness our getting lost and await our safe return. Homer's Penelope sat for years at water's edge waiting for her Odysseus to come home from the Trojan War, all the while nervous energy exiting her fingertips in stitches woven, then unraveled, for the shroud or her father-in-law, Laertes. Odysseus returned, and yet, he didn't. For no true journey leaves the traveler unchanged. And a journey home - back to the heart of who we are -  is no journey at all if, at the end of it, the traveler bears no mark of his travels. With the return of Odysseus-but-not-Odysseus begins Penelope's own journey back to a man she knows yet doesn't know, an intimate forever changed and as such, paradoxically, a stranger. That journey - Penelope's journey - is the setting for the most recent addition to the auspicious litany of Odyssey-inspired artworks, Sarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope, a song cycle for voice, chamber orchestra and electric instruments sung from the various perspectives of Penelope, Odysseus and Nausicaa. In this cycle, a long-absent Odysseus returns from war with profound post-traumatic amnesia to his abandoned Penelope, whose empathy for the lost and suffering soldier moves her to try to bring him "home" to himself. Snider and playwright/lyricist Ellen McLaughlin unfold a compelling narrative arc over fourteen songs. But don't expect the likes of Schubert and Schumann from this song cycle; the musical language of Penelope couldn't be more different from that of Dichterliebe, Die schöne Müllerin or even the dark-hued Winterreise. Snider's Penelope is an indie rock song cycle - some might say a concept album, given its "popular" musical style - of one upsettingly beautiful song after another strung together in a garland of insanity, desperation, tenderness, remembering and, if not ultimately recovery and redemption, then at least acceptance and release. It is a testament to the strength of Snider and McLaughlin's collaboration that their work on the theme of post-traumatic psychological reintegration, textually and musically so well integrated, so effectively evokes a sound world of psychological disintegration and instability. That instability defines the cycle's first song, "The Stranger with the Face of a Man I Loved," whose text tells of Penelope's rage at the return of the long-absent Odysseus. Irregular rhythms, constantly shifting harmonies and instrumental textures and lines like  "I try to forget the times he lied and lied/before he just left me here" evoke both Odysseus' war-induced amnesia and Penelope's anger. Tapping your foot to the beginning of this song is as fruitful as trying to hold onto one of the ocean waves that eventually pushed Homer's Odysseus back home: [audio:http://wosu.org/audio/classical/2010/111810-Penelope-stranger.mp3] (Performance by vocalist Shara Worden and Signal) Empathy begins to overcome anger in the cycle's second song, "This is What You're Like." Penelope begins the song yearning to hear Odysseus speak: "I'd give a lot to hear him/tell me lies like that again/tell me much of anything," and ends with desperate pleas: "Do you remember, you are a man who/Told me you loved me...This is what you're like/Try to remember": [audio:http://wosu.org/audio/classical/2010/111810-Penelope-this-is-what-you're-like.mp3] A few songs later is "Nausicaa," a moment from the legend of Nausicaa's guiding the shipwrecked Odysseus to safety at the court of her kingly father, who eventually supplies him with the ship that takes him home. Snider/McLaughlin's Nausicaa tells Odysseus "You look so lost, Stranger./But you're not lost/'Cause I've found you./ Just take my hand, Stranger ... /And I will lead you home": [audio:http://wosu.org/audio/classical/2010/111810-Penelope-nausicaa.mp3] Interspersed among the expressions of our Homeric characters are songs unsung, instrumental tracks for which texts appear among the other song lyrics but are not heard on the recording. The text of the cycle's third "song," "The Honeyed Fruit," relates the episode of the lotus-eaters, whom Odysseus encounters on an exotic island, and who drift into a sleep of forgetfulness when they eat the fruit of the lotus plant. The music fashions a sort of sonic corridor into the psychiatric ward that is the setting for the next song (with whose refrain, "I'm lost in this night ... But I'm not as lost as them," Odysseus protests too much). Here's some of "The Honeyed Fruit": [audio:http://wosu.org/audio/classical/2010/111810-Penelope-honeyed.mp3] Another unsung song, "I Died of Waiting," is an excerpt from Odysseus' conversation with his dead mother's spirit. The orchestra lingers but tries to push on amidst a fog of real-world racket. [audio:http://wosu.org/audio/classical/2010/111810-Penelope-i-died.mp3] And in the text for "And Then You Shall Be Lost Indeed," Tiresias tells Odysseus of the disastrous consequences of dallying with the cattle of the sun God, Helios. Tiresias' words are not uttered, so the instrumental music takes on the role of prophet: [audio:http://wosu.org/audio/classical/2010/111810-Penelope-and-then.mp3] All of this textual variety - some songs sung, others unsung, shifting voices and perspectives - deepens the impression of the disorientation Odysseus suffers and by his presence inflicts on others. But through it all, Penelope's narrative arc is rendered faithful to the overall sweep of Homer's original, and it is only at the end of Penelope that the cycle makes its most striking divergence from The Odyssey. With the final song, "As He Looks Out to Sea," we are forced to confront the possibility that there are some journeys from which even the gentlest waters cannot carry us back. Unlike Homer's Odysseus, who makes his way home and resumes his life, Snider/McLaughlin's Odysseus can only stare out at a sea as blank and expansive as the empty pages of the book of his existence. His story, the lyrics tell us, "... tells itself,/The pages turn and tell themselves/Backwards and forwards like the tide": [audio:http://wosu.org/audio/classical/2010/111810-Penelope-as-he-looks.mp3] This nihilistic ending is perhaps Penelope's closest resemblance to Schubert's song cycle Winterreise, whose anti-hero searches for himself through the dead of winter only to find a grotesque and frightening Doppelgänger and live out his fate to the insane soundtrack of the grinding of a hurdy-gurdy. At the end of Penelope, we're left hanging, forced to question Homer's optimism and those fairy tale endings we used to hear about. Maybe they were for a different age, before so many things that wreck our souls piled up in the world. Penelope makes us wonder, Can I find my path again in this world, which war, sickness, greed and death are, like Penelope with Laertes' shroud, unraveling? - Jennifer Hambrick