So, Sarah and I were classmates at Yale and I've always loved her music so much. It's originally for violin, cello and soprano, and soprano lines often can translate pretty well to the trumpet. I really loved the poem. It's by a writer that she knew at Yale called Ivanna Yi and it's a very short poem.
—Mary Elizabeth Bowden, from “New Classical Tracks: Trumpeter Mary Bowden explores the purity and power of sound” (2019)
For some listeners the style issue is the most interesting aspect of the music, but I think that’s because genre is a hot topic right now and for many critics it’s intriguing to see genre-blending happening on both sides of the classical/pop fence. For me, blending those influences is not something I did consciously - it may sound simplistic, but what I really strove to do throughout the cycle’s composition was think about this woman and this man, the story of their relationship, try to imagine how they felt, and try to imagine how those feelings might translate musically. I wanted style and genre to be totally irrelevant. Paradoxically, of course, this meant consciously reminding myself not to discount an idea or gesture just because it was “poppy,” which is something I used to do in much of my music, particularly when I was in school…
…Together, the three songs are loosely about artistic identity; they were inspired by the poet’s own experience of feeling she had to choose between her growing love of writing poetry and a lifelong study of the violin. The poems are stark and beautiful, by turns quizzical and whimsical and grave, so the music strives to echo those qualities, as well as some of the bittersweetness of discovering a new love while parting with another…
…For our generation, the musical world obviously has so many different voices - gender, race, background, whatever - and to us it’s not about diversity for diversity’s sake, it’s that the table is genuinely so much more interesting with as many of them present as possible. Excluding women on the basis of gender is something that would never happen with the group of people behind this festival, not only because that kind of thinking is totally alien to their values and the way they operate, but because some of the best music in the scene right now is being made by women, and that’s what the Ecstatic Music Festival is about: presenting an accurate snapshot of all the incredible music being made right now in this little fertile patch of terrain between genres. When you’re after the best music and the best festival, it’s not a feminist move; it’s a musical one.
——Sarah Kirkland Snider, from “Ecstatic Music Festival Interview #5: Sarah Kirkland Snider and Rob Moose (2017)
The poem I have not written
comes to me in my sleep,
a woman dressed in white.
I have been waiting for you,
I tell her. After all this time,
why are you still unwritten?
Without shame she slips out of her
dress.
I tried to become a poem, she says,
until I became human.
—”Chrysalis”, Ivanna Yi
Chrysalis (2006)
versions 2011 [soprano and mixed nonet, part of “Taking Turns in My Skin], 2015 [soprano, violin, and cello], 2019 [w/trumpet]
Duration; 3:10 (ver. 2019)
My first exposure to the music of Sarah Kirkland Snider was a solo piano work called The Currents from the album Impressions by pianist Nicholas Phillips. The piano was Snider’s first musical instrument, and some of her earliest works are written for it. The pieces are relatively short, original works reminiscent of the romanticism of Debussy and Chopin. Snider also was attracted to vocal composition early on, particularly Gregorian chant, so her music often contains a lyrical quality that some contemporary composers tend to shy away from. This lyricism has led to extended song cycles that have not only blurred the lines between classical and popular genres but have also produced recording projects that have brought modern studio engineering to the world of classical composition.
While amplification and recording equipment has been widely used since the early days of musique concrète, I can’t recall ever listening to anything quite like Snider’s Unremembered. Projects like Unremembered represent a unique musical voice moving past concepts such as genre using every tool available to present music primarily concerned with emotion and storytelling. How did we get here? One way to expand and progress an art form, or anything else for that matter, is to take steps to include as many different voices as possible. The piece I have chosen to focus on for our final listening selection this summer is a prime example of such progress.
Chrysalis was commissioned and premiered at Yale in 2006. The original version is a vocal setting of a poem by a poet and academic named Ivanna Yi, whom Snider met in an art-songwriting course. Thirteen years later, after the piece had already been reworked as the last movement of a song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble and as a trio for soprano, violin, and cello, the trumpeter Mary Elizabeth Bowden, who was a classmate of Snider at Yale, recorded Chrysalis as a trumpet solo with strings, taking advantage of the lyrical nature of Snider’s writing by eliminating the text. While trumpet repertoire contains plenty of examples of lyrical music, Bowden’s adaptation of Snider’s piece is uniquely modern. There is no attempt to make the trumpet sound like anything other than a restrained, refined lyric soprano. It’s simply beautiful, like the poem. This recording would not exist without the voices of these three women who brought it into existence with their unique experiences, vision, and determination to be heard.
Much more of this, please.