BIOGRAPHY
“...a startling new voice...”
--Bruce Hodges, Monotonous Forest
“...the emotional immediacy and sense of narrative were arresting...”
--The Yale Daily News
“...indeterminately elegiac, or just plain lovely...”
--The New Haven Independent
"...the gem among the rest..."
-- The Manchester Evening News
“graceful, haunting, deft"
--MusicWeb-International.com
"Luminous romanticism...tender, lyrical and avuncular."
--The Glasgow Herald
“Sarah Kirkland Snider belongs to a diminishing margin of composers whose work is as easy on the ears as it is demanding of the mind. ”
--Hotel St. George Press
Sarah Kirkland Snider is a composer of music noted for its lyricism, dramatic narrative, and direct expression. Drawing inspiration from moody indie rock and folk musics as well as from various outposts of the classical tradition, her music infuses an open embrace with a subtle violence, striving to illuminate the human heart's darker places with warmth, intimacy, and candor.
Recent works include Penelope, an evening-length concert-theater piece with acclaimed playwright Ellen McLaughlin and the Eclipse Quartet, commissioned by the Getty Center, and Until I Became Human, an orchestral song cycle for Dinosaur Annex and the Community Music Center of Boston Orchestra set to the poetry of Ivanna Yi. Other recent commissions include works for the American Composers Forum and Jerome Foundation, the NOW Ensemble, Newspeak, Third Coast Percussion, Janus, and violist Nadia Sirota. She is also at work on The Sybil of the Rhine, an opera with writer/filmmaker Alex Rose; Windows Windows Windows, a multimedia collaboration with composers Kristin Kuster, Greg Spears, and Stefan Weisman; and Penelope Songs, an album of her vocal works, to be released on New Amsterdam Records.
Sarah's music has been performed internationally, in both alternative spaces and major venues and festivals including Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project Club Concerts, June in Buffalo, the Look & Listen Festival, the Getty Villa, the Bennington Chamber Music Conference, Music With a View, and the Keys to the Future Contemporary Piano Music Festival, by performers such as percussionist Colin Currie, soprano Lisa Bielawa, cellist Rafael Popper-Keiser, pianists Ian Pace and Tatjana Rankovich, and Eclipse Quartet, Dinosaur Annex, Quatuor Bozzini, Psappha and Hebrides Ensemble. She has also composed music for theater, including off-off Broadway productions The Burning Out of ’82 and Advanced Topics of Capricorn.
Sarah has an M.M. and Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. From 2001-2007 she co-curated the Look & Listen Festival, a new music series set in modern art galleries. She now acts as Co-Director, along with William Brittelle and Judd Greenstein, of New Amsterdam Records, an independent co-operative label serving the indie classical community in New York and beyond. She also contributes to the Hotel St. George, an online arts quarterly. Temporarily displaced to Berkeley, California, Sarah usually splits her time between New York and Princeton, New Jersey, where she lives with her husband, Steven. She is learning to play drums.
Sarah occasionally writes essays for the New Amsterdam Records Website. Click here to check out her first, “Mixed Up at the DNA Level.”
