Sarah Kirkland Snider

Sarah Kirkland Snider (born October 8, 1973) is an American composer.

She has received critical acclaim for her chamber, orchestral, song cycle, choral, and ballet works.

Snider was born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey.

Despite a non-musical parentage, she had a self-professed musical itch from a young age, going as far as to knock on her neighbors’ doors to play their pianos by ear.

Eventually, Snider began formal music study, beginning piano at age 7 and cello at age 10.

She also sang in choirs, attending five years of summer camp at the American Boychoir School where she studied under Anton Armstrong.

She later attended Princeton High School, singing in a nationally celebrated high school choir under William Trego, and performing in the PHS Orchestra.

She cites two female PHS Orchestra conductors as early female role models.

Snider also composed music at a young age, keeping it private until her junior year of high school when she showed her first works to her piano teacher, composer/pianist Laurie Altman, who encouraged her to study composition in college.

Snider would later stylistically describe these early works as "somewhere between early Debussy and Joni Mitchell."

Snider received a BA in Psychology-Sociology from Wesleyan University, where she decided not to pursue composition because she felt her music too conservative for its experimentally-oriented program.

After graduating in 1995, she moved to New York and worked at a pro-choice law firm.

While considering pursuing public interest law, she began writing music for experimental theater and decided to pursue composition full-time.

Snider enrolled in the composition master's program at New York University to study with composer Justin Dello Joio, whom she called "a brilliant, Nadia Boulanger-style teacher," but left after three semesters.

HuffPost named it one of the Top Ten Alternative Art Songs of 2001–2010, while NPR listed the track as among the "200 Greatest Songs Written by 21st Century Women" in 2018, eight years after its release.

Snider’s sophomore album, Unremembered, is scored for seven voices, chamber orchestra, and electronics, an expanded scope from Penelope.

In 2005 and 2006, she received a Master of Music and an Artist Diploma in Composition from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, and David Lang.

She is married to composer Steven Mackey.

Snider's musical compositions, particularly her song cycles, frequently borrow from indie rock and popular musical idioms as well as classical chamber music forms and instrumentation.

These stylistic choices have led critics to label her music as part of the burgeoning indie-classical movement, where she has been called "perhaps the most sophisticated" of voices within this genre.

Written for female voice and chamber orchestra, Penelope is an orchestral song cycle based on Homer's Odyssey, imagining the ancient Greek epic as told from the perspective of Odysseus's wife, Penelope. Penelope was originally conceived as a music-theater monodrama in 2007–2008, commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Center and scored for alto/actor and string quartet.

Snider later expanded it to a song cycle, expanding and tailoring it to the unique talents of vocalist Shara Worden and the chamber orchestra Ensemble Signal, both of whom feature prominently in the reimagined work.

Its lyrics were written by Ellen McLaughlin.

Snider has received particular recognition for her album releases of her classical song cycles and her Mass: Penelope (2010), Unremembered (2015), and Mass for the Endangered (2020).

New Amsterdam Records, who published the album on October 26, 2010, describes the work as follows:"Inspired by Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, Penelope is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home. Suspended somewhere between art song, indie rock, and chamber folk, the music of Penelope moves organically from moments of elegiac strings-and-harp reflection to dusky post-rock textures with drums, guitars and electronics, all directed by a strong sense of melody and a craftsman’s approach to songwriting."The album received widespread critical acclaim and commercial success—as of 2020, the song cycle has been performed over fifty times in North America and Europe.

Pitchfork 's Jayson Greene described Penelope as "a gorgeous piece of music and hauntingly vivid psychological portrait."

Time Out New York named Penelope its "No. 1 Classical Album of 2010", while NPR deemed the song cycle among its "Top Five Genre-Defying Albums of 2010."

"The Lotus Eaters", the fourth song on the album, received particular attention.

Released September 4, 2015 on New Amsterdam Records, critics deemed the song cycle an overwhelming success—it appeared in over 20 year-end lists for Best Album, including "Top 5 Classical Albums of 2015" in The Washington Post.

Unremembered sets poetry by New York-based poet/writer Nathaniel Bellows, described as recalling "strange and beautiful happenings experienced during a childhood in rural Massachusetts."

Shara Nova returns on vocals alongside singers Padma Newsome and DM Stith.

Additionally, the album features the Unremembered Orchestra, a group of performers within New York City contemporary ensembles Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, The Knights, and So Percussion), conducted by Edwin Outwater. The recording was co-produced by Snider with Lawson White and mixed by Grammy-winning producer Andrew Scheps, and made greater use of the multitracking and processing tools of the studio than did Penelope.

In 2017, vocalists Padma Newsome, Shara Nova, and DM Stith toured Unremembered in the U.S. and Europe with various orchestras and ensembles at venues including Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival (with The Knights), Liquid Music (with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra), the SHIFT Festival (with North Carolina Symphony), and Holland’s Cross-linx Festival (with the Doelen Ensemble and Codarts Rotterdam).

Snider’s first Mass and third album was commissioned by Trinity Church Wall Street, the renowned New York City sacred choral institution, and released on Nonesuch Records/New Amsterdam Records on September 25, 2020.

Part of Trinity’s Mass Re-Imaginings project, the work is described as "a rumination on the concept of the traditional Catholic Mass, its fidelity enhanced by Snider’s interpolation of traditional Latin text for the Gloria, Sanctus/Benedictus, and parts of the Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei."

The six-movement work is written for SATB choir and twelve instruments.

Thematically, NPR critic Tom Huizenga wrote that though Mass for the Endangered uses a religious framework, it instead "focuses not on our relationship to God, but instead to the flora and fauna on our planet."

Snider herself describes the Mass as embodying "a prayer for endangered animals and the imperiled environments in which they live."

Snider received similarly lofty acclaim to her previous albums.

Mass for the Endangered was among The Boston Globe’s "10 Reasons to Keep Falling for Classical Music" and appeared on numerous year-end lists including NPR and The Nation.