Last week my fellow New Amsterdam co-directors William Brittelle and Judd Greenstein and I talked with Rebecca Gross of the National Endowment for the Arts for their “Art Talk” blog. We talked about New Amsterdam and what we’d like to see more of the music world. You can check it out here.

Artwork by D.M. Stith

On September 27, 2011, New Amsterdam released yMusic’s Beautiful Mechanical. I’m honored to have a piece I wrote for the group on the disc, Daughter of the Waves, along with music by a handful of composers I admire greatly: Judd Greenstein, Shara Worden, Ryan Lott, Annie Clark, and Gabriel Kahane. You can read more about the project here.

Photo by Murat Eyuboglu

Excited to announce that Penelope will be performed in full at the the redoubtable Carlsbad Music Festival in Carlsbad, CA on 9/24! Shara will perform it with the Calder Quartet plus many other phenomenal musicians participating in the Festival. The CMF also features sets by My Brightest Diamond (Shara’s band), Build, the amazing pianist Vicky Chow, the Calder Quartet, and others.

The Believer

As a big fan of The Believer Magazine, I’m honored to have some of my music featured in their 2011 Music Issue (and my name on the cover! look Mom!) out now in newsstands. The issue comes with a free CD that includes “Nausicaa” from Penelope. The compilation also features music by my friends Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, Ted Hearne, and Jacob Cooper, as well as other New Amsterdam friends and collaborators.

This August I’ll be doing a two-week residency with the polystylistic vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth at Williams College. Roomful of Teeth is a vocal ensemble that studies and incorporates non-classical vocal practices, combines them with western styles, and develops new compositions using the fullest possible range of vocal techniques. I’m super excited about it. I’ll be writing a bunch of new stuff for them, setting poems written for the occasion by my uber-talented friend, the writer and poet Nathaniel Bellows.

The other composer who will be in residency with me on this project is the amazing Merrill Garbus of tUnE-YarDs. The residency will culminate in a concert of our new works at Mass MoCA on August 26.

Check out this video of Merrill collaborating with Roomful of Teeth for the Ecstatic Music Festival. Crazy, right?

Courtesy JAM Magazine

JAM Magazine, The Rolling Stone of Italy, published a three-page interview this month discussing Penelope, the “Pop Odyssey of Contemporary Music.” Presenting the project to Italian readers as the nexus where “indie meets contemporary music,” interviewer Claudio Todesco and I talk at length about the origins of the piece, the details of the compositional process, and the new generation of composers who work within both pop and classical worlds. “Is the wall between high-brow and low-brow music falling down?” asks Todesco. In what he calls the “reverie” of Penelope, Todesco concludes, the answer is irrelevant.

I will post a translation of this interview soon.

I’m honored to have been included in NPR’s recent feature “100 Composers Under 40.”

Photo courtesy NPR.

They write: “A few weeks ago, Q2 and NPR Music launched a crowdsourced project to determine listeners’ favorite composers under the age of 40 — and, by extension, those pieces which were shaping our contemporary musical scene and defining what it means to be a composer in the 21st century. On Facebook, Twitter and the aggregating pages on Q2 and NPR Music, an international array of comments poured in, reaching almost 800 suggestions in total. With much debate and awareness of such a list’s limitations, we’ve narrowed the field down to 100 composers, each represented by one song in a randomized stream on this page…How do you know when you’re hearing a composer? All we can really say, to paraphrase the late Potter Stewart, is: “I know it when I hear it.”

I’m honored to have been included in Flavorwire‘s recent feature “10 Young Female Composers You Should Know.”

The article features our video for Penelope‘s “The Lotus Eaters.” Judy Berman writes: “Sarah Kirkland Snider has been on the classical circuit for years, but her breakthrough came with last year’s arresting Penelope. A collaboration between Snider, playwright Ellen McLaughlin, singer Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond), the Signal chamber orchestra, and conductor Brad Lubman, Penelopeis a song cycle about a woman whose amnesiac husband returns to her after 20 years. To help the two of them deal with their separation and reunion, she reads him The Odyssey. While these mirrored stories might scream “meta,” there’s nothing inaccessible about Snider haunting and epic work. Writing for The New York Times, Steve Smith observed that Penelope “had an elegiac quality that deftly evoked sensations of abandonment, agitation, grief and reconciliation.”

Shara and New Music Raleigh

On April 18, Shara teamed up with the redoubtable New Music Raleigh to present a truly gorgeous performance of Penelope at King’s Barcade in Raleigh, NC. It was actually only the third full performance of the piece since its premiere in early 2010. Shawn and Karen Galvin have a wonderful thing going with New Music Raleigh, and I expect that we’ll hear many more exciting things from them in the next few years to come. A local film crew shot a fancy video of this performance; when it’s finished I’ll post word of it here.