PENELOPE is a song cycle by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, with lyrics by playwright Ellen McLaughlin, featuring vocalist Shara Worden and the chamber orchestra Signal. Inspired by Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, PENELOPE is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home.
1) The Stranger with the Face of a Man I Loved
2) This Is What You're Like
3) The Honeyed Fruit
4) The Lotus Eaters
5) Nausicaa
6) Circe and the Hanged Man
7) I Died of Waiting
8) Home
9) Dead Friend
10) Calypso
11) And Then You Shall Be Lost Indeed
12) Open Hands
13) Baby Teeth, Bones, and Bullets
14) As He Looks Out to Sea
PENELOPE is a song cycle by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, with lyrics by playwright Ellen McLaughlin, featuring vocalist Shara Worden and the chamber orchestra Signal. 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.
PENELOPE originated as a music-theater monodrama, co-written by McLaughlin and Snider in 2007-2008 and commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Center. In the work, originally scored for alto/actor and string quartet, a woman’s husband appears at her door after an absence of twenty years, suffering from brain damage. A veteran of an unnamed war, he doesn’t know who he is and she doesn’t know who he’s become. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads him the Odyssey, and in the journey of that book, she finds a way into her former husband’s memory and the terror and trauma of war.
In 2009 Snider re-conceived PENELOPE as a song cycle, expanding and tailoring it to the unique talents of vocalist Shara Worden and the chamber orchestra Signal, and collaborating with programmer Michael Hammond on sound design. Worden and Signal, under the direction of conductor Brad Lubman, recorded this version of PENELOPE with producer Lawson White November 3-6, 2009, at Clinton Studios in New York, NY.
“One of the most powerful expressions of the indie classical style is Snider’s breakthrough work, 'Penelope'… [It] maintains a high level of emotional and expressive intensity while demonstrating the composer’s innate ability to present powerful and evocative stories through music.”
"It's a relatively short and simple song, but "Nausicaa," in this breathtaking rendition, packs an outsized emotional punch. An aqueous synth intro yields to gently undulating strings, unfurling a subtle red carpet walkway onto which the Canadian mezzo-soprano Emily D'Angelo makes her majestic, yet intimate, appearance. And with one long, ravishingly phrased line ("Don't be afraid, stranger"), we fall under the spell of the beauty of the human voice."
"The gorgeous, haunting song cycle ['Penelope'] updates Homer's Odyssey from the perspective of its female characters. Snider has been taken to task for writing music that is too vulnerable and too expressive. In "The Lotus Eaters," she answers her critics powerfully with restless music that overflows from an intoxicating desire to forget." (from "The 200 Greatest Songs By 21st Century Women")
"Snider wields voice and instruments like a flexible set of industrial tools, each fulfilling a single function in the depiction of an abstract, tormented conversation. Trios and quartets felt at once micro-orchestrated and passionately spontaneous..."
“groundbreaking...one of the most acclaimed song cycles of the last decade…What makes “Penelope” so gently devastating is the way Snider precisely captures the mood of McLaughlin’s text: alternately desolate, agitated, or coldly detached. Musical syntax matters less than the complex web of loss, recrimination, and self-understanding evoked.”
“Snider’s music was at once plainly expressive and rich in nuance, with alluring harmonies, arresting chromatic twists and an abundance of instrumental color. Call “Penelope” what you will (indie post-classical chamber pop drama?), it’s an amazing, beguiling work.”
“[Penelope] embraces the sort of slow, aching beauty that pours out of Iceland these days: Sigur Rós, Múm, the composers on Valgeir Sigurðsson’s label Bedroom Community. Snider’s songwriting floats though its melody, cycling notes, leading the ear forward without adhering to the relentless A-B-A forms that can clobber similarly gorgeous pop songs.”
"Sarah Kirkland Snider has been on the classical circuit for years, but her breakthrough came with last year’s arresting Penelope...haunting and epic." (from "Ten Young Female Composers You Should Know.")
"Snider’s music lives in…an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all."
“Penelope is a gorgeous piece of music, but it is more — it is also a hauntingly vivid psychological portrait, one that explores a dark scenario with a light, almost quizzical touch, finding poetic resonances everywhere… No matter what perspective you bring to this album, it bears profound rewards.”
"With the absurd distinction between serious and non-serious musics largely eradicated, it’s time to take stock of some of the best alternative art songs of 2001-2010 [including "The Lotus Eaters"] (The Top Ten Alternative Art Songs of 2001-2010)
“In the last decade or so, a new breed of conservatory-trained musicians has reinvented crossover in unprecedented ways, fusing classical tradition with hip-hop, indie rock and world music and providing new, exciting audience bridges among these forms at the same time. A good example is New York composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s song cycle “Penelope”, with a score that combines strings and harp with drums, guitars and electronics.”
Snider has taken a fascinating idea from playwright Ellen McLaughlin and turned it into a song cycle that works on several levels...Penelope deals with big ideas -- memory, identity, "home" -- but it's also an intimate portrait of a woman who, like Homer's Penelope, is confronted with finally getting what she's wished for. (from "The Best Five Genre-Defying Albums of 2010")
“[A] weary bewilderment threads through [Penelope]… there are many secrets that can’t be unraveled on a first listen… The catchiness of the music, though, draws us to seek out meaning, and repeated listenings don’t disappoint.”
“...alternately melancholic, agitated and poignant… the musical offspring of Britten’s Sea Interludes and Eno’s Music for Airports…[serving] to confirm Snider’s deft command of many different musical languages.”
“Snider’s score is the very model of smart, contemporary “music savant”—”knowing music” engaged with the “classical” tradition but unafraid to trot out the tools of “popular” music to suit its purposes… Penelope is, for me, the finest, most indispensable and potentially lasting new work I have heard or am likely to hear this year.”
“Sarah Kirkland Snider has generated a minor critical tsunami this year with Penelope… [we’re] abnormally proud to premiere the absolutely stunning video for “The Lotus Eaters”, one of several haunting numbers from Penelope that taunts me for merely saying that it defies description.”
“…The journey through Penelope—achingly stark, sparse, swaying, and soaring—begs repeated listening with an attentive ear. The way hints of Radiohead and David Lang materialize and mingle with St. Vincent and Chopin only to be reabsorbed into an aural landscape that is uniquely—ineffably—the voice of Sarah Kirkland Snider, results in what is easily the most beautiful album of the year.”
“Penelope is such an accomplished and remarkable work, it’s hard to believe that it could possibly be [Snider’s] debut album… This year or any year for that matter, one would be hard pressed to hear melodies that are more gorgeous and soul-stirring… Material so powerful places Penelope head and shoulders above much else that was released in 2010.”
“[Snider] courageously tackles a dramatic story arc in the vein of a Puccini opera while never losing track of her audience. Dramatic music may still be popular in many different genres but is rarely done with such care and precision.”
“[Penelope was] subtly explosive…the roar of applause at the end seemed as cathartic as it was genuine.”
"[Penelope] features a genre-blending style compelling enough to throw categorizations to the wind and revel in its unique dialect.”
“[Penelope] deftly weaves pop…and classical. Snider’s dark-hued score is inventive and subtle, with a mix of watery, undulating strings, guitars, percussion and electronics that submerges you completely within the story.”
“[Penelope] deftly weaves pop…and classical. Snider’s dark-hued score is inventive and subtle, with a mix of watery, undulating strings, guitars, percussion and electronics that submerges you completely within the story.”
“The phrases and the underlying harmonies would sound completely at home on a Radiohead record...It’s long, narrative arc is dramatic in the manner of Schumann and Schubert, but the understated, ambiguous resolution captures the questioning stance of so much of Radiohead’s material…”
“Remarkable… a beautiful cycle of songs… limns the boundaries between art song, chamber folk and post-rock.”
“‘This Is What You’re Like’ is an adroitly constructed composition… however, this is a song that does not forget that it is in fact a song—an impressive accomplishment for a classically trained composer… Snider anchors the intermittently dense proceedings with a recurring, bittersweet melodic refrain that I’d call a chorus except that she plays with it each time so it’s never quite the same twice. It’s a lovely and affecting melody… ”
“[Penelope] is a cycle of haunting art songs…[echoing] the piercing melancholy of a Chopin nocturne and spacious rhythms of minimalism. Snaking out of the pastoral backdrop are instantly hummable pop melodies.”
“Uniting pop and classical music, though, doesn’t have to result in a shadow of both worlds… Sarah Kirkland Snider [is] conjoining genres to produce culturally electric new music.”
“…But as a music critic who might “Bah!” and “Arrgh!” at some new [style] of work I can with confidence say that “This Is What You’re Like” is awesome. It’s such a well-crafted song with intense emotion and wonderful instrumentation. The vocals are classic My Brightest Diamond and hearing Worden in a slightly different and unique setting is just thrilling.”
“[Penelope] had an elegiac quality that deftly evoked sensations of abandonment, agitation, grief and reconciliation…ably [demonstrating] the poised elegance of Ms. Snider’s writing.”
