Program Notes:
I wrote this piece in my first year of graduate study at Yale. I wanted to create a lyrical, ruminative, single-movement narrative for solo cello, an instrument I had studied as a child and often longed to play. The music was inspired by this passage from “As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat,” a poem by John Ashbery.
“…The night sheen takes over. A moon of Cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed.
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.”
The Cello Museum
"[The Reserved, the Reticent] is a marvelously written work that, in time, may become one of the staples of our repertoire."
The San Diego Story
“The Reserved, The Reticent” [is] a complex solo cello etude...Snider’s rhapsodic adventure veers from passionate, even furious arabesques to calm, almost bucolic themes. Greenbaum handled these challenges with his customary command and panache."
The Glass
"[Mariel] Roberts handled Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “The Reserved, The Reticent” with hardly a reservation. Her rhythmic swipes dug deep into the strings, and commanded the instrument’s full range all at once. The energy relinquished in volume but never intensity as the piece moved to a conversational middle section, where the melody was glided between pizzicato and bowed statements. The opening double-stop was resounded in the concluding moments and served as the basis for a dramatically executed final statement.”
New York Magazine
"'The Reserved, the Reticent' is a work of impassioned, old-fashioned eloquence.”
