#Sarah Kirkland Snider

[knightofleo]

Sarah Kirkland Snider | This Is What You’re Like feat. My Brightest Diamond

It’s true, he talks It’s true, he talks, but it’s not Anything like it was then Anything like it was When he talked the way a bird sings; Just to sing This is what you’re like Do you remember? This is what you once were like

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Playing

THE BLUE HOUR

Composers Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider

Text Carolyn Forché

Performers A Far Cry Shara Nova

[nonesuchrecords]

Happy birthday to composer Sarah Kirkland Snider!

[cozy-cardassian]

used “came back wrong” in a presentation about a piece of music (specifically about a phrase reprising but slightly altered) and no one laughed. kids these days :(

[grntaire]

sarah kirkland snider is writing an opera about hildegard and richardis von stade we’ve got catholic lesbian opera folks we WON!!!!!!!!!

[infjtarot]

4 of Cups ~ Bachus Tarot

  Here, an idea or a new inspiration is trying to make itself known to you, but you are trying desperately not to notice. There are basically angelic choruses singing above your head, and you have clamped your hands over your ears and are doing your best “La-la-la-la-la, I can’t hear you!” The question is, Why would someone ever ignore something like that? Surely that is what all creatives sit around waiting for: inspiration to strike. But it’s disruptive. You might be almost finished with the project, or maybe you have a very clear sense of how you want things to go, and then here comes the big blinking sign that says, “Nope, dummy, this is the way it should be instead!” It means you are going to have to tear apart the work you’ve already done or maybe abandon it completely to follow this new idea, and who wants to do that? A client of mine, after spending four years on a manuscript and finishing a complete draft, told me that she suddenly realized during her revisions that the novel should have been written in the first person rather than in the third. She had become so stuck on the idea of a third-person narration that she had ignored the signs this was the wrong approach and plowed through to the end. Now that she was done, she was completely unwilling to fix what she knew to be a very obvious problem. My client would not have had to start over from the beginning, but certainly admitting that this was the solution to her book’s problems would mean another year’s worth of work ahead of her. She was so anxious to be done with this book and move on to something else that she was willing to sacrifice the whole thing. Eventually, though, she resigned herself to her task and began the hard work of revision. It took her a long time, but the end result was much improved. In that way, we can all be like Penelope in Homer’s The Odyssey, who prayed for her husband Odysseus’s return from the protracted Trojan War only to fail to recognize him when he finally showed up. If what we get doesn’t fall in line with what we expect, or if what we get is too disruptive, we can fail to see its value. And so we reject it or send it away. Like, “No, I see myself only playing stringed instruments; I have no use for the clarinet.” But maybe the clarinet will open up whole new worlds for you if you are willing to give it a try. With the Four of Cups, you have to maintain an openness and a willingness to be derailed. It’s not good to stay stubborn just so that you can stay on schedule or stick with your original vision when a better way is calling out to you. RECOMMENDED MATERIALS The Beast in the Jungle, book by Henry James “The Stranger with the Face of a Man I Loved,” recording by Sarah Kirkland Snider Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, book by Julia Strachey The Creative Tarot. Jessa Crispin

[theglasscat]

current deranged playlist: -chappelle roan -reverend kristin hayter aka the artist formerly known as lingua ingota i'm gonna buy her new album on cassette tape because that sounds like a fun thing to do -klaus nomi -Penelope by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Shara Nova -that Tipping the Velvet anthology of queer music from the 1920s but especially the gwen farrar selection and featuring the ballad of: Queen Nefer-titty: An Old Egyptian Queen

[sethsings]

“Starting tonight!

“Queens New Music Festival 2023!

“4 days | 7 concerts | 31 performers | 41 composers.

“Performers: Giacomo Baldelli, Sabina Torosjan, Jay Julio, Molly Aronson, Tengku Irfan, Thomas Piercy, Kinga Augustyn, Alla Milchtein, Hypercube (Jay Scorce, Andrea Lodge, Erin Rogers, Chris Graham), Composers Concordance (William Anderson, Sean Satin, Gene Pritsker), Sugar Hill Salon (Jay Soleil St. Flono, Alyssa Mercedes Mena, Alex Davis, Thierry de Lucas Neves), Duo Karolina Mikołajczyk & Iwo Jedynecki (Karolina Mikołajczyk, Iwo Jedynecki), Risa Renae Harman, Seth Gilman, Lish Lindsey.

“Composers: Gilbert Galindo, Allen Schulz, Frances White, Viet Cuong, Whitney George, Shoichi Yabuta, Bright Sheng, Cynthia Lee Wong, Yui Kitamura, Debra Kaye, Milena Zhivotovskaya, Dina Pruzhansky, Arvo Pärt, Richard Carrick, Ricardo Gallo, Kunal Gala, Manny Hernandez, Annie Hui-Hsieh, William Anderson, Dan Cooper, Jonathan Dawe, Jane Getter, Milica Paranosic, Gene Pritsker, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Reena Esmail, Daniel Catan, Lori Laitman, Jay Soleil St. Flono, Krzysztof Penderecki, Philip Glass, Paweł Janas, Edward Smaldone, Marcin Błażewicz, Seth Boustead, Zhihua Hu, Masatora Goya, Beata Moon, Tyson Gholston Davis, Miho Sasaki, and Michael Schelle.

“May 4-7, 2023

“The Secret Theatre Random Access Music

“Info here: https://www.ram-nyc.org/qnmf-2023”

h/t Thomas Piercy

[gabrielkahane]

after the silence, a change of scene

The last time I posted here was in November of 2019. Needless to say, that was a different era. A few weeks after I shared that cryptic photograph with a post office box address, I began an extended digital hiatus, about which I’ll have more to say in the coming months. In the meantime, I wanted to say hello. There has been a whole lot of grief, loss, and trauma around the world, in our country, in our cities, in our communities, and within our families. And it continues. Three people very dear to me have died in the last year, and I imagine that many of you have experienced similar losses. I hope you’re all doing okay, and I send all my love. And with that…

Two Concerts in San Francisco; a world premiere

Next week, I will play my first concerts since the pandemic began. If you happen to be in the general vicinity of San Francisco, I will be appearing at Herbst Theater on July 17th and 18th as part of a new summer festival presented by San Francisco Performances.

On Saturday the 17th, at 7:30pm, I will give a solo concert featuring a dozen new songs written in October 2020, drawn from thirty-one composed that month. The program will be rounded out with selections from Book of Travelers, The Ambassador, and Where are the Arms. Tickets may be purchased here.

The next afternoon, at 2pm, I’ll join (as pianist) the wonderful tenor Nicholas Phan in a wide-ranging survey of song, including music by Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Esperanza Spalding; a whole lot of Schubert; and the world premiere of Final Privacy Song, an eighteen-minute work I’ve written for tenor and piano on a new poem by Matthew Zapruder. Tickets are here.

A New Publication

Ten years ago this September, I released my sophomore album, Where are the Arms. Yesterday, at long last, several boxes of piano/vocal scores for those songs arrived at my doorstep. I’ve arranged them all for piano & voice as I play them, with chord symbols for guitar where appropriate. They will begin shipping out today, and you can pick up a copy here. And for the cellists & violists in the room…

emergency shelter intake form

Just as the pandemic ensnared the world in its vice grip, I was preparing, alongside soloists Alicia Hall Moran, Holland Andrews, and Holcombe Waller, to bring emergency shelter intake form to the Orlando Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, and the Milwaukee Symphony.

While it was disappointing to see those concerts go up in a puff of smoke (in addition to performances planned by the San Francisco Symphony and Louisville Orchestra), I am happy to share a video of the entire piece (found t the bottom of this post), captured in Portland in August of 2018 during a free community concert presented by the Oregon Symphony, which, along with the Britt Festival, commissioned the work.

On its face, emergency shelter intake form is a piece that addresses homelessness. But at its heart, it’s a cry against inequality, not only the kind that results from ruthless, unregulated capitalism, but also the sort that manifests when we close our hearts to other human beings, treating them as if they exist in some discrete universe of misfortune distant from our own. If nothing else, I hope that esif shrinks that distance, and may help us to recognize that we, too, might be one medical emergency or job loss away from having to make wrenching decisions about how to devote our limited material resources.

Oh, and there’s an album, too.

Thanks to the generous support of members of the Portland community, we were able to document the aforementioned performance of emergency shelter as an album. The physical object, which has the feel of a hardcover book, was designed, along with its stunning cover, above, by the stupidly gifted composer-pianist-graphic designer-bean cooker Timo Andres, and includes a forty page booklet with the compete libretto. The album, in physical and digital form, is available for purchase here.

In Conclusion

My time away from digital spaces was intended, in part, as a diagnostic for my not-always-super-healthy relationship to the internet. Those who follow me on social media may (or may not!) have noticed that I’ve been silent on those platforms since late 2019. It’s my hope going forward to use them sparingly (if at all), and to communicate more frequently through bandcamp’s messaging platform, which, because it is not an ad-based service, is not wrapped up in surveillance capitalism, its pernicious algorithms, and/or the attendant destruction of democracy, etc. And of course, I will continue to post here from time to time.

Thank you as always for your support,

Gabriel

[leohtttbriar]

Don’t be afraid, Stranger I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid of you. You look so lost, Stranger But you’re not lost, ‘Cause I’ve just found you. Just take my hand, Stranger Just take my hand And I will lead you home.

[knightofleo]

Sarah Kirkland Snider | Nausicaa feat. My Brightest Diamond

Don’t be afraid, Stranger I’m not afraid I’m not afraid of you

You look so lost, Stranger But you’re not lost ‘Cause I’ve just found you

Just take my hand, Stranger Just take my hand And I will lead you home

[endless-unfolding]

No, no, you can’t go home, she says, the world, where do you think you’re going? We’re not done with you. The world is never done with you.

The world wants her travelers to stay lost.

[nonesuchrecords]

Apple Music Classical—a new stand-alone app for Apple Music subscribers—launched this week, to easily find classical recordings all in one place with fully optimized search. That includes classic Nonesuch recordings and recent releases by John Adams, Timo Andres, Louis Andriessen, Julia Bullock, Jeremy Denk, Gidon Kremer, Kronos Quartet, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Nico Muhly, Richard Goode, Henryk Górecki, Jonny Greenwood, Steve Reich, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Dawn Upshaw, and more. Apple Music Classical is available on the App Store and is included at no extra cost with nearly all Apple Music subscriptions.

[yestheydo]

from Mass for the Endangered (2021)

[samelnicomposer]

"Penelope: The Lotus Eaters" by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Shara Worden, Signal, Brad Lubman

Penelope: The Lotus Eaters By Sarah Kirkland Snider, Shara Worden, Signal, Brad Lubman From the album Penelope Added to Favorite Classical Works/Movements playlist by Sam Melnick on February 5, 2018 at 11:43AM Listen on Spotify