About the Piece

~ “rapturous” — The New York Times ~
~ “the year’s most affecting creation” — Time Out New York ~
~ “no matter what perspective you bring to this album, it bears profound rewards” — Pitchfork ~

PENELOPE is a song cycle by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, with lyrics by playwright Ellen McLaughlin, featuring vocalist Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and the chamber orchestra Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman. Inspired by Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, Penelope is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home. Penelope, the album, released October 26, 2010 on New Amsterdam Records, and can be purchased through New Amsterdam, Amazon, iTunes, eMusic, Bandcamp, and many other places.

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 has garnered critical acclaim from NPR, The New York Times, Pitchfork, The Los Angeles Times, Time Out New York, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, New Music Box, The Utne Reader, eMusic, textura Magazine, Death and Taxes Magazine, Popshifter, Venus, and many others, with Time Out New York calling the album “the year’s most affecting creation,” textura Magazine declaring it “head and shoulders above much else that was released in 2010,” and the Indie Handbook pronouncing it “the landmark achievement of 2010.” Most recently, Penelope has received dozens of year-end accolades, with NPR naming it one of “The Five Best Genre-Defying Albums of 2010,” Time Out New York placing it at the top of the “Ten Best Classical Albums of 2010,” textura rating it No. 3 on its list of “The Top Ten Albums of 2010,” and The Huffington Post naming the track “The Lotus Eaters” one of the “Top 10 Alternative Art Songs of The Decade.”  The influential webzine Pitchfork called the work “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.”

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.

“Sarah Kirkland Snider offers a unique voice in contemporary composition. Few artists stand so firmly on the line between classical music and current trends in independent popular music; Sarah has an ability to synthesize her influences into an organic whole that contains the best qualities of them all. Up until now, her work has been for smaller-scale forces, but Penelope finds Snider allowing her incredible gifts for orchestration, as well as for melodically-inclined art song, to flower. The incomparable Shara Worden, of the popular indie rock band My Brightest Diamond (but also a classically-trained soprano), makes the songs her own, personalizing them to great effect. Signal and Brad Lubman create an ideal orchestral soundscape for these lush songs, fulfilling the promise suggested by Snider’s earlier material. There is no label where Penelope would make as much sense as on New Amsterdam; this work is, more than anything else we have released, unidentifiably of one genre or another — an exciting proposition for us, and for the future of music.” – Judd Greenstein, Composer and Co-Director, New Amsterdam Records

photo by Murat Eyuboglu