Sarah Kirkland Snider: Unremembered

Released five years ago, Sarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope cemented her as one of the decade’s most gifted up-and-coming modern classical composers. Emotionally fraught and cloudy, the words used an amnesiac soldier’s past as a lens to explore memory and mortality over muted explosions of electronics and a weighty, restless orchestra. Her new group of songs, Unremembered, is more restrained than Penelope, but no less haunting.

Like Penelope, Unremembered features Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond on vocals. This time, Asthmatic Kitty vet DM Stith and Clogs’ Padma Newsome join her, while the ensemble is a collection of all-star new music players from ICE and So Percussion. Its vague stories are set in shadowy old houses, endless meadows, sinister thickets and forests lost souls enter to never emerge from. Snider’s multiple narrators spiral deep into dark memories of these places. The libretto comes from the poet Nathaniel Bellows, who takes his formal cues from 20th century imagists like Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth, describing gothic New England vistas.

The foreboding and chaotic tenor of the music mirrors the fear and horror of the characters: Ghosts are ever-present, evoked by the constant surges of soupy, heavily reverbed background vocals that rise and fall behind each song’s primary narrator—either Worden, Stith, or both. Often, these anonymous voices assume a role in the story: In the pastoral "The Song", they are echoing bird calls, but on the more macabre "The Estate", they become taunting spirits ("The field has breath, the pond a voice...They told me then to leave this place/ Or stay and lose it all"). Eventually, they become buried underneath Snider’s mournful, kinetic instrumental figures (glissandi-punctuated violin lines, chimes, harp, or Snider’s own celeste), which sometimes recall the work of Snider’s former teacher, David Lang, and at more tuneful moments, Max Richter. Most songs build to booming climaxes, that dissipate along with the "vapor of the dead" at the end of each song.

The record is best when Snider’s music captures both the beauty and foreboding of Bellows’ setting at once; in restrained pieces like "The Orchard" and "The Past", she lets subversive dissonance creep slowly into her simple accompaniments. Many of Bellows' poems feature images of mirroring, water, and hazy vantages of landscapes or spirits, and Snider’s musical landscape complements this with a rippling, echoing quality. Her melodic shapes are as vague as the scenes she is describing: It is intelligent and evocative, but it takes a focused listen, and is best enjoyed with Bellows’ words on hand for reference. His poetry interacts closely with the musical pivots. Unremembered definitely lacks the haute tension and the fierce musical contrasts of Penelope, but there are plenty of pleasurably uncanny moments. Even in these more contemplative scenarios, Snider still keeps visceral emotion on the surface of her music.