Sarah Kirkland Snider grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, in a family that was not particularly musical, but her parents took notice of her innate attraction to music. A piano entered their home when she was six, a cello several years later, and then she spent six summers at the American Boychoir School’s coed summer program. Still, the idea of conservatory training didn’t enter her mind, and when she went as an undergraduate to Wesleyan University, she majored in psychology and sociology. Although she was already writing music at that time, she couldn’t see how it would fit in with the avant-garde tendencies of the school’s music department.
After moving to New York in 1995, Snider began composing music for an experimental theater company, and she soon realized that this was pointing to her career path. Studies ensued with composer Justin Dello Joio at New York University and then with Martin Bresnik, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, and David Lang at the Yale School of Music. “I think composers are born with an original voice, and learning to be a composer is about learning to trust it,” she stated in an interview with the online publication Fifteen Questions. She described her formal studies as involving
a struggle to reconcile my impulses with what I thought would win the most approval from my teachers. After school, I found myself reaching back to the instincts I’d had since childhood. I was deeply grateful for the technique and craft I’d learned in school, but I found that I needed to unlearn some of the dogma. In a funny way, it’s about getting back to the voice you’ve always had.
In 2006, the year after Snider completed her graduate work at Yale, she was a Schumann Fellow at the Aspen Music Festival, an affiliation that gave rise to Thread and Fray, a trio composed for members of the Aspen Contemporary Music Ensemble; the New York Philharmonic included it in CONTACT!, its contemporary-music series, in 2018. (The orchestra also presented her 2006 song “How Graceful Things Are, Falling Apart” in a concert a year ago at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.) Her breakthrough work appeared in 2010: Penelope, an orchestral song cycle that imagines the dynamics of Homer’s Odyssey from the wife’s perspective. The piece, which draws on pop, folk, and rock styles, reflected her admiration for such musicians as Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Sinead O’Connor, and Liz Phair. She has explained:
By claiming some more of the pop and rock side, I felt like: Yeah, this is me lining myself up alongside my heroes that I’ve had since childhood, where I felt like women in the modern age are accepted, which is something I hadn’t really felt with classical music.
Penelope was followed by further large-scale works, including Unremembered (2015), a song cycle for voices, instruments, and electronica, with optional visuals by illustrator Nathaniel Bellows; Hiraeth (2015), a tone poem with accompanying film by Mark DeChiazza; and Mass for the Endangered (2018), an eco-mass about loss in the natural world. A number of her compositions have appeared on New Amsterdam Records, which she co-founded in 2008 and which has evolved into an all-in-one nonprofit record label, presenter, and artist service organization.
Many of Snider’s pieces involve stimulation from non-musical sources, whether through general inspiration or overt collaboration. “Over the course of my career,” she said, “I’ve been very directly inspired by visual art, poetry, dance, theatre, etc.—I will see an image and hear something, or read a passage and hear something. So, I definitely believe that all the senses are tied up together in complicated ways.”
Such is the case with Forward Into Light. It was created as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, through which 19 new works were commissioned from 19 women composers to celebrate the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote. Snider’s piece was inspired by the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose interactions informed the piece’s structural conception and details of its motivic processes.
Sarah Kirkland Snider has written the following about Forward Into Light:
Forward Into Light is a meditation on perseverance, bravery, and alliance. The piece was inspired by the American women suffragists—Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, Zitkála-Šá, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, to name but a few—who devoted their lives to the belief that women were human beings and therefore entitled to equal rights and protections under the law of the United States of America.
I wrote the music thinking about what it means to believe in something so deeply that one is willing to endure harassment, deprivation, assault, incarceration, hunger, force-feedings, death threats, and life endangerment in order to fight for it.
Formally, the piece was inspired by the idea of synergistic interpersonal partnerships, which lay at the heart of the American women’s suffrage movement. The best-documented example of this was the alchemical relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. “I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them,” Stanton said of Anthony. “We did better work together than either could alone … and together we have made arguments that have stood unshaken by the storms of 30 long years; arguments that no man has answered.”
Forward Into Light opens with three motivic ideas: a pair of ascending sixth intervals in the violins, an undulating quintuplet figure in the harp, and a lyrical line in close canon led by the violas. The trio of ideas coax each other forward, tentatively at first, and then more urgently, as tremors of adversity intensify the stakes. New voices join the conversation, challenging and subverting the original ideas to explore new collaborative solutions, united in the search for a strength that only a defined, mutual purpose can yield.
Forward Into Light features a musical quote from March of the Women, composed in 1910 by British composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth, with words by Cicely Hamilton. The anthem of the women’s suffrage movement, March of the Women was sung in homes and halls, on streets and farms, and on the steps of the United States Capitol. It’s briefly alluded to by the oboes in close canon following each of the narrative’s first two arcs, and then precedes the ending as a recorded sample, performed here by Werca’s Folk, a women’s choir based in Northumberland, England, under the direction of Sandra Kerr (used here with permission).
The title of the piece derives from a suffrage slogan made famous by the banner that suffragist Inez Milholland carried while riding a white horse to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade on March 3, 1913, in Washington, DC:
“Forward, out of error
Leave behind the night
Forward through the darkness
Forward into light!”
When the Curtis Institute of Music opened its doors to students on October 1, 1924, Samuel Barber was second in line. It was a violinist who managed to pass through the portal before him: Max Aronoff, a future member of the Curtis String Quartet, the ensemble for which Barber would compose (a dozen years later) his String Quartet with its famous slow movement, often heard in its string orchestra setting as his Adagio for Strings. Barber’s musical gifts had been apparent from an early age, and he was fortunate to have been born into a family that was attuned to recognize them. Although his parents were not professional musicians, his aunt, contralto Louise Homer, was a mainstay at the Metropolitan Opera, and her husband, Sidney Homer, was well known as a composer of light lieder of the parlor-song sort.
At Curtis, Barber studied piano (with Isabelle Vengerova), composition (with Rosario Scalero), and voice (with baritone Emilio de Gogorza, who was a colleague of Barber’s aunt at the Met). While still a student there he produced several works that have entered the repertoire, including Dover Beach for baritone and string quartet (which he sang in its first commercial recording) and the orchestral Overture to The School for Scandal and Music for a Scene from Shelley. Thanks to a Rome Prize, he spent 1935–1937 at the American Academy in that city, completing, among other pieces, his Symphony in One Movement; it quickly received high-profile performances in Rome, Cleveland, and New York, as well as in the opening concert of the 1937 Salzburg Festival. The following year, his reputation was cemented when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast his Essay No. 1 and the Adagio for Strings; the latter would become one of the most recognized compositions of the century. Barber was famous, and he was not yet 30 years old.
In 1939, he returned to Curtis, this time as composition professor, and he maintained that position until 1942, when he traded his affiliation there for one with the U.S. Army Air Forces. During this period Barber composed his Violin Concerto, which also grew out of a Curtis connection. Samuel Fels, of Fels Naptha soap fame, served on the school’s board of directors, and in early 1939 he offered Barber a $1,000 commission to write a violin concerto for Iso Briselli, a Curtis violin student he was interested in assisting. Barber accepted. He got to work on the piece that summer while staying in Sils-Maria, Switzerland. He moved on to Paris, where he hoped to complete the finale, but with the outbreak of war in August, Barber returned home to continue working on his concerto in America.
The finale was problematic in part because the violinist for whom the concerto was commissioned (and his violin coach) expressed displeasure with it. After provisional read-throughs, including by respected violinist Oscar Shumsky, Barber showed his concerto to the eminent Albert Spalding, who was reputedly on the lookout for an American piece to add to his concerto repertoire. Spalding signed on instantly, and it was he who introduced the work, with Eugene Ormandy conducting The Philadelphia Orchestra, following its extended gestation.
Barber contributed this comment to The Philadelphia Orchestra’s program for the premiere of his Violin Concerto. Written in the third person, it refers to tempo markings that Barber would later simplify:
The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was completed in July 1940, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania, and is Mr. Barber’s most recent work for orchestra. It is lyric and rather intimate in character, and a moderate-sized orchestra is used: eight woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano, and strings.
The first movement—Allegro molto moderato—begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement—Andante sostenuto—is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetual motion, exploits the more brilliant and virtuoso characteristics of the violin.
Gustav Mahler was a famous conductor by the time he embarked on his First Symphony, having worked his way up through a quick succession of directorships with musical organizations in Ljubljana, Olomouc, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, and Budapest. He arrived at the last of these in October 1888, assuming the directorship of the prestigious Royal Hungarian Opera, and it was in that city that he unveiled his Symphony No. 1. Its premiere, in late 1889, came on the heels of personal tragedies that had marred the preceding months: the death of Mahler’s father in February and of both his younger sister Leopoldine and his mother in the autumn. This left the composer with the stress of serving as head of his remaining family while balancing the substantial musical and political challenges of his professional life.
One wishes that the unveiling of his symphony could have come as a triumphant exclamation point, bringing such a difficult phase to an end. Unfortunately, the premiere was entirely unsuccessful, and the politics of Budapest continued to wear Mahler down until he finally submitted his resignation (in March 1891) and moved to Hamburg. He would later say that the disastrous reception of his First Symphony prevented his being accepted as a composer for the rest of his career—probably an overstatement, but containing a grain of truth nonetheless. “My friends bashfully avoided me afterward,” he told his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner. “Nobody dared talk to me about the performance and my work, and I went around like a sick person or an outcast.”
The work played on that occasion in 1889 was rather different from the Symphony No. 1 as it is normally heard today. It was not even presented as a symphony; instead, the program identified it as a five-movement “Symphonic Poem in Two Sections,” and it included, as its second section, an Andante Mahler referred to as Blumine (Bouquet of Flowers). In a newspaper article that ran the day before the premiere, Mahler laid out a descriptive program for the piece in which the five movements were said to depict spring, happy daydreams, a wedding procession, a funeral march to accompany the burial of a poet’s illusions, and an advance toward spiritual victory.
Stung by the vehemence with which much of the audience rejected the work, Mahler set his score aside for three years. In 1893—he had by then moved to Hamburg—he subjected the symphony to severe revisions, particularly in matters of orchestration. “On the whole,” Mahler wrote to Richard Strauss the following May, “everything has become more slender and transparent.” He knew this not just from his inner ear but from concert-hall experience as well, since he had conducted the new “Hamburg version” on October 27, 1893, with considerably more success than Budapest had allowed. Strauss slated it for a music festival he was programming, and he arranged for Mahler to travel to Weimar to conduct it in June 1894. This time the reception was sharply divided. Mahler wrote to a friend:
My symphony was received with furious opposition by some and with wholehearted approval by others. The opinions clashed in an amusing way, in the streets and in the salons.
Mahler kept on revising. He attached further programmatic descriptions to the movements and then discarded them. His travail concerning the symphony’s program can be read as a reflection of the aesthetic gulf then separating proponents of “program music” from “absolute music” adherents, seeming in hopes of gaining the sympathies of the “program” faction while being at heart an “absolutist.” When the piece was published, in 1898, the composer left only the words “Like the Sound of Nature” at the head of the score. He also eliminated the Blumine movement—so effectively that it remained unpublished for seven decades.
—James M. Keller
Former New York Philharmonic Program Annotator,
The Leni and Peter May Chair