Not so long ago if one wanted to do interesting electronic music things one needed a studio full of enormously expensive equipment, access to which was likely restricted to a fortunate few. Now with a few relatively inexpensive mikes, a laptop and some speakers one can create all kinds of cool stuff and perform it in almost any venue. The recording ‘m going to talk about here was made a few years ago but it’s good and pretty typical of what I’m talking about.
Unremembered is a cycle of thirteen songs by Sarah Kirkland Snider to poems by Nathaniel Bellows about his childhood in rural Massachusetts. But this is the darker side of childhood. There are ghosts, witches and houseguests freezing to death. It’s not Anne of Green Gables with baked beans!
It’s scored for voices, chamber orchestra and electronics and is pretty eclectic. The voices are Padma Newsome, DM Stith and Shara Worden and none of them perform in a “classical” vocal style. The band is the Unremembered Orchestra, which includes members of ACME, Alarm Will Sound, ICE, The Knights and So Percussion and is conducted by Edwin Outwater of the late lamented Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.
I’ve been listening to Emily D’Angelo’s debut album elageia (find out more in the next edition of Opera Canada). It features music by Missy Mazzoli, with whom I’m a bit familiar, and by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Hildur Gudnadóttir, who are both new to me. Like Mazzoli, Snider is an exponent of that kind of cross-genre vocal music that seems to be assuming some significance in the US music scene. I’ve been listening to her song cycle Penelope which riffs off Homer’s Odyssey from a woman’s POV. Specifically the texts, by playwright Ellen McLaughlin, tell the story of a woman re-engaging with the man she was married to who has gone missing missing for 20 years and returned with PTSD.
operaramblings 