Saturday

Program Notes

The six-movement Mass for the Endangered is a rumination on the concept of the traditional Catholic Mass, its fidelity enhanced by Snider’s interpolation of traditional Latin text for the Gloria, Sanctus/Benedictus, and parts of the Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei. For the album art, Bellows created an illustrated triptych of endangered flora and fauna that evoke medieval Christian altarpieces and stained-glass windows.

Snider explains, “The origin of the Mass is rooted in humanity’s concern for itself, expressed through worship of the divine—which, in the Catholic tradition, is a God in the image of man. Nathaniel and I thought it would be interesting to take the Mass’s musical modes of spiritual contemplation and apply them to concern for non-human life—animals, plants, and the environment. There is an appeal to a higher power—for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention—but that appeal is directed not to God but rather to Nature itself.”

Growing up in Princeton, NJ, one-time home of the American Boychoir School, Snider attended that venerable institution’s co-ed summer camp as a youth: “I attended for five summers. I fell in love with choral singing there, and later sang with the Princeton High School Choir, which was at the time one of the most celebrated high school choirs in the country. These experiences were profoundly formative for me, and I learned a lot of the choral repertoire. I felt very at home in that music, but I hadn’t yet had a chance to explore it in my writing in a significant way. The Mass was my first large choral commission, and I was thrilled to immerse myself in memories of singing the Mozart, Brahms, and Fauré Requiems, the Palestrina and Byrd Masses, the Bach chorales.

“Rather than consciously upend those traditions,” she continues, “I wanted to open the gates in my mind between centuries-old European vocal traditions and those of more recent American vernacular persuasion, and write from a place where differing thoughts about line, text, form, and expression could co-exist.”

Accompanying video by Deborah Johnson presents a unified and distinctive vision to accompany the music of Snider’s Mass: the full six videos are viewed as a ‘Cathedral of the Cosmos,’ honoring and receiving the animal and plant species that no longer find life on Earth sustainable. The videos draw from architectural elements of cathedrals, and grow in complexity with each video.

“One of my favorite aspects of this collaboration has been learning about Deborah’s creative process and getting to peek behind-the-scenes at how she makes her art. I was really struck by the thoughtfulness and sensitivity with which her animations inhabit the architecture and pacing of the score,” Snider writes in an essay for the Nonesuch Journal on working with Johnson. “Working with Deborah on Mass for the Endangered has been one of the more satisfying and enriching collaborations I’ve experienced. I love that I don’t know what’s next to come in this poetic, layered, phantasmagorical story she’s creating, and I can’t wait to see how it expands and deepens my understanding of the music.” More information about this collaboration can be found here.

Texts and Translations

Sarah Kirkland Snider, composer

sarahkirklandsnider.com

Recently called a “significant voice on the American music landscape” by the Philadelphia Inquirer and “an important representative of twenty-first century trends in composition” by New York Classical Review, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” by the New York Times, “groundbreaking” by the Boston Globe, and “poignant, deeply personal” by the New Yorker. With an ear for the poetic and the architectural, Snider’s music draws upon a variety of influences to render a nuanced command of immersive storytelling. Of her orchestral song cycle, Penelope, Pitchfork said: “Snider’s music lives in … an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all.”

Snider’s works have been commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Britten Sinfonia, and National Arts Centre Orchestra; violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, percussionist Colin Currie, and vocalist Shara Nova (formerly Worden); eighth blackbird, A Far Cry, Ensemble Signal, The Knights, and yMusic; Roomful of Teeth, Cantus, and Trinity Wall Street Choir, among many others. Penelope and Unremembered, her first two LPs, earned critical acclaim from NPR, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, the Nation, and Pitchfork. Her music is published by G. Schirmer, Inc.

Deborah Johnson, artist

candystations.com

Deborah Johnson, aka CandyStations, is an interdisciplinary artist and designer, specializing in stage design and performance visuals. She has worked with artists including Sufjan Stevens, M83, Sofi Tukker, St. Vincent, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Annie B. Parson, Ray LaMontagne, Bang On A Can, and Wilco, with performances at Coachella, Disney Concert Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Museum of Modern Art, MASS MoCA, Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, The Fillmore, The Ryman, and Wiener Konzerthaus. Johnson has created site-specific performances and installations at SXSW, Sundance, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 92Y Tribeca, MoMA, Chicago’s Millennium Park and the Baltimore Museum of Art, and completed residencies at MASS MoCA, The Experimental Television Center and The Atlantic Center for the Arts. Working as CandyStations, she celebrates the collaborative nature of live-performance, accessing a diverse network of like-minded fabricators, lighting designers, artists, and programmers to create transcendent, responsive experiences by merging digital and handmade processes — from lines of code to piles of charcoal. She is also a proud Associate Professor of Time and Movement and Light, Color, and Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.