About Me
Sarah Kirkland Snider is a composer of music noted for its lyricism, dramatic narrative, and emotional immediacy. Drawing inspiration from moody indie rock and folk musics as well as from various outposts of the classical tradition, Sarah’s music infuses an open embrace with a subtle violence, striving to illuminate the human heart’s darker places with warmth, intimacy, and candor.Recent commissions have come from the American Composers Forum/Jerome Foundation, the Getty Center, Dinosaur Annex/Community Music Center of Boston, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, the NOW Ensemble, Newspeak, Janus, and numerous soloists. Upcoming projects include The Sybil of the Rhine, an opera with writer/filmmaker Alex Rose, and Penelope, an album of her vocal works to be released on New Amsterdam Records. Her music has been performed internationally in both alternative spaces and major venues/series including Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, the Aspen Music Festival, the Colorado Music Festival, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project Chamber Series, June in Buffalo, the Look & Listen Festival, the Getty Villa, the Bennington Chamber Music Conference, Music With a View, and the Keys to the Future Contemporary Piano Music Festival, by performers including Colin Currie, Dinosaur Annex, Eclipse Quartet, Hebrides Ensemble, Lisa Bielawa, Quatuor Bozzini, and Psappha. She has also composed music for theater, including off-off Broadway productions The Burning Out of '82 and Advanced Topics of Capricorn.Sarah has an M.M. and Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. From 2001-2007 she co-curated the Look & Listen Festival, a new music series set in New York modern art galleries. She now acts as Co-Director, along with William Brittelle and Judd Greenstein, of New Amsterdam Records, an independent co-operative label serving the indie classical community in New York and beyond. She also contributes to the Hotel St. George, an online arts journal. She splits her time between New York and Princeton, NJ. She is learning to play drums.
