Forward Into Light
Composition and Premiere
Sarah Kirkland Snider was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on October 8, 1973, and lives there. She composed Forward Into Light in 2020 on a commission from the New York Philharmonic, Jaap van Zweden, Music Director, for the Philharmonic’s Project 19. Originally scheduled for June 2020 but delayed due to the pandemic, the premiere was given by the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden on June 10, 2022, at Carnegie Hall. First BSO performance: July 14, 2024, at Tanglewood, Andris Nelsons conducting.
The score for Forward Into Light calls for piccolo, two flutes, 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1st doubling A clarinet, 2nd doubling E-flat clarinet, 3rd doubling A clarinet and bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: waterphone, mark tree, marimba, brake drum, almglocken, glockenspiel, crotales, suspended cymbal, vibraphone, tam-tam, bass drum, low tom-tom, chimes), piano and celesta, harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, double basses). The piece is about 15 minutes long.
Sarah Kirkland Snider was an especially apt choice among the nineteen composers chosen by the New York Philharmonic for its “Project 19,” a commissioning initiative to mark the centennial, in 2020, of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which established national voting rights for women in the U.S. (Snider’s colleagues in the venture included Joan Tower, Tania León, Unsuk Chin, and Jessie Montgomery.) Many of Snider’s prior works explored questions of personal identity, particularly from a woman’s perspective, and her life and music have consistently shown a commitment to positive social change.
Although she committed to music as a calling relatively late, Snider quickly established herself with works both expressively natural and sonically intricate. She is drawn especially to words, storytelling, and the voice, and even her instrumental music—Forward Into Light being a recent example—tends to spring from a narrative image. Her Mass for the Endangered highlights the climate crisis and its effect on species living in fragile ecosystems. Her celebrated Penelope, based on the Greek myth underlying Homer’s Odyssey, resonates with the trauma experienced by veterans of war and their loved ones. Drink the Wild Ayre, commissioned by the Emerson Quartet and performed at Tanglewood in summer 2023 as part of the quartet’s farewell tour, takes its title, appropriately, from a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Forward Into Light, as the composer writes below, contemplates musically the intense fight for the right to be heard politically.
Recent commissions include those from soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Will Liverman, Trinity Wall Street for Mass for the Endangered, the Guggenheim Museum, A Far Cry, Birmingham Royal Ballet, and Beth Morrison Projects for an opera about Hildegard von Bingen, among many others. Recordings of her music include the full album length works Mass for the Endangered, The Unremembered, and Penelope.
Related to her penchant for voice, Snider brings a lyrical element to all her work. A child chorister from an early age growing up in Princeton, NJ, Snider also took piano and cello lessons and began writing songs. She pursued her musical interests even while studying psychology at university. It was only after working in another field for several years that she returned to earn degrees in composition from New York University, where she worked with Justin Dello Joio, and Yale University, where her mentors included Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, and David Lang. Snider is herself an advocate for other composers; she has served, almost since earning her degrees, on the board of New Amsterdam Records, a composer-driven record label she co-founded with like-minded composers Judd Greenstein and William Brittelle in 2008.
The emotional directness and clarity of Snider’s music reveal influences from popular and stage music. Her hour-long monodrama Penelope (2010) shares characteristics of the intimate “chamber-pop” genre as explored by Bryce Dessner, Osvaldo Golijov and others, with roots in progressive pop’s concept albums of the 1960s. Beyond the arbitrary constraints of categorization, Snider is, of course, her own composer. Subtlety and intricacy of structure, harmony, and color show her deep awareness of a wide range of contemporary classical compositional practices, as well as her rich imagination for drama and direct expressivity.
Forward Into Light employs layers of instrumental gestures, some sustained, some very brief, to form a shimmering, nuanced musical fabric. A pulse is almost constantly present, frequently articulated by the harp, moving the piece through its shifting moods. Even through its most dense and intense passages, there is a sense of spaciousness and perspective about the piece, almost of patience. Snider’s score markings mirror some of the stages of working toward a distant goal: we are by turns “ruminative,” acting “with abandon,” “pensive,” and “trying again, with resolve,” among other indications. The majestic and noble final pages lead to “voices raised in unison” quoting Dame Ethel Smyth’s “March of the Women.”
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications
Sara Kirkland Snider on her 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, and Mabel Lee Ping-Hua, 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, isolation, assault, incarceration, force-feedings, and life endangerment to fight for it. Forward Into Light does not attempt to tell the story of the American women’s suffrage movement, but rather to distill the emotional and psychological contours of faith, doubt, and what it means to persevere.
Forward Into Light features a musical quote from “March of the Women,” composed in 1910 by British composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth. 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.
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, D.C.
“Forward, out of error / Leave behind the night / Forward through the darkness / Forward into light!”
Past Performances
