Snider SOMETHING FOR THE DARK

Sarah Kirkland Snider

SOMETHING for the DARK

From the G. Schirmer Rental Library Date of Printing________________

Music Sales Corporation New York, NY Rights administered by G. Schirmer, Inc. New York, NY

Sarah Kirkland Snider

SOMETHING for the DARK

commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in honor of Elaine Lebenbom World premiere by Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor on 14 April, 2016

Music Sales Corporation New York, NY Rights administered by G. Schirmer, Inc. New York, NY

Instrumentation: Piccolo 2 Flutes 2 Oboes English Horn 3 Clarinets in Bb 2 Bassoon Contrabassoon 4 Horns in F 4 Trumpets in C 2 Trombones Bass Trombone Tuba Timpani Percussion (3 players) Piano (Celesta) Harp Strings duration ca. 12’

Program Note: When I received the commission to write this piece, I thought I would try to write something about hope — it being an essential element of Detroit’s narrative of endurance, or indeed any narrative. Early into my sketches for the piece, I stumbled upon the idea that sounded to my like hope incarnate: a bold, noble, full-hearted little melody surrounded by sunlight and dignity and shiny things. I thought that maybe I would open the piece with it and then have the music journey through some adversity to find its way back to an even bigger, bolder statement of optimism.

Growth! Triumph! A happy ending! But that wasn’t what happened. The piece opens with the shiny statement of hope, and sets out on an uncertain journey to find it again, but can’t. Instead, it encounters strange new echoes of the motif in different, unfamiliar settings. It follows digressions, trying to resolve related but new musical arguments. Eventually, it finds its way to solid ground, though this piece is quite a bit darker than where we began. But to my mind this arrival feels more trustworthy, more complete, more worthy of celebration because it feels more real.

While writing the piece, I was reading some Detroit poets on their take on the city, and grew better acquainted with the work of Philip Levine.

The last two lines of For Fran struck me as an apt motto for the kind of clear-eyed reflection on endurance that runs through his poems about Detroit. In preparing the flower beds for winter, Levine’s wife becomes a symbol of the promise of renewal in general: ‘Out of whatever we have been / We will make something for the dark.’ Levine has said that much of his poetry about Detroit was born of the hope that [Detroit] might be reborn inside itself, out of its own ruins, phoenix-like, rising out of its own ashes. Except I don’t see it in heroic terms. The triumphs are small, personal, daily. Nothing grandly heroic is taking place; just animals and men and flowers asserting their right to be, even in this most devastated of American cities.

Something for the Dark is a meditation on the promise of renewal, and the hard-won wisdom that attends the small, personal, daily triumphs of asserting one’s right to be.

I extend my sincere gratitude to the David and Elaine Lebenbom Foundation for the great honor of their commission, and for their work on behalf of female composers in general.

— Sarah Kirkland Snider

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