Sarah Kirkland Snider

Sarah Kirkland Snider is an American composer of critically acclaimed chamber, orchestral, and choral music, as well as art songs that have been said to straddle the border "between richly orchestrated indie rock and straight chamber music." She is also a co-director of New Amsterdam Records and the non-profit presenting organization, New Amsterdam Presents.

Snider was born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.M. and Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, and David Lang. Other notable teachers include Christopher Rouse and Marc-Andre Dalbavie at the Aspen Music Festival, and Justin Dello Joio.

Snider's musical compositions, particularly her song cycles, frequently borrow from indie-rock and popular musical idioms as well as classical chamber music forms and instrumentation. These stylistic choices have urged critics to label her music as part of the burgeoning indie-classical movement, where she has been called "perhaps the most sophisticated" of voices within this genre., She has received performances at venues ranging from New York's Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to rock venues such as (Le) Poisson Rouge and The Bell House and art spaces such as MoMA and Mass MoCA. Snider has received commissions and performances from artists and ensembles including San Francisco Symphony, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony Residentie Orkest Den Haag, American Composers Orchestra, ACME, yMusic, Ensemble Signal, the Knights, NOW Ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Shara Nova (My Brightest Diamond), violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, percussionist Colin Currie, and many others. Her works have been featured in festivals such as Aspen, Ecstatic, Colorado, Sundance, BAM’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Bang On a Can Summer, Liquid Music, MATA, Carlsbad, Look & Listen, 21C Liederabend, SONiC, New York Festival of Song, and Apples & Olives.

...
Wikipedia