Majel Connery: Hey, everybody, this is your host, Majel Connery. And before we do anything, I want to give you a quick heads up that this episode contains a couple bad words. All right, here we go.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: I was, like, feeling very anti-classical music in general. Like, even if I got in the car and, like, a piece by Handel would come on, I'd be like, Get that shit off. You know, like, I did not want to think about male composers. I didn't want to think about their world because I just felt like that world had betrayed me.
[Theme Music starts: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature]
Majel Connery: From CapRadio, this is A Music of Their Own, an interview podcast about women in music. We hear stories of survival and perseverance, and we explore why being a woman in music is so different from being a man.
I'm your host, Majel Connery, and in this first season, we're meeting women in classical music where the number of men vastly exceeds the number of women. Now, when I say vastly exceeds, I mean that only 12 percent of the music performed by major American orchestras this past season was written by women. And inside those orchestras, the story is about the same — of all the violinists and trumpet players in the world, only 17 percent are women. If you want to dive more into the numbers, check out our show notes. Now, the good news is that these numbers are definitely going up and the women on this podcast are some of the success stories. They are the ones who have risen to the top of their field against the odds. The goal of this podcast is to figure out who are these women and how did they get where they are? This is A Music of Their Own from CapRadio. We'll be right back.
[Theme Music ends: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature ends]
Majel Connery: Welcome back. I'm Majel Connery. My first guest on A Music of Their Own is Sarah Kirkland Snider.
[Music begins: “Mass for the Endangered”]
Majel Connery: Sarah's music has been commissioned and performed by major symphony orchestras and has appeared on the biggest stages in this country and abroad. She's also a co-founder and co-director of New Amsterdam Records, which released the music you're hearing right now from Sarah's album “Mass for the Endangered.”
[Music in clear: “Mass for the Endangered”]
Majel Connery: I'm going to just jump straight into what I think are the most pressing questions we have to ask on this podcast. Is music written by women different from other music? Is music by women woman-ish?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: I know lots of female composers who hate this question and they tell people before they give a pre-concert talk. Don't ask me about how it feels to be a woman composer or whatever. I feel like, look, as soon as I walk out on the stage in the context of an orchestra or whatever, people are going to be thinking, ‘Oh, it's a woman composer.’ Like, you're just going to be thinking that. They're going to think, ‘What's her experience been like? How did she come to be a composer? Did she have role models? Did she get hit on?’ You know, what's happened over there? And ‘is her music going to be as good as a man's music? Like, did she orchestrate all that by herself?’ You know, whatever. I get asked that all the time, by the way, ‘Did you orchestrate that by yourself?’ And oh, my God, needless to say, none of my peers ever get asked that after a concert. But it's been a huge — it's dominated my career, okay? Like, it dominated my decision to not do it for all those early years. Like, I would have become a composer so much earlier if I'd been a guy, you know? But instead I questioned and self-doubted, and all that stuff. And I didn't choose the profession until I was 25, didn't start graduate school until I was 30. I mean, you know, I'm now 47 and I feel all this panic to make up for lost time. I wish I'd written five operas by now. And so every day, the fact of my gender is a fact of my reality. So yeah, for me, the topic of women in music is unavoidable. It's also, I think, a positive thing. I think it's great that women are showing up in music more, you know? Let's talk about that. Yeah, let's get that out there. Let's talk about the fact that there needs to be a podcast on this because there haven't been enough women in music, not just in classical music, but I mean, even pop music, where as a kid I grew up feeling like I did have role models. Looking back, I had very few, you know, and they were under significant duress. When I read interviews with them now, it's all about the crap they were dealing with and all of the choices they made were because of the limited choices they had or the hardships they were dealing with that had to do with their gender. So again, everything is about gender. When you're making music as a woman, it just is.
Majel Connery: Do you personally listen differently to music when you know it's by a woman?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Oh, God, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I think that music has no gender. I love this question because it's so hard to explain the answer in my brain. Like, there are certain musical decisions that we associate with so-called femininity or so-called masculinity. Like a big, loud ending, we would call that masculine and a soft, gentle ending, we would call that feminine. But those are just semantics that we've been taught. And these are emotions and experiences that both men and women have all the time. Loud and soft things happen to all of us, you know, and it's ridiculous that we've assigned genders to them. Men cry and then go through sadness. Men lose things that they love. You know, they have all the same emotions that we do. But this is the thing that kills me about all of this is like, if music were so different when it was written by a woman, then I never would have been madly in love with all the music written by men, because I wouldn't have been able to relate to it. Right? All the music that I grew up loving was written by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, WC, Ravel. These are my favorite composers growing up, and a lot of Bach music that I played, those were like deep religious experiences that I had emotionally, and I would not have been able to relate to them if music were somehow gendered, you know? So why should it then make sense that music written by a woman could not have the same emotional effect on a man? I often try to imagine a different world where all the music had been written by women and like, what would the female, you know, Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” sound like? Or the female Gorecky's Third or whatever. And it's totally imaginable to me that it would be this amazing world of music, but I don't actually think it would be all that different from what we have.
Majel Connery: Let me ask you this — I sometimes have this mental wake up in the middle of an article where I'll think, ‘This article was written by a woman.’
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Mm hmm. I have that too.
Majel Connery: And I'll page back to see if it's written by a woman or a man or someone who identifies as a woman or a man, like in terms of their name.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: And you'll catch some internalized, misogynistic thing in yourself.
Majel Connery: Yes.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Me too.
Majel Connery: And sometimes I'll think this language feels very feminine to me. I don't know if I could put my finger on it, but it feels feminine. And I'll go back. And it's by some person named Dave blah, blah, blah. And I'll think, cool. Mm hmm. That's really cool. But I know when I do that little inadvertent exercise that I am on some level cataloging the total number of usages of this word or the way that this metaphor was couched or whatever, they somehow add up to a characterization of femininity or not In an article.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yes, totally
Majel Connery: So surely the same goes for music, yes or not?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. I think you're absolutely right about that. Like, you can hear a piece of music that's like, okay, let's imagine some pastoral thing for flutes and harp and, you know it's very pretty and consonant and whatever that you might say, like, oh, that sounded like very feminine music. I'm sure that can happen all the time. But most of that music that we've heard that sounds very feminine — that stereotypical feminine sound — has actually been written by men. Right? There were no female composers whose music really got performed until recently. So I'm thinking of that music they play when you’d watch "The Smurfs" all the time when I was a kid. And they would have like, da da da da da da da. Da da da. Da. Da da.
[Music is heard underneath: “Adagio for Strings”]
Sarah Kirkland Snider: It's like this pastoral thing. Like, to me, that's a very that would be like a stereotypically feminine piece of music, you know?
[Music is fades out: “Adagio for Strings”]
[Music starts: “Morning Mood”]
Majel Connery: The music you're hearing - and the music Sarah was singing - is from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. It's called "Morning Mood." And before that, you heard a snippet of "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber. This is A Music of Their Own from CapRadio. We'll hear more of my conversation with Sarah Kirkland Snider right after this break.
[Music ends: “Morning Mood”]
[Music starts: “Unremembered”]
Majel Connery: This is A Music of Their Own from CapRadio. I'm your host Majel Connery. And the music you're listening to is the prelude from Sarah Kirkland Snider's song cycle "Unremembered."
“Unremembered" is one of Sarah's best-known pieces. And it's no wonder because it's freaking lovely. It's lush. It really wears its emotion on its sleeve. So much so, that it's hard to hear this music and not be moved by it. It compels you to react.
"Unremembered" has also been attacked for the same reason. It's too emotional and too feminine. What you're going to hear next is my conversation with Sarah about "Unremembered" and also another piece in the same vein called "Penelope." You'll note how Sarah dismantles this kneejerk association between emotion in music and femininity.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: "Penelope" and "Unremembered" — it's like as I was writing the music, I kept thinking, ‘Ah, this is so naive and simple and ridiculous and it's only half notes and nobody will take it seriously. And, you know, there's just like these pretty chords. It's literally fucking have notes. Oh, shit. I can't write this.’ I mean, I literally would never be allowed to write that when I was in grad school. I once got in trouble for having eight quarter notes in a row in grad school. So anyway, I had all these ideas of what the critics would be saying in my head. You know, it's like people are just gonna laugh at this. It’s girl music, you know? This is like high school girls, it's like Lilith Fair music. Still, something about writing those songs for "Penelope" felt really good. After I got over all the self-doubt and the self-loathing, and after I started sharing it with people and I started getting all these amazing responses, I was like, ‘Oh, it feels good to connect with people emotionally in the audience.’ And so when I wrote "Unremembered," that was me trying to do another experiment along the lines of "Penelope." What does my brain come up with when I'm giving it permission to be itself?
Majel Connery: So it must be reassuring that those are two pieces that you're like super duper known for?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yeah, but those are also the most polarizing pieces, right? These are the pieces that I had people — and I knew this would happen, of course, which is why I didn't want to do it in the first place. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to write my teachers and get letters of recommendation for the past year of what I've been doing. But then I was super shocked to see that “Penelope” had this super warm reception, and it made me realize that I had hated all of these musical instincts in myself when I was in graduate school. But then suddenly these were the same instincts that other people were liking. And I thought, okay, the problem isn't in my head. Like there are lots of people out there who would embrace different kinds of music than I give them credit for.
Majel Connery: Well, so when you said they're polarizing, I know there were negative comments and your decision, at least in one of these cases, was to write a freaking article.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: So that was specifically about the gender issue that I felt was in the criticism of this piece. So this was criticism about "Unremembered" and it was "The New York Times" critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim had called "Unremembered," compared it to candy floss, and she said the piece was something about candy floss earnestness or something like that. I'd have to go back. I'm proud of myself for not remembering it word for word. I used to, but it's been a couple of years. So what troubled me, at first, I was like, ouch, candy floss like that just hurts no matter what the context is. But then I started thinking, Wait a minute. She's actually particularly critiquing the emotion in my piece. And that's the candy floss that she's referring to was the emotion. And I just thought that's really troubling to me. I don't want other young female composers to read this and think that it's they're going to be made fun of if they, you know, are melodic, having like lyricism combined with directness. If you're really direct, but it's very gestural and modernist. I mean, if it's like I'm expressing anger through these notes you know, that’s
Majel Connery: Different
Sarah Kirkland: Different. Yeah. So I read that quote and I was like, oh, now all these girls who come up to me and say these things, you're going to read this and think that, you know, being emotional is a girly problem, or they're going to be teased for being girly, for being about this. This whole conflating of emotion with femininity is super problematic. And when teachers now recommend this kind of music to their students, they'll say things like, you know, ‘Barber's romanticism is unparalleled. You know, where has this melody, this exquisite melody, you know, of "The Adagio for Strings" Is like the exemplar of modern a modern sensibility approaching, you know, a romantic melody or whatever.’ It will be held up as something good, not something bad. Even the men who are writing in that style, like Barber and Britten, didn't really, I mean, they had it. They were given a hard time. But still, as a man, you could pull it off because it goes against type and it's not seen as indulgent. But as for a woman to write that way, it's like, ‘Oh, you're just emotional and squishy anyway.’ And for you to show us your emotional squishiness is just shocking to see that it's so embarrassing. It's just horrifying. I mean, when you go back and read the biographies or the letters of Schumann and Chopin and the list and the way that they would write to each other, it was so romantic. I mean, it was so emotional. And Schumann would say, ‘I was up all night crying about these chords, you know, that I was sick, I couldn't stop crying.’ And Chopin, they would write these florid letters of like flawed emotionality to each other. And that was accepted then. You know, it was a different time. For a lot of people music is an inherently emotional medium.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: It's a medium that does elicit a lot of emotion in a lot of listeners. And so to talk about it as though it's just a bunch of crossword puzzles or just sort of systems and processes on the page and not talk about what your emotional objectives are or your narrative objectives. But for sure, when I got out of grad school, I was super, super down on classical music and super down on composing in general. And that assignment that I got for “Penelope” came right at the right time because I was feeling very anti-classical music in general. Like, even if I got in the car and a piece by Handel would come on, I'd be like, ‘Get that shit off,’ you know? Like, I did not want to think about male composers. I didn't want to think about their world because I just felt like that world had betrayed me. I felt like, you know, those had been my heroes growing up and they'd all rejected me during grad school. So it's funny because in interviews since then, I've wondered should I admit this or should I not? Should I say like, ‘oh yeah. I always felt confident to write whatever the hell kind of music I wanted to write.’ Would that be more helpful and inspiring to young female composers to hear that, or would it be more helpful and inspiring for them to hear that I struggled and that it was really that there was a lot of self judgment and self-loathing that I had internalized a lot of this male perspective? PJ Harvey was a huge inspiration for me and in college, like, she was just such a badass and she went out there into the field of rock when she was so young. And just like in the end, her attitude in interviews was very much like, I just went out there and did whatever the fuck I wanted. Like, she was just maybe that wasn't true, but she projected this totally hard, badass self and that did inspire me. So that was part of the reason why, by and large, as I've told you, I chose to be honest about it.
[Music starts: “The Agnus Dei”].
Majel Connery: You're listening to "The Agnus Dei" from Sarah's "Mass for the Endangered," her most recent record release with the choir Galicantus, conducted by Gabriel Crouch. Before that, you heard Chopin's "Prelude, Opus 28, No. 4 in E Minor” played by Martha Argerich.
In this final segment of the episode, Sarah and I wade into tricky territory, but it's territory that is totally critical and that is age. What is the relationship between music and aging? For many of us women, whether we feel it explicitly or implicitly, the appeal of our music is tied to our sex appeal. As we age and our bodies age with us, it would seem to suggest that over time we could lose the ability to connect with people musically, which sounds crazy, but that is the nub of this conversation and of this podcast. How is it that the sex of a person can be equated with the music that comes out of them? Is the ability of a woman composer to reach her audience premised on youth and sex appeal.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: I think the age thing is super important because again, it's something that I know it's important because it scares me and it's something that I worry about with my career. And that ties into the whole ’I should have written five operas by now,’ you know? NPR did this nice piece on my mass last year, but they misunderstood my age hugely. They were like, ‘She's not even in her 40s yet.’ Like that was part of the NPR article. And I was like, ‘Oh, that's so nice to hear.’ But I was like, and I told my publicist, I was like, ‘We should correct him.’ And he was like, ‘Nah. We already told him how old you are. You must have just chosen to ignore that or forgotten. It doesn't matter.’ But I was like, But we really should. And so whenever I posted about it, I was like, ‘They got my age wrong. But, you know, there's this article.’
Majel Connery: Wait, why did you feel compelled to correct that?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Because I'm 47 and he said I was not even in my 40s. I am well into my 40s. I'm on the outside of my 40s.
Majel Connery: Did you feel like you would be participating in a certain deceit?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Didn't like Cher do that or something? I think she lied about her age and then she was found out about it or something. It was like the Cher debacle. I was like, That's me, you're joking. And I was like, the Cher Snider debacle or something. I forget what we said. But anyway, I kind of always want to hide my age because everyone always thinks I'm younger because of the fact that I struck out with, that I did well with “Penelope” when I was 35 and I was fresh out of grad school and I was, you know, I just started grad school late. So all my peers from grad school were like seven years younger than me. So everyone thought I was seven years younger. And so I've never wanted to correct that because it's always felt like it's worked to my advantage somehow. But then at the same time, I think it's a messed up, you know, paradigm that we have. And this idea of needing to be younger, wanting to be younger is so toxic. And so the other day I was really stressing out about this actually, because I was deciding whether or not to postpone my opera to another year to 2024, because we've had a lot of changes in the personnel and I've decided to write the libretto myself, which is like scary and a big undertaking and I want to make sure I'm doing that right. And then we have enough workshops. So I decided to push it back to ‘24, but I realized the main reason why I wasn't wanting to do that was because I will be 50 then when it premieres instead of 49. And in my head it was going to be a much easier, sexier opera if it's written by a 49 year old than a 50 year old. It sounds ridiculous, but also not ridiculous, you know, because it's like it's real. These kinds of fears. I mean, the difference between 49 and 50 is ridiculous. But to think that 49 is going to get you much more mileage is ridiculous. You know, there are women that I really look up to who are, you know, 20 and 30 years out from me and whose careers are great. And it should be the opposite. It should be that as you get older, your wisdom on this earth makes you more …
Majel Connery: That.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Interesting to listen to. Well, it's true that it makes it more interesting to listen to you. I think for writers and for a lot of artists and thinkers, some of the great singers of our time who have aged gracefully and beautifully, you know, like Renee Fleming, for example. But she's somebody who is super hot like 20 years ago. Right. Or considered hot in the sense of, like, salable and beautiful. And I think she's still very much that way. And she's in her sixties. And, you know, she's still I think she has just as much scalability, if not more now. Classical music, I think, is more forgiving of aging than pop music.
Majel Connery: Don't you think it's the individual? I think it's whether or not this person, this particular human being, figures out what it is that people love about them and goes full bore?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Yes, I think that's 1,000 percent. And that's all that really matters. It's like the confidence sticking to it. I'm thinking of Patti Smith, okay. She's somebody who wonderfully has not tried to tailor her looks to the male gaze in the last 20 years, you know, but she is so beloved and she's so sought after and seen as this wise, artful person, you know, and so creative. And all those things like her following is immense. It's massive. And she's also I think she's turned all of that admiration into a kind of cool. I don't know if I'll have the guts to grow my but my hair goes gray. I don't know if I'll be able to do that, but I want to. And the fact that she's doing it makes me feel like doesn't matter how old you get when you're Patti Smith, you will always be cool, you know? And I think that's the secret. For us to figure out. You know, it's like how do we be our coolest selves? And by cool meaning being open. And she's got these Instagram posts where she just like, ‘Hi, I'm reading this book, you guys. Well, hang on, I got to go to the bathroom.’ She puts the book down and she goes upstairs for like five minutes and you're like, ‘I can't move, I can’t stop watching this’ and she comes back and she's like, ‘that was a long break, wasn't it? I had this thought about a bird and I wanted to go check on the bird,’ and she's just like, so unselfconscious, you know, and so, so wonderfully herself. And I am somebody who's always worried about every little thing I'm saying and doing. And so I aspire to be more like her. Did we get to a hopeful place with the age question? Because I want people to feel positive and inspired. I think sometimes I think it's this thing about having younger good composers, like knowing that they might be listening or I always want to say something that gives them encouragement. That's all.
Majel Connery: I think the note that you closed on was if you could find a way to wholly be yourself at all times in a defenseless way. Yes. Wouldn't that be …
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Wonderful? Yes. Okay. And I agree with that. But that's beautifully said.
Majel Connery: I mean, it goes without saying, Sarah, but thank you so much for doing this with me.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Oh, of course. Yeah, but we didn't ask your shyness-assertiveness question or your ambition thing, did we?
Majel Connery: I didn't think you had such a hunger to keep going?
Sarah Kirkland Snider: Well, I just want to make you happy. This is also very …
[Music starts: “Penelope: The Lotus Eaters”]
Majel Connery: I left in that trailing off part of the conversation for a good reason. The part where Sarah says, ‘Oh, but we didn't ask this question in this question.’ I left that in because I want to make you aware of a really important part of Sarah. Sarah cares to a really noticeable degree. She takes care of the people that she is in conversation with. Even in the context of an interview. She's worried about me feeling hurt and involved. And this is a trope about women that women are carrying and that they think of others first. So in a world where it's fashionable to not care, you know, like this, this whole no fucks given meme, somebody like Sarah because of this stereotype can come across as almost hyper gendered because she will not participate in the culture of not caring. But why should the choice to be responsive to other people be a woman thing? Isn't that just a human being thing? Being a human being in the world. Isn't one sided. It's two sided. And music is too. It is a conversation, not a monologue. Sarah is a caring, conversational partner, and her music is the same. It exists to connect. Sarah's music gives a fuck. Is that feminine? I don't think so. But you can be the judge for yourself. This last piece that you're listening to is called "The Lotus Eaters," and it's from Sarah's song cycle, "Penelope."
[Music ends: “Penelope: The Lotus Eaters”]
[Music starts: “Stacked”]
Majel Connery: On the next episode of A Music of Their Own, a conversation with flutist and composer Natalie Joachim.
Nathalie Joachim: It's like a classic black female experience. We've been having to be exceptional for a really long time and we're glad that you're all noticing now. We are going to like, you know, mark these emails read and move on because we actually do have a lot of work to do still.
Majel Connery: Next time, Nathalie gives us her view of the black female experience in the classical world and how she is making it in spite of the odds.
[Music ends: “Stacked”]
[Theme Music starts: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature]
Majel Connery: A Music of Their Own is a CapRadio production. Interviews were engineered and produced by me, Majel Connery, and edited by Kevin Doherty. Paul Conley mastered the mix. Sally Schilling is our executive producer, with production assistance from Jen Picard. Chris Hagan is our digital editor. Chris Bruno is in charge of marketing. Our designs were created by Marissa Espiritu. Renee Thompson is our digital projects manager and our social media is run by Emmy Gilbert and Emily Zentner. The theme song for A Music of Their Own is called “We Need a Room,” and it's by my band Sky Creature. You can find the song and Sky Creature on all major audio platforms. Don't forget to follow a music of their own wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a rating and a review so others can find this podcast, too. To find out more about the guests on our podcast, go to the show notes or visit capradio.org/amusicoftheirown. Thanks for listening.
[Theme Music ends: “We Need a Room,” Sky Creature]
