Any composer's relationship to music is intense, but Sarah Kirkland Snider, whose debut opera, Hildegard, receives its world premiere at the LA Opera this week, ratchets that intensity up to a higher, more metaphysical level. When Snider hears music, she says, she sometimes wants to eat it — that's how deep the desire goes. She's not traditionally religious, but she has come to see music as a mysterious, divine force within her.
That force has been gaining strength ever since the 52-year-old's breakthrough piece, Penelope, appeared 15 years ago. The song cycle tells the story of a psychologically damaged husband returning from war to a wife who tries to help him find himself again. The piece resonates in Snider's own life, as she's been open about her own struggles with depression and anxiety.
The Princeton, N.J., native has had to overcome more than just mental health challenges — her career, still on the rise, has been rife with roadblocks. One of the most significant dates back to her years in post-grad study at the Yale School of Music, where she sometimes felt creatively straitjacketed. She didn't write a note for the first six months she was there, afraid of breaking any of the academically sanctioned rules about what good music should sound like.
Finding her own compositional voice wasn't easy, but the warm critical response to Penelope helped validate her singular language — one that organically incorporates elements of classical, rock and pop, a blend she once felt ashamed to indulge. One of Snider's greatest assets is her natural facility in writing vocal music; she followed Penelope with another song cycle, Unremembered (2015), and the choral work Mass for the Endangered (2020), which married environmentalism with the traditional Latin requiem mass.
Given the hurdles she's surmounted and her success so far, it's not a shock to learn that the subject of Snider's new opera is Hildegard von Bingen — the 12th century German abbess who, against all odds, became a prolific composer, writer, scientist, philosopher and diplomat. Snider says that what Hildegard accomplished in her time, especially as a woman, is a never-ending source of inspiration.
From her home in Princeton — where she lives with her husband, the composer Steven Mackey, and their children — Snider joined a video chat to talk about Hildegard, how her health intersects with her work, and the genesis of New Amsterdam, the influential record label she co-founded.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Huizenga: In your upcoming opera about the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen, there's a scene where celestial voices tell Hildegard, "Know thyself, find your strength." It made me pause and think: Those words could probably serve as your own personal motto.
Sarah Kirkland Snider: You get at the heart of one of the reasons I became so interested in Hildegard. In my early readings about her, one of the pervasive themes of her life was self-doubt and anxiety, and that's certainly been true for me, too. I think that's true for a lot of people.
Just speaking for myself, as a woman who was raised by conservative Southern traditional parents to be a certain kind of girl — that meant pleasing others, downplaying my own needs, not sharing my own point of view. My parents meant well; it was the way they were raised. For women like me, who've had that experience, it certainly can be daunting to try to assert oneself in the world, artistically or personally. And when you're an artist, you have to constantly assert yourself. You have to put your artistic point of view forward and believe in it, and all of that can be very daunting. So that was part of my initial interest in Hildegard — in a time and place where women weren't supposed to be seen or heard, how did she conquer those fears and defy societal norms to accomplish everything that she did?
Most composers are, at some point, searching for their voice, finding themselves musically, learning how to navigate the classical music marketplace — and then playing to their strengths. Do you have a clear picture of the composer part of yourself, and your strengths?
I do feel like I have a much stronger sense of that than I did when I was younger. I still have enormous self-doubt and I'm relentlessly self-critical. But overall, I do feel like I trust my instincts more as a creative person. I know what my strengths are and I try to lean into them.
My strengths are really my interests. I'm very interested in melody and harmony, atmosphere, emotion and storytelling. I'm interested in communication and emotional immediacy. These are things that I was not necessarily encouraged to pursue when I was in graduate school or in my early years of study.
I'm not going to ask you "Why Hildegard?" because she's an endlessly fascinating figure. But what specifically about her appeals most to you?
I have chronic intractable migraine, and apparently so did Hildegard. I actually first learned about her reading a book by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who theorized that Hildegard's visions were in part due to her auras she experienced during her migraines. He mentioned that she was a composer, and that made me curious to learn about her music. But beyond that, I wanted to know more about her visions, so I started reading books about her life, and from there I just became absolutely transfixed.
I had no idea what she had accomplished — the fact that she was a woman in the Middle Ages when women were not allowed to be educated, and went on to gain papal approval to be the first woman ever to speak as the voice of God and say that she was receiving visions directly from God. She was called a prophet, the first woman in the Catholic Church's history to be given that title, and published her visions. She was very savvy — she couldn't just come out and try to radically change everything. She needed to play the game in order to have the church give her credibility. And I find that fascinating.
How important was it for you to put Hildegard in a romantic relationship with another woman in your opera? We know that a young nun named Richardis von Stade came to the abbey where Hildegard lived and became her assistant, but the jury is still out on whether their relationship was erotically charged or not.
There was so much to share about her life and what she accomplished, but my initial drafts of the opera were a little too academic and dry. I remember [the opera producer] Beth Morrison saying to me, "You know, this is an opera, not a dissertation." I realized I needed to get at these ideas in a more human, relatable, universal kind of way — and I thought I would use her relationship with Richardis as a way of dealing with her philosophical teachings in regards to her own life and everyday experience. We're not sure whether there was an erotically charged relationship. Historical documents seem to show that she certainly had very strong feelings for Richardis, feelings that were discouraged by Benedictine tradition — but I wondered, what was that like for her internally?
I kept having to remind myself that what opera does best is deal with emotions, and particularly complex, layered emotions that are not just primary colors, but where you can use harmony to really get at complication and internal dissonance.
Because Hildegard was a composer, I'm curious how you determined what kind of sound world you wanted for the opera? Were you tempted to write your music in a kind of medieval-influenced style?
One of my first reactions to Hildegard's music when I first heard it in my 20s was a feeling of affinity, because she has this penchant for large leaps and melismatic writing — lots of notes per syllable. And that was something I was doing when I first started composing. So inhabiting her musical world enabled me, in some ways, to go deeper into my own. That sounds strange, perhaps, but I tried to use her music as a springboard for a lot of my ideas in certain places. Like, I wanted it to have overall an early music vibe, but I also didn't want to feel like I was trying to rewrite her music or inhabit her point of view.
Hildegard's reputation has soared in the last half century or so, primarily as a result of the increasing interest in early music. What can we learn from her and her music, more than 900 years after her birth?
Oh my gosh, so much. In a way, it's sad to see how little has changed in certain respects. Of course, women have many more rights now than they did then, but a lot of the struggles that she faced resonate with women today. And not just with women, anyone who is marginalized by society, government, family systems. Looking at the way she went into her struggles and came out with this life of self-direction and creative accomplishment with such tremendous panache is very inspiring. Furthermore, there's a plotline in the opera about how Richardis endures a rape and a pregnancy — which is still resonant today, obviously.
And there's even an unsympathetic helicopter mom who bulldozes in and whisks Richardis away from Hildegard.
And that's true for a lot of gender expectations from families today, right? That was all about Richardis not fitting the mold of a traditional girl who was interested in boys and court. Instead, she was interested in making art, and she was gay — and, because she was different from other girls, she was sent off to a convent. We have infinite versions of that today, where people are denied love and acceptance for who they are. And so ultimately, one of the central themes, and the note that we end on in the opera, is about Hildegard recognizing who she is and accepting that. This is where the opera is not a biopic, it's a combination of fact and my own invention.
You were born and raised in New Jersey, in a not-very-musical household — but there must have been some music floating in the air when you were a kid. What were you and your parents listening to?
My parents did not listen to classical music at home. It was 24/7 pop, rock, Motown and Broadway. My dad was a big music lover and played records by The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and Simon & Garfunkel. And I loved all of that music deeply.
I began piano lessons at 6 or 7, and then started cello in fifth grade and played in the orchestras and kids' chamber music groups. And what was wonderful about that upbringing was that I didn't have anybody telling me that pop or rock music was low art and that classical was high art. I thought all of it was just music. Whereas I think a lot of my peers in classical music, who grew up with classical music parents, had a lot of preconceived ideas about pop and rock being bad.
What was hard for me was, when I got serious about music — having those impulses for emotional immediacy — being steered away from that by my teachers because the impulses were associated with the world of pop and rock. Music is all about emotional immediacy. For me, classical music, at least everything up until pretty much the early 20th century, is also about emotional immediacy. So it was hard for me to understand why we were suddenly not supposed to do that when there were hundreds of years of great art and music that did do that — that managed to be both artistic and stimulating on visceral and emotional and cerebral levels.
I think we can hear those pop influences in your music. If I had to imagine a Sarah Kirkland Snider Top 40 hit, it would definitely be "The Lotus Eaters" from your song cycle Penelope, which has great hooks and a great chorus you just want to sing along with, like any good pop song.
It's funny — that song came so quickly and strangely to me, because I'd taken my husband to the hospital for a minor medical procedure. I was in the waiting room and brought my computer, and I just immediately heard these melodies. I was thinking actually about one of my favorite pieces of songwriting, by Radiohead — they're probably my all-time favorite.
Indeed, one of my favorite bands, too.
I was thinking about "Karma Police," which goes to this wonderful unexpected place; the song sort of levitates and you're suddenly in this other dimension when the lyrics go, "For a minute there, I lost myself." I wanted to do that in "The Lotus Eaters" with the line "And I'm lost in this night."
I was taught in graduate school that when an idea comes to you easily, you should reject it, because it probably means that you've heard it somewhere else before, and you should try to be more imaginative. That is such a toxic message for a creative person, because then you're constantly second-guessing all of your ideas. I have to credit my husband, who's also a composer, because he sat me down and said, "You know, what you need is therapy, not composition lessons. These are beautiful, great ideas and you just have too much dogma that you've internalized. Just commit to it."
I'm guessing that that internal conflict was part of the fuel that helped you — and fellow composers Judd Greenstein and William Brittelle — found the influential record label New Amsterdam in 2008.
Judd and Bill and I felt like music should be a place where people of our generation and our interests can find some cultural resonance — not look at a record album cover and see a picture of people in gowns and tuxedos. Honestly, we wanted to create a space to make the music that we wanted to make, that we felt we couldn't make when we were in graduate school.
This was happening about the same time that I was writing Penelope. Judd and Bill came to see a performance and they said, "This is exactly the music we should record for New Amsterdam." And I was like, "Oh, no. This is just a side project, I can't let this out into the real world." And they said, "Sarah, do you realize how hypocritical this is? You're saying that we should have freedom. And yet you feel shame about this music." They basically dared me, and supported me tremendously. We put out the album, and I think it was just at the right moment.
It struck a chord with a lot of people.
I was utterly gobsmacked by the critical reception of Penelope. I was expecting it to just come and go under the radar and use it as a guinea pig for New Amsterdam. And it not only did well critically, but I received all of these emails from classical people wanting to commission me. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. This is basically rock music with some weirdness thrown in — very on the fence between rock and classical.
It helped launch your career, and the record label, too. Fairly soon, New Amsterdam seemed to epitomize a style that was called, for better or for worse, "indie classical" — implying a blend of classical and indie rock. How do you feel about that descriptor?
I'm not a big fan of it. I think it got stuck on us early on because we were very DIY in terms of our approach. We didn't know what we were doing starting a label; we didn't understand how much work it would be. It was very "indie" in terms of our approach to the infrastructure of setting up a label, and then that got merged with the idea of the music we were making. It's an unfortunate descriptor because it subjects the inhabitants to a false universalism — not everybody writing so-called "indie classical" sounds the same. It also suggests that the music is lightweight, and that's unfortunate. I think there can be rigor in all kinds of music.
In one interview from 10 years ago, you pointed out what you called a "lack of infrastructure to support music written in the cracks between" the classical and pop music worlds. Has that changed at all in the past decade?
Yes, I think there's a lot more support, but it's still difficult to build a career. If you look at somebody like Julia Holter, she's finding a way to make it work. I don't think she has a teaching job — she just makes music and tours, and she's doing really interesting work in the cracks. But if you can't market something, it's very hard to find an audience for it. Even today, some might say you have more access, and you can get your music out in any way. But there's so much music out there, almost too much music to really be seen and heard unless you can get writers interested and find your way above the fray.
My husband teaches at Princeton, and there are a lot of composers there who are doing very interesting work in the cracks that they wouldn't have been doing, I think, 10 years ago. I've seen, more and more, the changing of the guard — younger teachers coming in, more open-mindedness.
You've been refreshingly open-minded about your own struggles. I remember a beautifully honest Facebook post you wrote in 2020 where you said, "I'm Sarah. And on World Mental Health Day, I'm writing to say that I have generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder … that anxiety and depression are a result of imbalanced chemistry in the brain, the same way diabetes is a result of insufficient insulin in the pancreas, and should not be stigmatized." It must have taken some real courage to write that.
It was courage. But also, I immediately regretted it afterwards.
Really?
Yes, and no. When I woke up in the morning, I had a panic attack that I had done it. It took a lot of reassurance from people coming forward and telling me how much it meant to them for me to realize that it was indeed the right thing to do.
I think I got to a place of feeling so tired of hiding it. I have two kids who are neurodivergent; my son has mild autism spectrum disorder and my daughter has mild Tourette's. They certainly have the potential to develop some anxiety and depression around these issues. I felt a strong impulse to be the voice that I was craving hearing, saying that it's OK to talk about these things. I grew up in a family where it was definitely not OK to talk about these things. Even now, as I'm saying these words, I'm feeling embarrassed to admit that I have struggled with depression. It's just so deeply ingrained in me for that to be a shameful thing.
But when more people do what you bravely did, more people will get the help they need without feeling that shame.
Thank you.
I don't want to be presumptuous, but I imagine it can get in the way of your work.
For sure. My depressive episodes have always been concomitant with intractable migraine. And it's always been unclear: Is the depression causing the migraine? Is the migraine causing the depression? It's very difficult to tease these things apart because it's been my life since childhood. In the deepest part of my soul, I believe that the migraine came first — because now my migraines are better, and I'm generally less anxious. I'm a very optimistic person by nature; my husband always says, "You're the most optimistic depressive I've ever met." I really have a strong sense of hope and believe in the good in the universe. But I can get terribly sad and melancholy, and it has definitely interfered with my work, most significantly during COVID.
The years 2020 and 2021 were very hard years.
A lot of my performances and commissions were canceled and I stopped being able to write. I was supposed to have this big New York Philharmonic premiere, and I felt like my whole career had been painstakingly leading up to that moment, struggling to get my foot in the door of the orchestral world, which is a really hard one to break into.
I also had this commission and found out that it was going to be put off for two more years — the same for the release of the recording of my Mass for the Endangered. Both of these things were going to help launch a new phase. Suddenly, I felt like, by the time that all these things wind down, I'm going to be forgotten. My headaches got much worse, I had a 15-month migraine with almost no interruption and became severely depressed.
I'm so sorry.
And I wasn't properly medicated because of all the shame I carry about my anxiety and depression. It got to the point where not only did I stop writing, but I was crying all the time and not sleeping for, like, six months. I finally went to see a new psychiatrist and he said, "This is major depressive disorder," which was the first time that I'd heard that diagnosis. And so committing to that in the Facebook post was, I think, part of my way of really trying to force myself to embrace it. It is really important that we talk about it; we need to destigmatize and make people feel like it's not weird and shameful, because it is so common.
Well, I was going to ask this question, but maybe it's not appropriate.
No, go ahead. I'm an open book.
Does it ever work the other way? I mean, can it sort of help you in certain circumstances? For example, I'm thinking about what rich, poignant portraits you created in Penelope — the emotionally damaged character and the person who tries to bring him back to himself. Can you tap into that musically in a special way because of your own struggles?
I think we are at our best when we're the most honest. We all have so many deep feelings that come from our lived experiences, and they're such an important source of inspiration if we let them be. And in the case of the man coming from back from war, of course I haven't been to war. But I know what it's like to feel very oppressed, to feel like you don't know yourself because you're walking on eggshells and trying to keep peace, and then what it's like to find yourself again.
I did a lot of writing in journals as a kid; that was my greatest source of therapy. The reason it was so helpful to me was because I would allow myself to access all the feelings I was repressing. I have always strongly identified with people who have to repress things or are losing and burying parts of themselves. What touched me about the story was the idea of this man trying to figure out who he was beneath all the layers of trauma.
Emotion in music is something important to you. You once said, "Nothing puts me more directly in touch with the feeling of being alive, of being human, than music." What is it about music, specifically, that makes you feel that way?
I've always had a strong physical relationship to music. The hair on my arms stands on end frequently when I listen; I get chills. In fact, I remember having a sensation of wanting to eat music, like an apple. I still get this from time to time, where I'll be in an orchestral rehearsal and the harp will play a note, and I have this impulse to put it in my mouth. It's this funny feeling of needing to get music inside of me. My kids get upset with me sometimes because a certain song will come on and I can't listen to it, because of either what it will do to me emotionally in that moment, or it reminds me too powerfully of something unpleasant, or I have such a strong physical reaction. They're like, "Mom, don't be a snob." And I'm like, "It's not about snobbery. It's about incapacitation."
I've had similar reactions — it hasn't happened often, but I've hyperventilated and also experienced extreme euphoria at concerts. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist I've interviewed who wrote the book This is Your Brain on Music, says it's a real chemical reaction that happens in your brain.
Yes. I've always told my kids music is like a drug — the only really good kind of drug for you.
Jensen Artists
Jensen Artists
It seems like your career is really still ascending, and now you're staking your flag in the opera world with Hildegard, claiming important new territory. Where do you see your music going?
I don't know that I have grand plans, except that I really want to be doing as many bigger pieces as I can. I loved writing this opera. It was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done, and I would like to do more of it. I want to write orchestral music, more choral music. I loved writing Mass for the Endangered. I like writing these big pieces that I can really sink my teeth into and have different ideas come back and return. I am very traditional in the sense that I like to develop my materials quite a bit and I'm very interested in seeing how much mileage I can get out of an idea and how I can bring it back later in a different way. I'm very nerdy in the sense that I love being able to study other composers' music, from 200 years ago or whatever, and find the Easter eggs of how they inverted this or augmented that. Large canvases give you a bigger chance to do that.
Are you at your artistic peak?
I feel like I've really hit a stride in terms of enjoying writing music. I've been really happy composing in the past 10 years in a way that I wasn't before. At certain points of writing this opera, I was really tearing my hair out and it was tough. But I feel like there's this parallel with Hildegard. She came into a second birth after she got her papal permission. And then she established her own abbey and began turning out a tremendous amount of music and writing. She finally came into her sense of confidence and self-belief. I feel like — maybe to answer your very first question — this is confirmation that I must be getting there myself, because I have a lot more joy in the process now than I used to. So I'm just looking forward to continuing that as long as I can.
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