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Editorial Reviews
Review
Homer's Odyssey has been a very deep well of inspiration for artists from centuries ago right up to today.
Sarah Kirkland Snider's new song cycle, Penelope, makes a modern twist on the ancient saga.
The compelling story of the Greek warrior Odysseus' trip home from the Trojan wars, has sparked movies, like the Coen Brothers' Oh Brother Where Art Thou, operas, such as Monteverdi's moving The Return of Ulysses, and even pop songs like Tim Buckley's haunting 'Song to the Siren.'
Kirkland Snider's new work, originally a theater piece, deftly weaves pop, jazz, and classical. The texts, by Ellen McLaughlin, are sung by Shara Worden from the band My Brightest Diamond.
Kirkland Snider's song cycle is told from the woman's point of view Penelope, that is, Odysseus' faithful wife, who waits at home, wondering if her husband will ever return, dead or alive.
McLaughlin's poems update the story to modern times. Penelope's long-lost husband turns up unexpectedly, emotionally damaged after years spent at war. In an attempt to rebuild his memory, she reads aloud to him from Homer's Odyssey.
Kirkland's dark-hued score is inventive and subtle, with a mix of watery, undulating strings, guitars, percussion and electronics that submerges you completely within the story.
Some songs flaunt melodic hooks, others are atmospheric. And all are aided by Worden's vocals, mournful, urgent and expressive. Brad Lubman conducts the tight little chamber ensemble known as Signal. --NPR.com, Deceptive Cadence, Classical Detour, Thomas Huizenga, October 2010
Sarah Kirkland Snider's new song cycle, Penelope, makes a modern twist on the ancient saga.
The compelling story of the Greek warrior Odysseus' trip home from the Trojan wars, has sparked movies, like the Coen Brothers' Oh Brother Where Art Thou, operas, such as Monteverdi's moving The Return of Ulysses, and even pop songs like Tim Buckley's haunting 'Song to the Siren.'
Kirkland Snider's new work, originally a theater piece, deftly weaves pop, jazz, and classical. The texts, by Ellen McLaughlin, are sung by Shara Worden from the band My Brightest Diamond.
Kirkland Snider's song cycle is told from the woman's point of view Penelope, that is, Odysseus' faithful wife, who waits at home, wondering if her husband will ever return, dead or alive.
McLaughlin's poems update the story to modern times. Penelope's long-lost husband turns up unexpectedly, emotionally damaged after years spent at war. In an attempt to rebuild his memory, she reads aloud to him from Homer's Odyssey.
Kirkland's dark-hued score is inventive and subtle, with a mix of watery, undulating strings, guitars, percussion and electronics that submerges you completely within the story.
Some songs flaunt melodic hooks, others are atmospheric. And all are aided by Worden's vocals, mournful, urgent and expressive. Brad Lubman conducts the tight little chamber ensemble known as Signal. --NPR.com, Deceptive Cadence, Classical Detour, Thomas Huizenga, October 2010
Product Description
Penelope is a song cycle by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, with lyrics by playwright Ellen McLaughlin,
featuring vocalist Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and the chamber orchestra Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman. Inspired by Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, Penelope is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home.
Suspended somewhere between art song, indie rock, and chamber folk, the music of Penelope moves organically from moments of elegiac strings-and-harp reflection to dusky post-rock textures with drums,
guitars and electronics, all directed by a strong sense of melody and a craftsman's approach to songwriting.
Penelope originated as a music-theater monodrama, co-written by McLaughlin and Snider in 2007-2008 and commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Center. In the work, originally scored for alto/actor and string
quartet, a woman's husband appears at her door after an absence of twenty years, suffering from brain damage. A veteran of an unnamed war, he doesn't know who he is and she doesn't know who he's become. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads him the Odyssey, and in the journey of that book, she finds a way into her former husband's memory and the terror and trauma of war.
featuring vocalist Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and the chamber orchestra Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman. Inspired by Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, Penelope is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home.
Suspended somewhere between art song, indie rock, and chamber folk, the music of Penelope moves organically from moments of elegiac strings-and-harp reflection to dusky post-rock textures with drums,
guitars and electronics, all directed by a strong sense of melody and a craftsman's approach to songwriting.
Penelope originated as a music-theater monodrama, co-written by McLaughlin and Snider in 2007-2008 and commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Center. In the work, originally scored for alto/actor and string
quartet, a woman's husband appears at her door after an absence of twenty years, suffering from brain damage. A veteran of an unnamed war, he doesn't know who he is and she doesn't know who he's become. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads him the Odyssey, and in the journey of that book, she finds a way into her former husband's memory and the terror and trauma of war.
Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:MP3 Music
New Amsterdam Records is enjoying many releases this year and seems to be creating a certain style or brand. Many of the releases I've heard this year feature composers that combine both classical and rock/pop elements. Penelope is no exception, but is the most convincing attempt from the label so far. Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes this song cycle for alto voice, a chamber string orchestra, drum set, and electric guitar among other things. One limitation all of these records have so far is a loss of rock music feeling. More clearly, a lot of these albums add drum set or other rock instruments but often it comes off as stale and too Dream Theater for my tastes. That is where Penelope differs.
These songs pull off the chamber pop sound while keeping hold of the rock feeling in the drums and guitars. Probably the most successful composer that does this is Clint Mansell in The Fountain soudtrack, but Snider is a close second. The Lotus Eaters is the best example of Snider's control both compositionally and emotionally. Snider's string writing is quite stunning and Shara Worden's voice clearly floats above these lush textures. The drums and guitar are not distracting, but add a nice element to the composite sound.
New Amsterdam should be proud to release their most convincing album that has equal footholds in the classical and pop worlds.
These songs pull off the chamber pop sound while keeping hold of the rock feeling in the drums and guitars. Probably the most successful composer that does this is Clint Mansell in The Fountain soudtrack, but Snider is a close second. The Lotus Eaters is the best example of Snider's control both compositionally and emotionally. Snider's string writing is quite stunning and Shara Worden's voice clearly floats above these lush textures. The drums and guitar are not distracting, but add a nice element to the composite sound.
New Amsterdam should be proud to release their most convincing album that has equal footholds in the classical and pop worlds.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By D. Avery
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
The back-story to this album has already been well described, so I won't try to retell it here. But while the story certainly adds a layer of meaning that enhances the listening experience, it should be mentioned that it's a beautiful song cycle even if you knew nothing about its origins.
There is a dreamy, melancholic feel to this album, but it is energetic enough not to put you to sleep. It's definitely not background music - you are drawn in and forced to listen, as the lyrics take you on a kind of journey. The main influence is classical, but it's rather amazing how other genres like jazz and rock are seamlessly incorporated so that it all sounds like a completely natural genre of its own. All of it together somehow manages to convey the depths of the human experience, from bittersweet tenderness to loss, grief and hope.
I think that the reviewer J. Dawson, who recommended Hadestown instead of this album "if you are interested in listening to a song cycle about Greek mythology", is COMPLETELY missing the point of this album.
For one thing, Penelope isn't a song cycle about Greek mythology. The imagined story of Odysseus' homecoming is used as a vehicle to tell a story about the trauma of war from a woman's point of view. Hadestown is a great album, but it isn't really a song cycle about Greek mythology, either. It uses a completely different Greek myth (that of Eurydice) as a vehicle to tell a story about materialism and selling out, which is a quite different meaning from the original myth. It's called 'artistic license', and there's nothing wrong with that.
But to call Penelope a cheap imitation of Hadestown is a ridiculous statement. It sounds like Penelope just wasn't J. Dawson's cup of tea, and he tried to come up with a cheap intellectual justification for that. The two albums tell two completely different stories, using two completely different musical styles. You can't compare them, because they're apples & oranges.
There is a dreamy, melancholic feel to this album, but it is energetic enough not to put you to sleep. It's definitely not background music - you are drawn in and forced to listen, as the lyrics take you on a kind of journey. The main influence is classical, but it's rather amazing how other genres like jazz and rock are seamlessly incorporated so that it all sounds like a completely natural genre of its own. All of it together somehow manages to convey the depths of the human experience, from bittersweet tenderness to loss, grief and hope.
I think that the reviewer J. Dawson, who recommended Hadestown instead of this album "if you are interested in listening to a song cycle about Greek mythology", is COMPLETELY missing the point of this album.
For one thing, Penelope isn't a song cycle about Greek mythology. The imagined story of Odysseus' homecoming is used as a vehicle to tell a story about the trauma of war from a woman's point of view. Hadestown is a great album, but it isn't really a song cycle about Greek mythology, either. It uses a completely different Greek myth (that of Eurydice) as a vehicle to tell a story about materialism and selling out, which is a quite different meaning from the original myth. It's called 'artistic license', and there's nothing wrong with that.
But to call Penelope a cheap imitation of Hadestown is a ridiculous statement. It sounds like Penelope just wasn't J. Dawson's cup of tea, and he tried to come up with a cheap intellectual justification for that. The two albums tell two completely different stories, using two completely different musical styles. You can't compare them, because they're apples & oranges.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Pitchfork Review of Penelope:
The quietly devastating song cycle Penelope begins with an unexpected homecoming. A man returns to his wife's doorstep after 20 years in an unnamed war, suffering brain damage-- a shadow of his former self. The woman takes this mournful figure in gravely, sorting through her ambivalence, bitterness, and grief by reading to him from Homer's Odyssey. The story's parallels to their lives-- a husband striving heroically over vast distances and years to return to his wife-- become a psychological probe for the woman to sound the depths of her shell-shocked husband's ruined mind. Speaking to him through the poem, she is able to gently coax him back from oblivion.
This eloquent meditation on death, memory, being lost, and homecoming is the work of three women. Playwright and poet Ellen McLaughlin wrote the incisive lyrics; Sarah Kirkland Snider composed the dreamily disquieting score; and Shara Worden, the smoky-voiced contralto of My Brightest Diamond, sings it. Together, they render the titular woman's voice with unsettling clarity. Penelope is a gorgeous piece of music, but it is more-- it is also a hauntingly vivid psychological portrait, one that explores a dark scenario with a light, almost quizzical touch, finding poetic resonances everywhere.
Snider's score, written for the new-music ensemble Signal, is the work's worried heart. Penelope lives entirely inside the heads of two people who can't communicate, and her music, coursing with mute anxiety, reflects that solitude. The strings hover like low-hanging fog, repeating a few harmonically troubled chords in softly insistent strokes-- the veil of confusion that clouds the man's memories, perhaps, or the heavy silence that settles in between the newly estranged married couple.
This fraught suggestibility between music and theme takes Penelope deep beneath your skin. On "This Is What You're Like", Worden's character tries to remind her husband of the man he once was; when she sings the line, "you are a man who, when the music dies away, you keep on dancing," the music stumbles briefly into a few bars of a half-remembered waltz. The story opens on the woman's house by the sea; a lapping and receding violin figure traces the shore while quiet gull-like cries circle overhead.
Snider's music lives in a netherland between richly orchestrated indie rock and straight chamber music, an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all: No matter what perspective you bring to this album, it bears profound rewards. Shara Worden's eerily poised singing will raise the hackles of St. Vincent fans, while Snider's ambiguous sense of harmony might put classical listeners in mind of Charles Ives' similarly memory-haunted Three Places in New England or Arvo Pärt's elegant simplicity. The work doesn't straddle a stylistic crossroads so much as swirl together artistic currents, creating a slipstream where electric guitar, chimes, strings, drum kit, and subtle electronic touches interchange fluidly.
There is an obsessive quality to Penelope's cellular, repeating mini-melodies, and it is echoed in McLaughlin's mantra-like lyrics. Songs hinge on poetically elusive but piercingly direct turns of phrase-- "Can't you do that?/ Can't you hide me, God?"; "The world is never done with you/ The world wants her travelers to stay lost." Worden sings these words with enigmatic wisdom, investing something as vague as "I am known for who I am" with palpable regret. McLaughlin's words speak with wry frankness about the burdens of waiting on, and caring for, men, and this touch makes Penelope a feminist story, a sly reappraisal of a male-centric tale on the order of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Like a siren song, it cloaks rocky edges in something soft and lyrical. Beneath the placid surface, you can hear the sound of one woman's thoughts, rendered with such care and intimacy that you can sense her staring out of the record back at you.
-- Jayson Greene, January 5, 2011
The quietly devastating song cycle Penelope begins with an unexpected homecoming. A man returns to his wife's doorstep after 20 years in an unnamed war, suffering brain damage-- a shadow of his former self. The woman takes this mournful figure in gravely, sorting through her ambivalence, bitterness, and grief by reading to him from Homer's Odyssey. The story's parallels to their lives-- a husband striving heroically over vast distances and years to return to his wife-- become a psychological probe for the woman to sound the depths of her shell-shocked husband's ruined mind. Speaking to him through the poem, she is able to gently coax him back from oblivion.
This eloquent meditation on death, memory, being lost, and homecoming is the work of three women. Playwright and poet Ellen McLaughlin wrote the incisive lyrics; Sarah Kirkland Snider composed the dreamily disquieting score; and Shara Worden, the smoky-voiced contralto of My Brightest Diamond, sings it. Together, they render the titular woman's voice with unsettling clarity. Penelope is a gorgeous piece of music, but it is more-- it is also a hauntingly vivid psychological portrait, one that explores a dark scenario with a light, almost quizzical touch, finding poetic resonances everywhere.
Snider's score, written for the new-music ensemble Signal, is the work's worried heart. Penelope lives entirely inside the heads of two people who can't communicate, and her music, coursing with mute anxiety, reflects that solitude. The strings hover like low-hanging fog, repeating a few harmonically troubled chords in softly insistent strokes-- the veil of confusion that clouds the man's memories, perhaps, or the heavy silence that settles in between the newly estranged married couple.
This fraught suggestibility between music and theme takes Penelope deep beneath your skin. On "This Is What You're Like", Worden's character tries to remind her husband of the man he once was; when she sings the line, "you are a man who, when the music dies away, you keep on dancing," the music stumbles briefly into a few bars of a half-remembered waltz. The story opens on the woman's house by the sea; a lapping and receding violin figure traces the shore while quiet gull-like cries circle overhead.
Snider's music lives in a netherland between richly orchestrated indie rock and straight chamber music, an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all: No matter what perspective you bring to this album, it bears profound rewards. Shara Worden's eerily poised singing will raise the hackles of St. Vincent fans, while Snider's ambiguous sense of harmony might put classical listeners in mind of Charles Ives' similarly memory-haunted Three Places in New England or Arvo Pärt's elegant simplicity. The work doesn't straddle a stylistic crossroads so much as swirl together artistic currents, creating a slipstream where electric guitar, chimes, strings, drum kit, and subtle electronic touches interchange fluidly.
There is an obsessive quality to Penelope's cellular, repeating mini-melodies, and it is echoed in McLaughlin's mantra-like lyrics. Songs hinge on poetically elusive but piercingly direct turns of phrase-- "Can't you do that?/ Can't you hide me, God?"; "The world is never done with you/ The world wants her travelers to stay lost." Worden sings these words with enigmatic wisdom, investing something as vague as "I am known for who I am" with palpable regret. McLaughlin's words speak with wry frankness about the burdens of waiting on, and caring for, men, and this touch makes Penelope a feminist story, a sly reappraisal of a male-centric tale on the order of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Like a siren song, it cloaks rocky edges in something soft and lyrical. Beneath the placid surface, you can hear the sound of one woman's thoughts, rendered with such care and intimacy that you can sense her staring out of the record back at you.
-- Jayson Greene, January 5, 2011
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simply the best record of 2010
Simply put, this is the best record of 2010. The composition is sublime, the lyrics are brilliant, the performance is captivating. Read more
Published on April 20, 2011 by moogabooga
2.0 out of 5 stars
Get Anais Mitchell's Hadestown instead
Bottom Line - if you are interested in listening to a song cycle about Greek mythology, get Hadestown instead of this album. Read more
Published on April 9, 2011 by J. Dawson
