U NREMEMBERED

Unremembered began in the spring of 2011, when the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth approached

me to write some music for them. I asked the writer/artist and my old college friend, Nathaniel Bellows,
to write some poems for me to set. Five short poems about his childhood in rural Massachusetts soon

arrived, unexpectedly accompanied by five corresponding illustrations he had drawn. Like stained glass,
each illustration brimmed with vibrant, swirling colors and complex, layered narratives. I remember

hearing the songs opening melodic line. I soon completed the commission for Roomful of Teeth, but
Nathaniel kept going more poems and illustrations followed, in the style of the first five. It quickly

became clear to me that a whole world lingered therein, one that I wanted to continue exploring.

commissioned me to collaborate with the vocalists Padma Newsome, DM Stith, and Shara Worden,

whose voices I had been imagining in the new songs. Unremembered ultimately grew into a thirteen-

song cycle tailored to their voices seven vocal parts in total, accompanied by chamber orchestra.

Unremembered is an assemblage of vividly intense, imagistic vignettes some are narrative, some are

existential and ruminative. In language that is simple, direct, and lyrical, we see the world through a

childhood my own recollections of how it felt to develop consciousness, to encounter things I could

not understand or explain, to reconcile the fact that some questions had no answers. In creating music

for this piece, I strove to immerse myself in my memory of those feelings, in hopes of creating a musical
world that reflected the sense of magic, mystery, wonder, fear, and revelation innate to childhood.

Sarah Kirkland Snider

In approaching this project, I was interested in exploring how writing poetry to set to music

drawn from in all my work, but revisiting these stories in this new context, and with a more

formal, deliberate poetic approach, resulted in something unexpected each poem possessed
a taut structure and musicality, blurred with an otherworldly halo of haunted uncertainty, a

shadowed quality that deeply characterizes my memories of that time and place. Because of the

potency and significance of the material, and because my first inclination in any artistic endeavor

is to draw, I made sketches and studies to further explore and ultimately illustrate each poem,
which, as the project evolved, were created in tandem to the music Sarah was writing.

At the beginning of writing these poems, I had in mind folk songs, fables, spirituals, and the
work of Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Dickinson, to help me recount these episodes from my

childhood. But the finished product has become something much larger and more expansive

than anything I could have been inspired by or hoped to capture from my own experience

Unremembered is a layered, ghostly chorus of innocence and ruin, the embrace and celebration
of the unknown, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from the passing of time.
Nathaniel Bellows

1.

Prelude

Someone breathed into my ear

The vapor of the dead
It woke me up, I was asleep
It circled round my head
It all comes back inchoate
The meaning has no base
I never learned to love someone
The way I did that place

2.

The Estate

Down past the River Road

In the lowest hollow
I took the path along the row
No stranger dared to follow
The wide lawn was overgrown
The eaves were bowed and brown
The window showed that every room
Was bare and white as bone
Above the pool, a mirrored gaze
I saw her ivied face
Her empty eyes, cold, recessed
Have watched this wasted place
Where dying bloom and creeping vine
Strangle and adorn
The place that built inside of me
A soul, a ghost, a home
The field has breath, the pond a voice
Ive known since I was small
They told me then to leave this place
Or stay and lose it all

3.

The Barn

You who live outside of life,

youre not alone, not yet
In the barn, the ghost, the girl
When I came home from school
She sat upon the hayloft stairs
In a dress of layered tulle

The land stretched wide beyond the house

Who knows what lay beneath
What other men were lying there
And would show themselves to me

Half-hidden from the shadows

Her body turned away
Her little gloves, pale and clenched
Over her little face

It was as if he took my hand

It was as if he knew
The earth held only part of him
And I should know it too

It was as if she took my hand

It was as if she knew
The earth held only part of her
And I should know it too

It was as if they caught my ear

It was as if their breath
Would say, would sing
The dance of life continues after death

Id seen the man out in the field

Immersed in dancing flames
A barn had once burned down out there
Long before we came

4.

The Guest

She left our house in the dead of night

My sister went to find her
We didnt know why she left
Shed fled as fast as fire
All this time I was asleep
While my sister chased her down
I picture them out in the woods
On the other side of town
It turns out she was lost and caught
Deep within her dreams
Which guided her out of our house
Like Joan called from her wheel
But no glory there awaited her
No god where she was found
On a patch of snow in a lonely copse
On the frozen moonlit ground

5.

The Slaughterhouse

The house of stone

With a concrete floor
A ring stuck at its center
Stood up the hill
From the spring-fed pond
Wed skate on every winter
In the past these family farms
Slaughtered all their stock
Id seen it once at another farm
And I never will forget
The ring was used
To hold them still
The nose ring in the ring
The pond was there
To drag them down
Dead but still bleeding
Why hadnt they torn it down
When the farms no longer thrived?
Beneath our blades a reef of beasts
Lay lowing under ice

6.

The Girl

The woods behind that sprawling farm

Above that ranging home
Was somewhere no one ever went
Unless to be alone
The wrens would sing, the grouse would fly
A fox a flash of red
A peaceful place of moss and flowers
In an untouched woven bed
Who was that girl that entered there
Who crossed that thorny turf?
She brought with her just rope and will
To end her time on earth
We didnt know her face or name
Just rendered in our minds
But the birds would sing the strangest song
As we rode by on our bikes

7.

The Swan

Do you know
The swan in the swamp?
Do you remember
How she screamed?

A truck backed up
Beyond the road
Where she lay alone
Asleep.

The twilight had just

Descended
That hour that fools
The eye

The night before

Id seen her there
A girl of snow
And ice.

The whitened wings

Unfurled
As the wheels
Destroyed her bed

The ivory neck

Extended
Like a finger
For its band

She lay there quiet

Against the grass
A splayed and shattered
Thing

Of red and white

Green and gold,
Undone
Embroidery

8.

The Witch

I saw the witch out in the woods

As we sang around the fire
Stooped and white, curled and dry
A bone enrobed in briar

No one else had seen her there

No one saw her face
Which stared at me, fixedly
Grim and unafraid

I left them all to sing their songs

By the fires dying glow
The woods and field enclosing camp
Like hands around a throat

Back at home I lay awake

Safe behind my door
Listening for her muted steps
In the shadowed yard below

And though the time has passed

I still see her in those trees
The world is now those darkened woods
The days her eyes on me

I was so young, had barely lived

But I recognized the fear
Was what lay waiting, out of view
In all our older years

9.

The River

On the banks
The wash so brown
The shadows blue
Theyre black
I saw the form
Astride the loam
Splayed out upon
Its back
A bear, a dog
A bed, a log
A childs eyes
Are pure
Until the hands
Of the missing man
Were clear against
The dew
The rivers flow
A blackened bow
That tied around
Our town
Had sapped his life
Like a lanterns light
Buried
Underground

10.

The Speakers

Im sorry, said the blade,

Poised above the hare,
The life you have inside of you
Is only yours to share.
In some ways, said the night,
As it blotted out the day,
The fact that you will soon return
Makes your death a sadder thing.
I hear you, said the hay,
The soured, dusty straw,
You are the holy, crying child
The world believes is gone.
Leave it, said the leaf,
The edge of me turns brown,
I die and rise invisibly
Like the ghosts you wont allow.

11.

The Orchard

The trees held bells

The chimes the blooms
Each fruit a tongue
To taste the bruise
The bending bough
Upended how
Wed try to steal
What it allowed
This was our greed
And was its gift
We raised the thing
That died to give

12.

The Song

No Go No
The throat of the bird would sing
Dont you hear it too?
The field was echoing
No So Low
The flying, slicing wing
It says that there is beauty
Inside your suffering
Go Go Go
The feathered head will turn
And look away, though now the song
Will live inside your room

13.

The Past

The meadow lost its golden hue

The trees let go their leaves
The air grew colder, cleaner, blue
Pale as centuries
Someone breathed into my ear
The vapor of the dead
It woke me up, I was asleep
It circled round my head
It all comes back inchoate
The meaning has no base
I never learned to love someone
The way I did that place

Conductor:
Edwin Outwater

Piano:
Timo Andres

Laura Metcalf
Brian Snow

Oboe:
Kathy Halvorson
Hassan Anderson on

Celeste:
Sarah Kirkland Snider

Double Bass:
Pete Donovan
Eleonore Oppenheim

English Horn:
Slava Znatchenii
Lauren Blackerby on

Bassoon:
Mike Parker Harley
Damian Primis

French Horn:
Matt Marks
Chad Yarborough
Percussion:
Jason Treuting
Lawson White
Melodica:
Lawson White
Harp:
Nuiko Wadden

Acoustic Guitar/Electric Guitar/

12-String Guitar/Mandolin/Banjo:
Taylor Levine
Violin I:
Erin Benim
Olivier Manchon
Gillian Rivers
Coco Taguchi
Violin II:
Kiku Enomoto
Rachel Golub
Max Moston
Mary Jo Stilp
Viola:
Amelia Hollander Ames
Surai Balbesi
Caleb Burhans
Beth Meyers
Cello:
Christine Kim
Ha-Yang Kim

Acknowledgments:

My deepest thanks toShara, Andrew,

Nathaniel, Michael,Edwin, David,

Padma, and Lawson;all the players of

the Unremembered Orchestra;
Ryan

Lott; Chris Bellman; Brad Wells and

Roomful ofTeeth; Kate Nordstrum;

Murat Eyuboglu;Beth Meyers; Hassan

Anderson; Molly Joyce; Charles
Harbutt,Mike Jinno, and AlexLeach;
Bill, Judd, Curt, Santino, and the

NewAm team; Stuart Wolferman; Mary

Jo Stilp; Ben Tousley; Willy Somma
and Noelle Marinelli;Natalie Rakes;
Kit Snider, Ned Snider, and Marina

Greenstein; and my beloved famil

y
Steve, Jasper, and Dylan.

All compositions and orchestrations by Sarah Kirkland Snider.

All lyrics and illustrations by Nathaniel Bellows.

Vocals by Padma Newsome, DM Stith, and Shara Worden.

Sound design by Michael Hammond, Lawson White, and Sarah Kirkland Snider.
Produced by Lawson White and Sarah Kirkland Snider.

Mixed by Andrew Scheps at Punkerpad West, Van Nuys, CA.

Mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering.

Pre-Mixed and Edited by Lawson White at Good Child Music Studios, Brooklyn, NY.
Additional Editing by Justin Hergett and Mike Jinno.

Recording Engineers: Charles Harbutt and Lawson White.

Assistant Recording Engineers: Mike Jinno, Sean Kelly,
Alex Leach, Cecil Lockwood, Gina Vosti.

Orchestra recorded at Water Music, Hoboken, NJ.

Overdubs and Shara Wordens and DM Stiths vocals

recorded at Good Child Music Studios, Brooklyn, NY.

Padma Newsomes vocals recorded at home in Mallacoota, Victoria, Australia.

Layout and Design by DM Stith.

Cover image by Unknown. Back Cover image by DM Stith.

Booklet polaroid transfers by DM Stith.

Portraits of Sarah and Nathaniel by Willy Somma.

Copyright 2015 Good Child/October Stone Music

In loving memory of my father,

Arnold (Arnie) Holmes Snider, III, 1945-2014.