Unremembered (for 7 voices and chamber orchestra) (2014)

Songs
1. Prelude
2. The Estate
3. The Barn
4. The Guest
5. The Slaughterhouse
6. The Girl
7. The Swan
8. The Witch
9. The River
10. The Speakers
11. The Orchard
12. The Song
13. The Past

Songs can be performed separately.

Note
Unremembered is an hour-long, thirteen-part song cycle for seven voices, chamber orchestra, and electronics by composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, inspired by poems and illustrations by writer and visual artist Nathaniel Bellows (W.W. Norton, HarperCollins).

A meditation on memory, innocence, and the haunted grandeur of the natural world, Unremembered recalls strange and beautiful happenings experienced during a childhood in rural Massachusetts: a houseguest takes sudden leave in the middle of the night; a boy makes a shocking discovery on a riverbank; a girl disappears in woods behind a ranging farm; ghosts appear with messages for the living. Through Bellows’s moving words and images and Snider’s vivid, fraught, astonishing score, the cycle explores the ways in which beguiling events in early life can resonate in — and prepare us for — the subtler horrors that lie beyond the realm of childhood.