Helen Lyons Speaks with Anne Decker, conductor and founder of TURN Music, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and soprano Mary Bonhag about TURN Music's upcoming performance of Kirkland Snider's song cycle, Penelope. Sunday, March 30, 2025 at 2 p.m. at the Barre Opera House.
TRANSCRIPT
ANNE DECKER: I have a reverence for contemporary music composers, the living composers. My name is Anne Decker and I've been a musician, music educator, conductor, and resident of Vermont for about 25 years. Turn Music is my Vermont version of the contemporary music ensemble, and we celebrated 10 years last summer. We're a growing organization.
HELEN LYONS: Some people are intimidated by or have preconceived notions of contemporary music. How do you address this in your programming?
ANNE DECKER: The kind of music that I'm generally programming, especially for the term music ensemble, is I believe it's accessible. I really do - sort of that new sound of contemporary music that I really wanted to get behind and I didn't think it was really being represented here in Vermont. I love, love this work. Programming is is my love and it keeps me turning forward.
HELEN LYONS: Turn Music calls Waterbury's home, but for their upcoming performance, they'll be at the Barre Opera House. The centerpiece of Sunday's concert is a song cycle by Sarah Kirkland Snider with text by Ellen McLaughlin titled Penelope, based on Homer's Odyssey. I caught up with Sarah to learn more about the work.
SARAH KIRKLAND SNIDER: I mean, I've written lots of music in my, in my life, but the emails that I get that are the most personal tend to be about Penelope. It's people saying that they felt deeply moved, that it made them think about this relationship in their life, a certain life experience they'd had, that it brought them to tears. I mean, those kinds of reactions are why I got into writing music in the first place. It's hearing that the piece genuinely moved someone.
HELEN LYONS: How did the project come about, and can you give us a sense of the experience of this piece?
SARAH KIRKLAND SNIDER: Ellen McLaughlin is this wonderful playwright/actor who specializes in creating modern day analogs for some of the Greek classic stories. She wanted to write something that dealt with these ideas of: how do you get back to your identity when you've been through. Intense life-changing trauma? How do you get back to the person that you were? And she was writing this during the Iraq War in the early 2000s and thinking a lot about the cost of war and the long-term effects that veterans carry with them, the burdens of surviving as a soldier...and so she came up with this beautiful story.
It's a modern day analog to the Odyssey: a woman who's living in this house by the sea, and one day she hears a knock on the door and it's this disheveled man she barely recognizes who's come to the house because he recognizes the house. He's suffering from extensive brain damage. She begins to realize after speaking with him for a few minutes that it's her long lost husband that she takes him in and tries to help him find himself again.
And so it's this beautiful, beautiful journey of her sharing stories about their life together with him and trying to help him remember who he is. But at the same time, there's this intense sadness because she can't quite bring back the person that he was. So I think at the heart of it, Penelope is really about this idea of longing for connection, both to the people that we love and to ourselves, you know, past parts of ourselves that we may have lost.
HELEN LYONS: Tell me about your collaboration with Ellen McLaughlin.
SARAH KIRKLAND SNIDER: I think we were really a match made in heaven on this. I mean, her lyrics and her text are so emotionally direct that I felt like it was, it was just very easy for me to plug in to her words and feel something. And so the music actually flowed out of me very quickly, although this was when I was fresh out of grad school and The style of Penelope, as you know, is post folk, post-rock, and a lot of vernacular influence, which was something that had been sort of pushed out of me in grad school, you know, the music I wrote through high school was very sort of a blend of Joni Mitchell and Debussy. So, In a way, she gave me the opportunity to get back in touch with a more honest part of myself musically.
HELEN LYONS: Singing Penelope will be a familiar voice for Vermont audiences. Soprano Mary Bonhag.
MARY BONHAG: It's a demanding piece, but in a way that's very exciting to me as an artist. The piece itself is so is so genre-bending. I love that about it. It stretches all the musicians in lots of different ways: towards musical theater, towards rock, towards pop, towards classical, but I get to occupy a lot of different musical worlds and vocal worlds in a very short span of time.
The poetry, the words are so evocative - there's not a clear narrative arc to the piece. There are points of view that sometimes seem like they're from Penelope specifically, maybe in modern times even, or sometimes long ago in ancient, ancient times. Sometimes it feels like we're hearing directly from Odysseus. It's murky in a very satisfying way.
It's a piece about remembering who we are. It's a piece about change and about how life circumstances change us. This piece, I think, really explores the question of what is that essential truth, what is that essential piece of humanity that still connects us, even if we've been separated, even if terrible things have happened. It really is an extraordinary piece of music that Sarah wrote. I'm grateful to her for writing it.
HELEN LYONS: Rounding out Sunday's concert will be string quartet arrangements of popular songs featured on the hit streaming shows Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte, and reflecting their commitment to living artists working in all disciplines as well as their local community, Turn Music has organized a silent auction benefit. Here's Anne Decker with more information.
ANNE DECKER: We are having a silent auction of paintings by Arthur Zorn, musician and now painter in Barre, Vermont. And he has donated 4 of his pieces for us to auction off, and we have decided to share the proceeds with the Brook Street High School, which is a high school in Barry, Vermont that serves women who had to put their high school degrees aside because of pregnancy and caring for their children. Thank you to Sue Minter and the for connecting us with the Brook Street High School to help us support a local organization.
HELEN LYONS: Turn Music presents Sarah Kirkland Snider and Ellen McLaughlin's Penelope Sunday at 2 at the Barre Opera House. For more information and tickets, head to.
