Marmoris
Composition and premiere: Sarah Kirkland Snider wrote Marmoris in 2024 on a commission from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance and the Monterey Symphony. The Michigan Youth Symphony Orchestra premiered the work under Jayce Ogren’s direction on March 2, 2025; the Monterey Symphony gave the professional premiere in May 2026. First BSO and Tanglewood performance of Marmoris: August 2, 2026, Andris Nelsons conducting.
Sarah Kirkland Snider’s life and music have consistently shown her commitment to positive social change. Her music frequently explores questions of personal identity and the relationship between the individual and social mores, particularly from a woman’s perspective. Although she committed to music as a calling relatively late, Snider quickly established a reputation with works both expressively natural and sonically intricate. She is drawn especially to words, storytelling, and the voice, and even her instrumental music—Forward Into Light and Marmoris being recent examples—tends to spring from a narrative image. Her substantial Mass for the Endangered is a rich example of her multifaceted artistic goals: the piece highlights the climate crisis and its effect on species living in fragile ecosystems. Snider’s celebrated ensemble song-cycle Penelope, based on the Greek myth underlying Homer’s Odyssey, resonates with the trauma experienced by veterans of war and their loved ones.
Recent commissions include those from the Emerson Quartet, soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Will Liverman, the New York Philharmonic, the Guggenheim Museum, A Far Cry, and Birmingham Royal Ballet. Her first opera, Hildegard, about the medieval musician and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, premiered in November 2025 and in June 2026 received the Best New Opera Award from the Music Critics Association of North America. An album including Forward Into Light, Eye of Mnemosyne, and Drink the Wild Ayre was released in February 2026.
Related to her penchant for voice, Snider brings a lyrical element to all her work. A child chorister from an early age growing up in Princeton, NJ, Snider also took piano and cello lessons and began writing songs. She pursued her musical interests even while studying psychology as an undergraduate. It was only after working in another field for several years that she returned to earn degrees in composition from New York University, where she worked with Justin Dello Joio, and Yale University, where her mentors included Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Ezra Laderman; she also studied with David Lang at Yale. Snider is an advocate for other composers, having served on the board of New Amsterdam Records, a composer-driven recording label she co-founded with like-minded composers Judd Greenstein and William Brittelle.
The emotional directness and clarity of Snider’s music reflect the influence of popular and stage music. Penelope (2010) shares characteristics of the intimate “chamber-pop” genre as explored by Emily Wells, Osvaldo Golijov, and others, with roots in progressive pop’s concept albums of the 1960s. Beyond the arbitrary constraints of categorization, Snider is, of course, her own composer. Subtlety and intricacy of structure, harmony, and color show her deep awareness of a wide range of contemporary classical compositional practices, as well as her rich imagination for drama and direct expressivity.
On its surface, Marmoris is a depictive tone-poem in the lineage of Debussy’s La Mer, but, characteristically, Snider gives it a broader perspective:
“Marmoris” is an ancient Latin word that means “the shimmering surface of the sea.”
Writing this piece in the months prior to the 2024 U.S. election, I found comfort in thinking about the world of the orchestra. Orchestras bring together musicians from all different backgrounds and perspectives to listen to each other, empathize, and cooperate in the creation of a shared human experience that transcends political, cultural, and ideological differences. The orchestra has often reminded me of an ocean in this way—a seemingly living, breathing thing consisting of myriad unique lifeforms pulsing, swaying, and churning in concert.
This piece reflects upon the forces in life that hold and enclose us, those vast similitudes that connect us and remind us we are a part of something much larger than our daily human struggles might allow us to perceive.
Every sea picture, musical or otherwise, is different, which is as it should be. Beginning quietly, Marmoris then highlights the sea’s shimmer via high woodwinds and harp before subsiding into placidity. Without getting too literal, the music mirrors the fluidly evolving, layered energies of the sea’s surface, its dispassionate power hinted at, but latent.
Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.