BOOK 16, Part 1: Penelope
Listen
For this New Sounds, listen to selections from Sarah Kirkland Snider's epic song cycle, Penelope. From a New Sounds Live recorded in March of 2011 at Merkin Hall as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, hear composer/vocalist Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond. together with the versatile sextet yMusic. Also, yMusic performs Snider's instrumental piece, "Daughter of the Waves."
In "Penelope," (inspired by Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey), 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.
Go to site to listen and read in its entirety.
In "Penelope," (inspired by Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey), 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.
Go to site to listen and read in its entirety.