Program Notes | Oct 11–13, 2019

IN THE COMPOSER’S AND FILMMAKER’S WORDS

Sarah Kirkland Snider and Mark DeChiazza have both written about Hiraeth and their creative collaboration. The composer’s description of Hiraeth follows in its entirety, followed by text from DeChiazza’s website, markdechiazza.com.

In 2013 the North Carolina Symphony commissioned me to write a large-scale piece about my family ties to the state. My father grew up in the small town of Salisbury, and his ancestors had been in North Carolina for 13 generations (or so the legend goes). His mother was an avid historian who helped found the Salisbury Historic Foundation and fought to preserve much of the town and surrounding areas. She assiduously educated my brother and me on our great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, and cousins—their names, personalities and accomplishments—going back several generations. It was very important to her that we knew where we came from. We were very close with my Dad’s side of the family, and spent a lot of time in Salisbury as I grew up. All of this fostered in me a deep feeling that while New Jersey was my circumstantial home, North Carolina was my spiritual one—a safe harbor, a place that would, if all else failed, take care of me somehow.

My plan was to write a personal meditation on notions of home, family and identity, as seen through the lens of my childhood memories of North Carolina. I was delighted to have Princeton Symphony Orchestra join as co-commissioner of the work; there could be no more fitting partner for this project than the orchestra of my own hometown, the locus of all my other childhood memories. Upon receiving the commission, I began imagining a film accompaniment for the piece. Because music is so abstract and the theme for this commission so specific, I thought it might be interesting to have a visual component explore some of the memories that inspired the piece. Sunlight was a salient feature of my memories of North Carolina—the play of light and shadow on wax myrtle trees on my grandparents’ patio, the burnished late-day light filtering through their sunroom windows, or the soothing, consoling sunlight of winter, which looked and felt very different to me from the light up North. I knew of a filmmaker, Mark DeChiazza, who made beautiful films for concert music, and I thought he might be able to capture this. With the support of several historic foundations in Salisbury, we were able to make it happen.

My father was thrilled about all of this. That his daughter was co-commissioned by his two hometown orchestras to explore notions of family history was a source of great pride and excitement for him. Shortly after I received the commission, however, my dad was diagnosed with a rare, untreatable cancer. I had just begun writing the piece when, three months later, he was gone.

I could no longer write the piece I’d planned to write. My musical ideas were now refracted through the lens of grief and the anguish and disorientation of letting go. My dad, with whom I was very close, was my primary living connection to North Carolina. The memories of my time there were newly painful to recall, because I could no longer share them with him. And the memories themselves almost felt surreal, difficult to compartmentalize: how do we reconcile the importance of places in our past that hold no future for us? Reeling from the shock and pain of his absence, what had initially begun as a rosy, nostalgic exploration of childhood was now suffused with melancholy and angst. The material grew darker, my thinking about the piece more complex.

Mark’s and my thinking about the film changed as well. We had initially envisioned an abstract visual poem of town and landscape, but because the piece is ultimately about family, Mark suggested we bring some aspect of humanity into it. We decided to shoot images of my own children (then 6 and 4 years old) re-creating my father’s and my memories of Salisbury: playing in parks, backyards and railroad tracks; running around downtown and lazing quietly around the house. He suggested the film include my father’s identical twin, Britt Snider, to offer a different narrative perspective. We also shot scenes of social gatherings—the kind that populated our visits down there, where the grownups would drink bourbon, smoke cigarettes and tell stories while children ran amok through the proceedings. For these scenes, we brought together friends of my parents and grandparents who are still living in Salisbury, and just let the cameras roll.

Ultimately, Hiraeth is both elegy and personal meditation, steeped in the hazy, half-recollected textures and sensations that surround a memory. At times I consciously strove to emulate the logic and architecture of a dream, the way memory sometimes feels: motifs overlap in evolving ways; thoughts wander and interrupt one another suddenly; and frequently, one memory is imbued with the color and perfume of another. But mostly I just tried to immerse myself in my own hiraeth for this time and place I can’t return to, and give voice to what rose to the surface.

— Sarah Kirkland Snider

DeChiazza’s film, which partners with live performance of composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s 30-minute orchestral work Hiraeth, aims to realize moments that never existed—rarefied memories from an imagined childhood. The film’s imagery could be understood as an intricate collage of invented home movies—an idealized and amped-up version of dad’s old super-8s.

Shot on location around Salisbury, NC, where Snider’s father grew up and where, as a child, she would visit her grandparents’ home. DeChiazza cast Jasper and Dylan, Snider’s own children, as the primary subjects of his film, drawn to the immediate and tactile way that children explore their surroundings through play, and how childhood memories are shaped through this mode of encountering the world.

With real people and places as raw material, the camera’s eye constructs a fictional nostalgic past, selectively focusing on some elements while leaving others obscured in luminous haze. It can draw very close, or pull back to skirt the periphery of its subjects as it seeks to simplify what is complicated and lingers to burnish the beautiful.

The children exist within a story that is always kept slightly outside of our frame—we are right beside it but always looking at a tangent to it. Evading narrative’s factual details, we instead become steeped in the tones, colors, and textures it exudes—a poetry that can be understood through sensation and experience.

– markdechiazza.com

GUSTAV HOLST, ASTRONOMY 100 YEARS AGO AND THE PLANETS

E.D. Hirsch’s original Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988) told us that a planet is “a kind of object that is in orbit around a star, but does not give off its own light; rather, it shines by reflecting sunlight. … There are nine major planets, including the earth, in orbit around our sun, along with many asteroids.” The first thing we ought to know about Gustav Holst’s most famous work, The Planets, is that it is not about mythology. Most planets in our solar system simply happen to be named for ancient Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.

We know from the program page that Holst’s suite consists of seven movements. Hirsch and our middle-school science teachers taught us that our solar system had nine planets. That changed in 2003, when astronomers tentatively identified a 10th planet. They reported that the so-called 10th planet (“2003 UB313”) was even larger than Pluto. Informally, they referred to it as Xena, but in 2006 they formally designated this trans-Neptunian object as Eris.

The three planets “missing” from the Holst composition are Pluto, Earth and the recently discovered Eris. Pluto was not discovered until 1930 (and in any case was downgraded in 2006 to a “dwarf planet,” as was the newcomer, Eris). Holst completed The Planets in 1917. Earth, for whatever reason, did not stimulate his imagination. His symphonic suite is its own musical galaxy, less governed by science than by mysticism.

What then was Holst’s context? Astrology, at least as a jumping-off point. But there is a lot more going on in these seven tone poems—for that is, in effect, what they are—than just the character he deemed appropriate to each of the planets. Holst was a bookworm who preferred the solitude of his study to almost everything. He became interested in eastern religions and mysticism early on, and he worked both aspects into much of his music, including The Planets. For him, philosophical ideas took precedence over astrological or astronomical accuracy. He thought of The Planets as a series of mood pictures, and he neither intended nor achieved immense contrast within any of its individual components. Between contiguous movements, however, there is a world of difference. That is precisely why this work is so enormously effective in its cumulative dramatic and musical impact.