The Princeton Symphony Orchestra (PSO) has been awarded the 2016 Art Works award from The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to help fund a community engagement project centered on Hiraeth, a new work by Princeton composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. The work was co-commissioned by the PSO in honor of its 35th anniversary celebrating the creativity of women, a tribute to Snider’s first teacher and founding artistic director of the PSO, Portia Sonnenfeld.
Snider’s works have been commissioned and performed widely by orchestras and smaller ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and the Grammy Award-winning group Roomful of Teeth. Penelope, her 2010 debut album featuring Shara Worden, made the top 10 lists of media outlets around the world. In September 2015, she released her second full-length album Unremembered on New Amsterdam Records. She received a master’s degree and artist diploma from the Yale School of Music.
Snider’s “Hiraeth” is a meditation on home, family, heritage and identity and is set to be performed under PSO Music Director Rossen Milanov at the orchestra’s final Classical Series Concert of the season “Passion and Affection” on Sunday, May 15, 2016 at Richardson Auditorium. Surrounding the concert will be a series of community engagement events with lectures, in-school workshops and a special chamber concert designed to explore the music and inspirations behind Snider’s composition.
The NEA announced awards totaling more than $27.6 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2016. In its first 50 years, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded more than $5 billion in grants to recipients in every state and U.S. jurisdiction, the only arts funder in the nation to do so. The Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.
For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, visit arts.gov.
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