“Unremembered began in the spring of 2011 when the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth approached me to write some music for them. I asked the writer/artist and my old college friend, Nathaniel Bellows, to write some poems for me to set. Five short poems about his childhood in rural Massachusetts soon arrived, unexpectedly accompanied by five corresponding illustrations he had drawn. Like stained glass, each illustration brimmed with vibrant, swirling colors and complex, layered narratives. I remember turning “The Guest” sideways to focus on the figure of one girl consoling another, and immediately hearing the song’s opening melodic line. I soon completed the commission for Roomful of Teeth, but Nathaniel kept going – more poems and illustrations followed, in the style of the first five. It quickly became clear to me that a whole world lingered therein, one that I wanted to continue exploring.

The project found its next opportunity the following year, when the Ecstatic Music Festival commissioned me to collaborate with the vocalists Padma Newsome, DM Stith, and Shara Worden, whose voices I had been imagining in the new songs. Unremembered ultimately grew into a thirteen-song cycle tailored to their voices – seven vocal parts in total, accompanied by chamber orchestra and electronics.

Unremembered is an assemblage of vividly intense, imagistic vignettes – some are narrative, some are existential and ruminative. In words that are simple, direct, and lyrical, we see the world through a child’s eyes. These were Nathaniel’s stories and experiences, but they triggered memories from my own childhood – my own recollections of how it felt to develop consciousness, to encounter things I could not understand or explain, to reconcile the fact that some questions had no answers. In creating music for this piece, I strove to immerse myself in my memory of those feelings, in hopes of creating a musical world that reflected the sense of magic, mystery, wonder, fear, and revelation innate to childhood. ”

“In approaching this project, I was interested in exploring how writing poetry to set to music would be – and needed to be – different from the longer, free verse narrative poems I am accustomed to writing. The landscape of my childhood in New England is something I’ve always drawn from in all my work, but revisiting these stories in this new context, and with a more formal, deliberate poetic approach, resulted in something unexpected – each poem possessed a taut structure and musicality, blurred with an otherworldly halo of haunted uncertainty, a shadowed quality that deeply characterizes my memories of that time and place. Because of the potency and significance of the material, and because my first inclination in any artistic endeavor is to draw, I made sketches and studies to further explore and ultimately illustrate each poem, which, as the project evolved, were created in tandem to the music Sarah was writing.

At the beginning of writing these poems, I had in mind folk songs, fables, spirituals, and the work of Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Dickinson, to help me recount these episodes from my childhood. But the finished product has become something much larger and more expansive than anything I could have been inspired by or hoped to capture from my own experience – Unremembered is a layered, ghostly chorus of innocence and ruin, the embrace and celebration of the unknown, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from the passing of time.”