MusicIC: "Penelope" featuring Shara Nova

The Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature's MusicIC Festival presents "Penelope," a contemporary multimedia song cycle written by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Ellen McLaughlin. 

Inspired by Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, Snider’s website describes Penelope: “The song cycle, written in 2009 for Shara Nova and Ensemble Signal, is based on a music-theater monodrama written by Snider and playwright Ellen McLaughlin for the J. Paul Getty Center in 2008. In the work, a woman's husband appears at her door after an absence of 20 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 to him from 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. is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home. Suspended somewhere between art song, indie rock, and chamber folk, the music of Penelope moves organically from moments of elegiac strings-and-harp reflection to dusky post-rock textures with drums, guitars and electronics, all directed by a strong sense of melody and a craftsman’s approach to songwriting.”

Shara Nova, a Grammy-nominated composer, vocalist, and producer, will perform the role written for her as part of this production. Nova has released six albums under the moniker My Brightest Diamond. Nova starred in the Tony Award Winning musical “Illinoise” on Broadway, directed by Justin Peck, co-written by Jackie Sibblies Drury with music by Sufjan Stevens, with a live album released on Nonesuch Records. Many artists have sought out Nova’s unique vocal work, including David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, The Decemberists, Steve Mackey, and David Lang.

She will be joined in the Iowa City performance by other ensemble performers include MusicIC’s Founding Artistic Director, violinist Tricia Park, and a cast of University of Iowa faculty members and students, led by Conductor Kenny Lee, Director of Orchestral Studies at the University of Iowa.