PROGRAM:
Sarah HENNIES - SETTLE (2012) [12']
for two vibraphonists playing one vibraphone
Sarah HENNIES - THOUGHT SECTORS (2020) [58']
for percussion solo
PERFORMERS:
Sarah HENNIES, vibraphone
Steven SCHICK, percussion soloist
concertnova presents Sarah Hennies as we explore queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought with an immersive installation from local artist Lizzy Duquette.
To mark the end of a great year at the shop, we’ve organized something special: on Saturday, December 7th, Af Ursin makes his US debut alongside a performance by Sarah Hennies and music provided by DJ Vivid Oblivion at an intimate, spacious private Williamsburg residence. The address will be shared with ticket holders the day before the show.
Over nearly three decades, the Belgium-based Af Ursin has released a steady stream of alchemical recordings both solo and in collaboration with the likes of Anne Gillis, Christoph Heemann (as In Camera), and Andrew Chalk (as Elodie). With antecedents within both the more esoteric strains of industrial musick and the classical avant-garde, it would be tempting to call Af Ursin a torchbearer for a hallucinatory approach to expansive sound if not for the hushed, chamber ambience of much of his output. Candlebearer seems a more apt metaphor for the blurred timbres of his structured improvisations; a music that passes intimately through darkness without entirely illuminating it.
In addition to his La Scie Dorée imprint, Af Ursin runs the Metaphon label, dedicated to publishing electronic and instrumental music from the 20th century, with a focus on Belgian composers as well as the music of Michael Ranta—an American composer and percussionist best known as a performer of choice for Stockhausen, Jean-Claude Éloy, and Luc Ferrari. Ranta serves as the connective tissue linking Af Ursin with Sarah Hennies, who has undertaken a recording project documenting never before heard Ranta chamber works mostly composed in the 1970s while he was living in Taiwan. Tomorrow, Important Records issues Transits: Volume 1, the first in this series.
Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College and her work has been released by Blume, Black Truffle, and New World Records. For this event, she presents a solo vibraphone and gong performance.
Presented in collaboration with Shared Shapes.
PROGRAM:
John CAGE - IN A LANDSCAPE (1948) [8']
Sarah HENNIES – MOTOR TAPES (2023) [56']
Vicki RAY, piano (Cage)
ECHOI (Hennies):
Andrew McINTOSH, violin
Wendy RICHMAN, viola
Niall FERGUSON, cello
Matt KLINE, double bass
Michael MATSUNO, flute
Brian WALSH, clarinet
M.A. TIESENGA, saxophone
Nev WENDELL, trumpet
Mason MOY, trombone
emma denney, guitar
Richard AN, piano
Jonathan HEPFER, percussion
Jonathan HEPFER, artistic director
Joshua RUBIN, technical consultation
This concert is underwritten by a generous gift from Margaret Morgan & Wesley Phoa
Project [BLANK] presents the west-coast premiere of RESERVOIR 2 by groundbreaking American composer Sarah Hennies. This evening-length work for choir and flute blurs the lines between performance and installation, and is based on the idea that the unconscious mind can act as a deep “reservoir” or repository for our most profound memories. Our new staging will activate and transform the vaulted spaces of St. Paul’s Cathedral, enveloping the listener in a constellation of voices calling out from the depths. Featuring a new light and video installation designed by Allison O. Evans, and performed by the San Diego New Verbal Workshop.
Saturday, September 7th, at 8pm ISSUE welcomes an elusive performer to open its Fall 2024 Season. After more than 20 years, American composer Frankie Mann will make her return to New York at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn. After last performing at Roulette Intermedium in 2000, she will be accompanied for this landmark occasion by longtime collaborator David Behrman, Allison Easter, Sarah Hennies and John King to present Descent, a new work for traditional acoustic and electronic instruments and soundscapes. Contemplating the etymology of the word “descent,” the artists explore its meanings–who and where you come from; the sense of entropy in our society; a melodic downward turn–to imagine what it looks like to go beyond this seemingly inevitable, human fate.Join as an ISSUE Project Room Member at any level and receive a free ticket to the event!
As with many women engineers, it is only recently that Frankie Mann is becoming recognized for her pioneering work in music and technology. She began her career in the 1970s when the shift from analog to digital technologies was quickly evolving, requiring Mann to (quite literally) write her way into the male dominated history of electronic music composition. Entering higher education at Oberlin Conservatory and later, what was once Mills College in California, the classically trained musician would go on to receive a Fullbright scholarship for her gifts in computer science and music despite the conservative nature of the emerging field. While much of Mann’s work has existed on the peripheries of history, this September, ISSUE brings forth a selection of her past works in conversation with present-day works and collaborators in celebration of the artist’s legacy.
From who and where do we descend? This thematic question finds resonance with the work of Sarah Hennies. Alongside Mann’s explorations of lived experience, Hennies often examines sonic peripheries through her study of psychoacoustics and queer and trans identity, and the messy, perhaps biological entanglement from which our curiosities and identities are formed. The artist’s work spans many years with ISSUE across disciplines including film and composition, and for this event, she will open the evening by working with difference tones for solo bowed vibraphone before joining Mann, Behrman, Easter and King.
Saturday, June 8 at 1 pm and 4 pm
As part of the performance program organized by guest curator Taja Cheek for Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Sarah Hennies presents Motor Tapes, a one-hour work for a large ensemble. Taking its name from neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás’s characterization of the human brain as containing innumerable “tape loops” that run continuously within the mind, Motor Tapes is composed of densely overlapping patterns of sound, with musicians representing synapses that both fire independently and work together to achieve complex activities. Llinás’s description of this phenomena is strikingly musical: “The activity in the basal ganglia is running all the time, playing motor patterns and snippets of motor patterns amongst and between themselves […] they seem to act as a continuous, random, motor pattern noise generator.” “I am interested in the motor tapes theory,” Hennies has said, “because it suggests that alongside lived experience there is a mysterious biological basis for our inclinations, talents and identities.”
Motor Tapes will be performed by Lauren Cauley, Laura Cocks, David Friend, Madison Greenstone, Judith Hamann, Tristan Kasten-Krause, Hannah Levinson, Christopher McIntyre, Erin Rogers, Brendon Randall-Myers, Bill Solomon, and Nate Wooley.
Motor Tapes was commissioned by GMEA - Centre National de Création Musicale d’Albi-Tarn and premiered by Ensemble Dedalus at the Darmstadt Summer Course in August 2023
“What do Adele, Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey and La Esterella have in common? They are all contraltos or contraltos. The lowest female voice is also the starting point of the controversial film 'Contralto' by the American composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies. Should women also 'sound' feminine, and what is the relationship between gender and pitch? Hennies' groundbreaking audiovisual work explores transfeminine identity through voice feminization therapy. The cast consists of transgender women, the soundtrack is extremely varied. A compelling film screening with live music accompaniment by GAME.”
“Memory Box: The Music of Sarah Hennies”
Experimental Music Workshop directed by Greg Stuart
Experience the exploratory sounds of Sarah Hennies’ compositions with “Memory Box: The Music of Sarah Hennies,” presented by The Experimental Music Workshop. A percussionist and composer, Hennies’ work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues, including queer and trans identity, love, intimacy, and psychoacoustics. Along with the performance of recent pieces, Hennies will join the ensemble for the premiere of a new work written for The Experimental Music Workshop.
Co-sponsored by the South Carolina Honors College
Sarah Hennies is a visionary American composer and percussionist, who “writes music rife with psychological effects and emotional undercurrents” (The New York Times). Meditative yet propulsive, challenging yet engaging, her work is concerned with a variety of musical and sociopolitical issues, including queer and trans identity and psychoacoustics. For her Portrait, two brilliant ensembles—the Mivos Quartet and Yarn/Wire—perform new works written especially for them.
Free admission • Doors open at 5:30PM, music at 6PM
Onstage seating is first-come, first-served.
The intrepid and virtuosic piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire takes a deep dive into the music of Sarah Hennies, starting with this Pop-Up Concert and followed by a Composer Portrait of her work on Thursday, April 4. Primers is a 30-minute work written for the ensemble that is both rhythmic and propulsive as well as subtle and meditative. Notes are juxtaposed with silence to create an aethereal and altogether unique sonic experience.
Sit onstage and enjoy a free drink during these hour-long weeknight Pop-Up Concerts, and mingle with the musicians and fellow concertgoers after the show.
SMFA at Tufts, Anderson Auditorium
230 The Fenway, Boston
$15 general admission / $10 members + students / FREE for SMFA and BU students
No one turned away for lack of funds
Michael Ranta is a legendary but now almost totally unknown percussionist, composer, and improviser who left the U.S. in the late 1960s and has lived abroad ever since. He worked closely with some of the most important composers of the 20th century including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harry Partch, Jean-Claude Eloy, Mauricio Kagel, and Helmut Lachenmann. In 1977, after seven years in Taiwan learning tai-chi, he settled in Cologne and opened the shop Asian Sound, a source of hard-to-find Asian percussion instruments. Since 2010, the Belgian record label Metaphon has been unearthing hours of unheard music from Ranta’s archives of percussion and electroacoustic music. Composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies has recently undertaken a project to perform and record a large body of scored chamber music mostly from the 1970s that has never been recorded and heard by very few.
Ranta’s works are almost totally unknown with no evidence of live performances. Though it is impossible to know for sure, it seems that almost no one has heard them. This program includes two of these works, Mharuva (1977) for solo marimba and Continuum II (1998) for two bass clarinets, one percussionist, and four-channel tape performed by Hennies and clarinetists Madison Greenstone and Katie Porter. Collectively, the three musicians bring years of experience as performers of experimental music to breathe life into an almost totally unknown major chamber composition for this rare instrumentation.
The Greenstone/Hennies/Porter trio (formed specifically to perform Continuum II by Ranta) will also premiere a brand new work by Hennies.
Bowerbird is pleased to present a portrait concert of composer Sarah Hennies performed by the Arcana New Music Ensemble with the composer.
PROGRAM
Passing, a short film
Monologue, for solo trumpet
Tessa Ellis, trumpet
Settle, for two players on one vibraphone
Sarah Hennies and Andy Thierauf, vibraphone
Abscission, for violin, cello, and guitar
Carlos Santiago, violin; Erin Busch, cello; Jonathan Pfeffer, guitar
New solo percussion performance.
At 8pm and 9pm on both Thursday, October 19th & Friday, October 20th ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary with two evenings featuring work from influential composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies. Each presentation will feature a showing of Hennies short film Passing plus the premiere of a new collaborative work with bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause.
The film Passing takes its inspiration from the life of Mark Hogancamp, a Kingston, NY artist who was beaten nearly to death after revealing his obsession with high heel shoes to a group of men in a bar. This minimalist film considers the existential condition of those who cannot walk through the world unnoticed. For these people, an awareness develops of one’s “otherness” that pervades their entire existence and self-image. This is especially a concern for many transgender women who are disproportionately affected by unwanted attention, verbal abuse, violence, and murder. Through repetitive imagery of Hennies dragging a toy train car along a country road, an arresting musical score, and an unexpected interview, Passing is a meditation on one’s greatest joy provoking their worst fears. ISSUE is thrilled to be presenting Sarah Hennies Passing for the first time to an in-person audience, in addition to a preview performance of a new in-progress collaborative duo work with Tristan Kasten-Krause as part of the 20th Anniversary Season.
Between Friday, Oct 13th and Saturday, Nov 4th, ISSUE invites audiences to experience numerous programs including new commissions and restaging of programs specifically designed for a limited capacity environment of 74 people. The program includes Hennies’ film Passing, which was originally presented as part of ISSUE’s 2020 Artist Fund Benefit, a critical fundraising initiative that enabled ongoing commissions through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hennies, who is a member of ISSUE’s Artistic Advisory Council, has an important history with the organization where in 2017 she debuted her monumental piece "Contralto", a one-hour work for video, strings, and percussion that exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary. The piece featured a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes a variety of conventional and "non-musical" approaches to sound-making. At ISSUE, Hennies also participated in the Queer Trash (2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship) symposium, an auspicious meeting of some very bright and very queer minds, that showcased the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life. At the event, Hennies performed a solo rendition of Fleas (2017), a composition made entirely from objects found at thrift stores and flea markets including a dozen small bells and a bass drum someone had converted into a lamp with Lou Reed’s face painted on it before throwing it out. Fleas was again presented in 2019, this time with an ensemble, as part of Nate Wooley’s FOR/WITH festival organized by performer, composer, and 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley. The festival, which ran at ISSUE 2017-2019, simultaneously premiered distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of commissioned composers. In 2019, Wooley presented the world premiere of Monologue for solo trumpet by Hennies, her first-ever piece for trumpet, in which she instructed Wooley to take the tubing and valves as instruments in themselves to be activated, or not, by the player’s breath. The 2019 performance of Fleas was the closing event aligned with Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, an exhibition of mixed media work from ISSUE’s late founder Suzanne Fiol, marking 10 years since her passing. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with Suzanne’s daughter, Sarah Fiol.
Notes from Sarah Hennies on the duo with Tristan Kasten-Krause:
I am a great admirer of two works from the early 1980s by French composer Jean-Claude Eloy made in collaboration with American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta, “Yo-In” and “Anahata.” These works each last three and a half hours and move at an almost impossibly slow pace and yet fully engages the listener at every moment. I have been pushing my practice towards increasingly extreme durations over the last decade and have found in duo partner Tristan Kasten-Krause’s rich, virtuosic and beautifully simple explorations of the double bass a great potential for a multi-hour work. We recently spent a week together in rural New Hampshire generating material, and for our performance at ISSUE Project Room we present to you the opening sections of this in-progress work.
During these presentations Laurie Berg’s (Sports) Bar-In-Residence will be activated as well as a lobby installation by Eva Davidova: Vinson and Catherine in the Garden, a series of augmented reality prints.
This Fall marks the 20th Anniversary of ISSUE and will be celebrated with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. During the Anniversary celebration, between phases of renovation, ISSUE returns to our 22 Boerum Pl. theater for a special series of twenty limited-capacity events. Featuring artists from across our history as well as new projects, these gatherings - including our 20th Anniversary Gala - present an opportunity to celebrate and support ISSUE as we continue an ambitious calendar of programming. Join us in recognizing this important milestone in our history.
In Fall 2023, ISSUE Project Room celebrates its 20 year anniversary with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events.
Since its inception in 2003 under the vision of late Founder Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE has evolved from a small East Village garage, to a grain silo on the Gowanus Canal, to a project space in The Old American Can Factory, to now owning our 22 Boerum Place theater as an internationally-recognized leader for fostering experimental cross-disciplinary performance.
The evening, including a Gala concert and pre-reception, will include presentations & performances from Laurie Spiegel & Seth Cluett, Fred Moten & Jean Carla Rodea, Sarah Hennies, Joan La Barbara & BINT, and more participating artists to be announced.
“Borrowed Light” – Sarah Hennies’s String Quartet, written for the Mivos Quartet – is as imaginatively evocative as Motor Tapes, the American composer’s new work in the program of Dedalus Ensemble on 8 August 2023. If Motor Tapes refers to neural pathways and endless loops, Borrowed Light derives from a technique developed by American Shakers to install windows in interior walls of buildings to let in light from adjacent rooms with exterior windows. The Shakers, a religious community now almost completely forgotten and often mistaken for the Amish People, also became known primarily for their craftsmanship – “Shaker-made” was considered a seal of quality per se. The Mivos Quartet, which will premiere Borrowed Light in Darmstadt, took part in a young ensemble program at the Summer Course 2012 and has since gone on to a remarkable international career. Together with the young Polish ensemble Spółdzielnia Muzyczna, the Mivos Quartet is Ensemble-in-Residence at the Summer Course 2023.
With the friendly support of Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung
Is the sometimes extremely hectic, confusing, seemingly always the same and yet erratic hustle and bustle at large airports to be connected with the constant repetitive loops that determine our human existence: Walking, sleeping, waking, working, breathing, blinking, heartbeat, etc.? Where do sounds come from that we suddenly hear inside us? US composer Sarah Hennies draws inspiration for her new piece Motor Tapes from findings by neuroscientists Oliver Sacks and Rodolfo Llinás. The latter speaks of “motor tapes” in connection with our motoric memory and compares it with neuronal processes underlying human creativity. He claims that creativity is not a rational process, but is based on constantly “running” neural pathways (like tape loops) and “snippets of motor patterns” that act “as a continuous, random, motor pattern noise generator.”
Brian Eno created a whole new genre in the late 1970s with his constantly overlapping tape loops, the so called Ambient Music. Ambient, minimal and at the same time experimental music by Tom Johnson, Philip Glass, Moondog, Frederic Rzewski, Luc Ferrari and Phil Niblock or more recently Catherine Lamb, Sébastien Roux or Pascale Criton have always fascinated the Toulouse-based ensemble Dedalus, founded by the guitarist Didier Aschour in 1996. And so it comes as no surprise that Dedalus is making its overdue debut at the Summer Course with precisely this evocative music by Brian Eno and Sarah Hennies – their hour-long piece Motor Tapes is receiving its world premiere in Darmstadt.
With the friendly support of Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung
Basilica Hudson and Le Guess Who? present in collaboration with Sarah Van Buren the return of 24-HOUR DRONE: EXPERIMENTS IN SOUND AND MUSIC for the first time in-person since 2019.
An immersive event and all-encompassing experience, 24-HOUR DRONE is a roving, international series featuring musicians and sound artists experimenting within the spectrum of drone to create 24 hours of unbroken, uninterrupted sound. An event that embodies Basilica Hudson at its most experimental and experiential, pushing the boundaries of what a communal, conceptual experience can be. 24-HOUR DRONE’s immersive and meditative nature emphasizes communion. This is a shared experience devoted to unifying players and listeners alike.
This year, we wade deeper into the durational and site-specific element of DRONE. The festival will start and end with special three-hour endurance sets by C. Lavender, Fuji||||||||||ta, Photay with Celia Hollander and special guests Laraaji + Arji OceAnanda and Raven Chacon.
The remaining 12 hours of the event include performances by Anneice Cousin, eucademix (Yuka C. Honda), Evans Saxl Seretan Thayer Quartet, Gamelan Dharma Swara, gushes, Kelman Duran, Laura Ortman, Liturgy (solo), Michael Foster / Luke Stewart Duo, Pauline Oliveros’ The Heart Chant led by Lisa Barnard Kelley, Sarah Hennies + Tristan Kasten-Krause, Sister Redhawk (Nea’ Mckinney), Veena + Devesh Chandra and Wolf Eyes.
Sarah Hennies’s extended composition The Reinvention of Romance stages the interplay of one cellist and one percussionist over an hour and a half of shifting timbres, mutating patterns, and poignant silences. Originally performed in 2018 by its commissioners, Ashlee Booth and Adam Lion of the coupled duo Two-Way Street, The Reinvention of Romance was inspired by the sometimes mundane, sometimes transcendent experience of domestic cohabitation, drawing its structure from the repetition of prosaic actions which characterizes much of the time spent together within a household.
Described by Hennies as simultaneously “tender and personal and intense,” the piece is minimal but far from austere, as each of its self-enclosed passages builds upon the narrative suggested by its provocative title. Like two partners carrying out their daily routines in tandem, the cello and percussion exist alongside each other, their casual closeness defined by a mutually agreed upon boundary as they fade in and out of conversation. With quiet determination, Hennies reinvents romance as a durational act born not of grand gestures but of hard-won intimacy. In Hennies’s own words, The Reinvention of Romance, “ties together everything I care about,” serving as the perfect introduction to her sonic world of vulnerable relationality.
For the work’s New York premiere at Blank Forms, Hennies on percussion will be accompanied by Judith Hamann on cello. Fittingly for a piece about long-term commitments, Hamann and Hennies’s musical partnership dates back to 2018, when Hennies composed Loss for Hamann’s record Music for Cello and Humming (Blank Forms Editions, 2020).
A Kind of Ache is a multimedia installation and concert from composer Sarah Hennies, sculptor and conceptual artist Terry Berlier, and electroacoustic duo The Living Earth Show that reimagines a world designed from and for a queer identity.
The drums-and-guitar duo will play on Berlier’s sculptures alongside Hennies, using objects, music, and their imaginations to wonder “What would it feel like to be the majority?”
The Living Earth Show–guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson–is a megaphone and canvas for the world’s most progressive artists, seeking to push the boundaries of technical and artistic possibility while amplifying voices, perspectives, and bodies that the classical music tradition has often excluded. This performance marks the beginning of a multi-season residency for The Living Earth Show at EMPAC, offering engaging and exciting large-scale work from artists with whom they work closely.
Cellist Amanda Gookin premieres, “Tied” for solo cello as part of the third installment of her Forward Music Project. https://www.forwardmusicproject.com
