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.

THE MUSIC OF MICHAEL RANTA AND SARAH HENNIES
PERFORMED BY MADISON GREENSTONE (CLARINETS), SARAH HENNIES (PERCUSSION), KATIE PORTER (CLARINETS)
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2024 AT 8PM

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.

Madison Greenstone clarinets
Katie Porter clarinets
Sarah Hennies percussion

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

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

Essen, Salzlager im Unesco Welterbe Zollverein

George Lewis – Assemblage (2013)
für Ensemble

Sarah Hennies – Clock Dies (2021)
für Ensemble

George Lewis – Tales of the Traveller (2016)
für Klarinette, Minimoog und Kammerensemble

Carl Rosman, Klarinette
Ulrich Löffler, Minimoog
Ensemble Musikfabrik
Brad Lubman, Dirigent

The Reinvention of Romance is a 90-minute duet for cello and percussion inspired by the care and empathy that emerges over time when two lives share space. The work consists of a series of repeating patterns that create a peculiar kind of harmony in which two musicians are rarely “playing together” but are nonetheless intimately bonded by a common center. The domestic lives of two people living together will inevitably consist of many endlessly repeating actions: sleeping, waking up, eating, going to work, coming home again, etc. Similarly, our biology is governed by repetition: breathing, blinking, heartbeat, etc. It is only through the passage of time that intimacy can evolve and increase. The Reinvention of Romance is a musical analogue that creates a startling closeness between the two performers and between the performers and audience.

As I Progress is a collaboration between visual artist Mara Baldwin and composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies that combines drawings, sculptures, and sound that will be installed/performed at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany, NY.

Baldwin and Hennies’ work is inspired by the traces left behind of the once thriving Shaker society and uses their objects, architecture, and music as source material for making a new kind of interdisciplinary work that evokes a feeling of ghosts and loneliness in the 1848 Meetinghouse.

This event features an exhibition of Baldwin’s visual art in combination with a one-hour piece of music by Hennies and performed by Hennies, guitarist Matt Sargent (Bard College), and Australian cellist Judith Hamann.

This is Baldwin and Hennies’ second collaboration of Shaker-themed work following the 2020 performance of Come ‘Round Right at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, a 45-minute piece for four fiddle players accompanied by four Shaker chair sculptures and slowly shifting light.

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 (Andy Meyerson and Travis Andrews) that reimagines a world designed from and for a queer identity. The drums-and-guitar duo will play Hennies’ score on Berlier’s sculptures, using objects, music and their imaginations to wonder “What would it feel like to be the majority?”

The Living Earth Show supports the next generation of artistic thinkers throughout their work.  During the 2020-21 season and throughout the pandemic, they worked closely with UMD School of Music students in the creation of Music for Hard Times. The eight-week virtual project featured 70 UMD Wind Orchestra students in an open source composition that can never be replicated. During their 2021-22 residency at The Clarice, The Living Earth Show will continue to collaborate with UMD students in the making of a safe artistic space for queer-identifying individuals. They will host an Arts Citizenship Talk (ACTnow) and share their creative process with audiences.