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).