Sarah Hennies was a name that was barely on my radar before the pandemic, but after spending over six months mostly in lockdown I listened to a CD released on New World Records, a label that pretty much always piques my interest, featuring two works of hers, both of which were a little over a half hour in duration. One is a trio for piano, double-bass, and percussion with the peculiar name Spectral Malsconcities which was performed by new music stalwarts Bearthoven. The other is a duo for just piano and percussion called Unsettle performed by the Bent Duo, an ensemble which was also relatively unfamiliar to me. The music seemed to evoke everything I was feeling about this extremely precarious and terrifying time we’ve all been living in, despite the fact that both pieces were composed and recorded before the word Covid became an unfortunate daily household utterance.
I was fascinated and intrigued. I had to hear more of her music and listened to everything I could find, from her early collaborative work as part of the Austin-based experimental rock band Weird Weeds to her multimedia documentary Contralto to extended duration solo and chamber music compositions for various instrumental combinations. Despite the extremely broad stylistic range of this material, it all shared a concern for extremely precise sonic gestures and involved a great deal of repetition, but not guided by any kind of structural process as far as I could discern. Again, very much in the same way days and months seemed to pass over the last two years. I had to speak to her and learn more.
The most significant music has the uncanny ability to tap into a zeitgeist sometimes well in advance of its time although, when I spoke to Hennies earlier this month, she said that she hadn’t associated her time bending compositional aesthetic with our current realities. She did, however, acknowledge the relationship. But everyone listening to this music might come away with a different personal reaction to it and that’s fine by her since how we perceive sound on a psychological level as it unfolds over time is key to the sonic experiences that Sarah Hennies creates, whether it involves hearing layers of counterpoint that are the result of the natural reverberation of a particular physical space or hearing ghost sonorities that aren’t actually there because of the way certain timbres combine.
“Everything for me is about the listening experience,” she said. “I don’t even use quote-unquote systems anymore. … Part of the reason that I like working with repetition so much is that you have this sense that the music is staying in one place, but it feels like it’s developing anyway. And so, it’s like the music is stopped in time, but to me, doing something over and over again, even though the music is not hypothetically changing, your thoughts are changing. Hearing something for one minute is experientially very, very different from hearing it for, let’s say, eight minutes. And so, the listener is changing even though the music is always changing on a micro-level, but essentially you’re hearing the same thing over and over again.”
Sarah Hennies’s scores are extremely economical; the score for the nearly 34-minute Unsettle is a mere two pages. And yet the sonorities feel extremely generous.
“I just think being economical and practical is interesting because you can get at the heart of a sound,” she explained. “I’m not writing melodies and harmonies. It’s like not that kind of music. So it’s about something else.”
Hearing something for one minute is experientially very, very different from hearing it for, let's say, eight minutes.
Sarah Hennies
If I find myself wanting to hear something or do something over and over again, and I can't totally explain why, then that to me is a very, very good reason to put that into music because then you can then externalize those thoughts or see it from a listener point of view.
Sarah Hennies
I just think being economical and practical is interesting because you can get at the heart of a sound.
Sarah Hennies
I'm not writing melodies and harmonies. It's like not that kind of music. So it's about something else.
Sarah Hennies
The easiest way to get a performer to do what I want without a bunch of extra nonsense is something that has played into how I write music really, really profoundly
Sarah Hennies
Everything for me is about the listening experience.
Sarah Hennies
There's no guarantee that a player is gonna play a mathematically perfect C-sharp every time ... something else that I love doing is playing on inherent imperfections in human performance.
Sarah Hennies
Simple thing equals complicated experience. Not to make it sound it too dumb, but that's really it.
Sarah Hennies
There have been a few moments over the last ten to 12 years where I did something, and I immediately thought: oh, I'm somewhere else now.
Sarah Hennies
It doesn't make sense that Orienting Response would be engaging. You know, it's like 45 minutes of bing-bong, bing-bong. But I just found it addictive or intoxicating.
Sarah Hennies
That is something that I still feel I'm doing, to be strange in a way that's not aggressive or dissonant for the sake of dissonance.
Sarah Hennies
I very intensely identify as a DIY artist ... I don't have a world as far I'm concerned, except my own.
Sarah Hennies
This is a semantic thing, but I don't consciously want to go in a new direction.
Sarah Hennies
I don't want to be permanently attached to any organization, or genre, or movement, or whatever. I just want to be out here wandering around by myself and just going where people want me basically.
Sarah Hennies
My experience generates the music, but that's not the thing that I need people to know about.
Sarah Hennies
I didn't want to be "Sarah Hennies: the Trans Composer."
Sarah Hennies
For a long time now I've thought it would be great to write a piece that was three or four hours long.