Sarah Hennies
Program Notes by Tim Munro
Miller Theatre commissioned the acclaimed writer (and musician) Tim Munro to write profiles of the creators featured onstage this season, with the goal of connecting listeners to both the creator and their music.
Borrowed Light
A fragment: four quiet, heart-beat rhythms, overlapping, ripples in a pond. Then, silence. The same whispered fragment. Silence. Rhythms. Silence, but longer now. Now, a new thing, a glow emerges, radiant.
Hennies began with an image: pure, warm light.
“I had this thought: that string instrument harmonics were ‘light.’” She struck upon a title: Borrowed Light, a term that the Shakers used to describe internal windows, carrying illumination through their homes.
It took time to discover the connection with the title. “I was writing very freely,” says Hennies, who played around with a series of musical ideas. Only when she first heard the music live did the kinship between image and music become clear.
Hennies noticed that the “little musical universes I created in Borrowed Light all eventually fizzle out.” This reminded her of the history of the Shakers. The religious sect had utopian ideas about society. Members remained celibate, and numbers dwindled over the decades. There are now just two living members.
“They knew their community could not sustain itself,” she says. “In some ways, they made a conscious decision to die out.” Hennies found this idea compelling, and connected it with her piece, which seemed to her to be about endings. She found that in her hands every section of the piece was a slow turning to dust.
“I didn’t intend to write a piece about death, but in some ways it turned out more beautifully than if I had been intentional and rigorous about making a piece about ‘death.’”
Needed fixing
Percussion is core to Hennies’ creative work. It shapes so much about who she is as a performer and composer. “I recently began asking myself why I chose drums as a nine-year-old, when I showed an aptitude for just about any kind of instrument,” she says in a 2018 performance piece that was later turned into an article for Sound American.
She was “a child who believed deeply that something was wrong with me, and that whatever it was badly needed fixing.” At the time, “drums = boys, and being a good drummer means being a good boy. Did I gravitate toward drums because it affirmed my boyhood to everyone around me ?”
Hennies suspects there is another piece of the puzzle. “Percussion instruments are more physical in a more tangible way—they’re touch instruments, they use the body in a way that playing a wind instrument does not. That also really appeals to me.”
Also, unlike with other musicians, percussionists “are not defined by our instruments.” It remains “the only discipline where you have the power to define yourself. I could do nothing but ring crappy little bells on stage, and I could still be accurately called a percussionist.”
Trust in the process
Hennies wanted to be a composer in high school. She fell down the experimental music rabbit-hole, listening to music by John Cage and others. It took her time to accept that she couldn’t yet be an old-fashioned, capital-C “Composer.”
In college, the composer Herbert Brün helped Hennies understand that she “couldn’t do what he did: sit at a desk and then emerge with a perfect piece all written down.” She needed to be in contact with the music she made: to play it, to hear it. “It took me a really long time to make peace with that.”
After college, she wrote a series of highly repetitive, ecstatic percussion works, mostly with vibraphone. “They started as improvised, but within a very narrow frame: pulsing a single sound for a long time. At first, I wasn’t thinking of them as compositions. But at some point, I thought, ‘Wait, what I’m doing is composing.’”
A guitarist in Santiago named Cristian Alvear asked Hennies for a new piece. “I thought, I can’t just write a percussion piece for guitar.” She explored related ideas, and this allowed her to develop a style, built on repeated ideas, that existed outside of herself as a performer.
“When I finally heard the piece, there was something mysterious and compelling about this music.” This quality drew her in. “As a listener, that interests me: hearing something that I can’t fully explain.”
Hennies has much more trust in her process than previously. “I have come to realize that I can make music any way I want to,” she says, definitively. “I know that my work qualifies as ‘composition.’”
“Hennies’ music doesn’t tell straightforward stories. Instead of clear goals, there is ambiguity and uncertainty. Instead of simple transitions, there are sudden halts, inconsistent repetitions. Instead of continuity there are silences, non-sequiturs.”
Death
Hennies’ music doesn’t tell straightforward stories. Instead of clear goals, there is ambiguity and uncertainty. Instead of simple transitions, there are sudden halts, inconsistent repetitions. Instead of continuity there are silences, non-sequiturs.
Hennies sees the two pieces on this program as linked. Both share a preoccupation with death and endings. “Things that can’t be unwound or rewound,” she says. “I’m interested in the things that don’t make sense to me about myself, things that are mysterious. And what is more mysterious than death?”
Music school goblin
“Going to the premiere of Borrowed Light at Darmstadt,” Hennies says, “I was worried that the music was too simple, or that I didn’t pay enough attention to the material.” She calls it her “music school goblin. The goblin says, ‘Your pieces aren’t complex enough. Your music is too easy to write.’”
Hennies has worked to reject this internal voice. “I have been working more subconsciously. I’ve been trying to avoid analyzing what I’m doing as a composer—to just do what feels right, to make decisions that I don’t fully or consciously understand.”
But still, the goblin can return. “I’m not a melody and harmony person at all,” she says, acknowledging how much the academic classical music world is focused on those elements. “I’m working more with timbres and textures and rhythm and sound.”
Spiral Organ
Panel 1. Chimes ring out in pianos and percussion. String harmonies fade in, again and again, in patterns that slowly fray, disintegrate. Then silence.
Panel 2. High bells toll. Uncertainty in the quartet—a low, weak melody struggles to emerge from low, slack strings. Silence.
Hennies was thinking about tinnitus. “I’ve noticed the ringing in my ears has gotten louder in the last couple of years,” she says. Hennies believes it comes from the years of playing in rock bands. “My hearing doesn't feel compromised, but the sound has become very noticeable.”
In response, Hennies created a simple harmony for electronics, “a four-note sine wave chord that fades in. It sounds like what I’m hearing in my head.” This chord later become the opening string quartet texture of Spiral Organ.
Panel 3. Chimes again, this time more forceful. Strings match the pained intensity. But all are destined to fade. Silence.
Panel 4. Mere fragments: high wisps in strings, bare gestures in piano and percussion. Silence.
The title, Spiral Organ, is another name for the organ of Corti, the receptor organ for hearing. Hennies was reading about tiny hairs inside the inner ear that are essential for hearing. “Once these hairs become damaged,” she says, “they don’t grow back.”
Hennies’ score definitively splits the two ensembles, which are separated on the page. “Yarn/Wire work as a unit—they’re always doing the same things at the same time, often in actual unison. And Mivos Quartet are playing mostly pitched, harmonically-based material.”
Going beyond
Hennies’ music is in no rush. While Borrowed Light lasts around seventy minutes, she wasn’t aiming to write a piece of epic scope. “It is that length,” she says, “because of the material I wrote—that’s the amount of time it took to work through the material.”
For many years, Hennies has wanted to explore more extreme durational work. She is an avowed fan of the three-and-a-half-hour works that Jean Claude Eloy made with Michael Ranta. “If I had to pick one thing to hear for eternity, that might be it.”
Hennies is now working with bass player Tristan Kasten-Krause. “When he and I started playing together, we were effortlessly generating material that could go for a long time and still feel exciting.”
She points to the three-hour-long documentary, Into Great Silence. In 1984, director Philip Gröning requested permission to film inside a silent community of monks in France. They asked for time to consider the request, then after sixteen years they granted Gröning’s request.
The documentary is one of Hennies most cherished movie-going experiences. “I was totally absorbed into the world of this thing.” She is eager to create these experiences in her own work. “Something that really goes beyond the concert experience.”