Sarah Hennies

Last updated
Sarah Hennies
Born1979 (age 4546)
Louisville, Kentucky
Origin Ithaca, New York
Genres
Instruments
Years active1993–present
Labels
Website https://www.sarah-hennies.com/

Sarah Hennies (born 1979) is an American composer and percussionist. She is known for her work as an acoustic group composer. She also contributes to improvisation, film, and performance art. [1] She is currently a visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College.

Contents

Life and career

Hennies was born in 1979, in Louisville, Kentucky. She began playing drums when she was nine years old, and as a teenager she started playing drums with local college punk rock bands. [2] She attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she studied under Stuart Saunders Smith, Herbert Brün, and William Moersch. [3] [4] She then received a master's degree from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied under Steven Schick. [4] Later, she moved to Ithaca, New York. [5] [6] [7]

After her graduation from UC San Diego, Hennies relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2003, and started collaborating with the guitarist Aaron Russell in the group Weird Weeds. In 2013, she founded her own record label, Weighter Recordings. Some of the musicians and ensembles with whom she has collaborated as a composer include Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, R. Andrew Lee, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire. She is also a member of the music trio Meridian. [5] [8] [6] [9]

Hennies went through a gender transition in 2015 and much of her artwork reflects some aspects of her experience as a transgender woman. [5] Her audio-visual work Contralto was premiered in 2017, featuring transfeminine identity issues [5] [10] [11] and was nominated for the Queer|Art Prize in 2019. [12]

Awards

Hennies is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts (2016), the Grants to Artists Award (2019) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts., [13] and a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship. [14] In 2022, she was one of 14 American composers to receive a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. [15]

Works

Singles, extended plays and albums

TitleDetails
Flourish
  • Released: 2013
  • Label: Consumer Waste
  • Format: CD
Clots
  • Released: 2014
  • Label: Weighter Recordings
  • Format: DVD
Work
  • Released: 2014
  • Label: Quakebasket
  • Format: CD
Everything Else [16]
  • Released: 2016
  • Label: No Rent Records
  • Format: Cassette
Gather & Release [17]
  • Released: 2016
  • Label: Category of manifestation
  • Format: CD
Reservoir 1: Preservation (with Philip Bush & Meridian) [9]
  • Released: 2018
  • Label: Black Truffle
  • Formats: CD
The Reinvention of Romance [18]
Extra Time
  • Released: 2020
  • Label: Hasana Editions
  • Formats: CD
Spectral Malsconcities (with Bearthoven & Bent Duo)
Bodies of Water
Motor Tapes

Films

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Annie Gosfield</span> American classical composer

Annie Gosfield is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments. She won a 2012 Berlin Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cherríe Moraga</span> American writer and activist (born 1952)

Cherríe Moraga is an influential Chicana feminist writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. A prominent figure in Chicana literature and feminist theory, Moraga's work explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class, with particular emphasis on the experiences of Chicana and Indigenous women. She currently serves as Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tania León</span> Cuban-American composer and conductor

Tania León is a Cuban-born American composer of both large scale and chamber works. She is also renowned as a conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne LeBaron</span> American post-modern composer, writer, and academic

Alice Anne LeBaron is an American composer, harpist, academic, and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Kolb</span> American composer (1938–2024)

Barbara Kolb was an American composer and educator, the first woman to win the Rome Prize in musical composition. Her music features sound masses of colorful textures, impressionistic sounds and atonal vocabulary, with influences from literary and visual arts. She taught at the Third Street Music School Settlement, Rhode Island College and Eastman School of Music.

Chet Pancake is an American filmmaker and musician. He is a co-founder of the Red Room Collective, the High Zero Foundation, the Charm City Kitty Club and the Transmodern Festival. He is currently an assistant professor in the Film and Media Arts Program at Temple University and director of the Black Oak House Gallery. His documentary film Black Diamonds (2006), an examination of mountaintop removal mining, has received a number of awards.

Dalit Hadass Warshaw is a New York-based composer, pianist, and thereminist. Previously on the composition and music theory faculty of Boston Conservatory, she currently serves on the composition faculty at Juilliard and CUNY-Brooklyn College. Her works have been performed by dozens of orchestral ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic Orchestras, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Houston Symphony, the Y Chamber Orchestra, the Colorado Symphony and the Albany Symphony Orchestra. In April 2006, her piece After the Victory for orchestra and chorus, was premiered by the Grand Rapids Symphony and the North American Choral Company. Her first recording, entitled "Invocations" was released by Albany Records in 2011. Her first piano concerto, Conjuring Tristan, was commissioned by the Grand Rapids Symphony in 2014. The work was inspired by Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, as well as by Thomas Mann's novella Tristan. The piece received its world premiere in January 2015, with Warshaw as the soloist.

W. Claude Baker Jr. is an American composer of contemporary classical music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arts Foundation of New Zealand</span> Arts organisation in New Zealand

The Arts Foundation of New Zealand Te Tumu Toi is a New Zealand arts organisation that supports artistic excellence and facilitates private philanthropy through raising funds for the arts and allocating it to New Zealand artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Schwendinger</span> Mexican composer

Laura Elise Schwendinger was the first composer to win the American Academy in Berlin's Berlin Prize.

Eric Guinivan is a composer, percussionist, founding member of the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, and was principal timpanist of the YMF Debut Orchestra. He has received commissions from Chamber Music America, the Fromm Foundation, New York Youth Symphony, the International Horn Society, Lake Union Civic Orchestra, the Firebird Ensemble, Staunton Music Festival, the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, and the Society of Composers, Inc., among others. His output includes works for orchestra, wind ensemble, percussion, brass band, chamber orchestra, film, and a wide variety of chamber ensembles and solo instruments. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Composition at James Madison University, and was previously a graduate teaching fellow at the University of Southern California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcos Balter</span> Brazilian contemporary classical composer

Marcos Balter is a Brazilian contemporary classical music composer and the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Du Yun</span> American classical composer

Du Yun is a Chinese-born American composer, performer, vocalist and performance artist. She won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera Angel's Bone, with libretto by Royce Vavrek. She was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Du Yun was named as one of the 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2018, and received a 2019 Grammy nomination in the category of Best Classical Contemporary Composition for her work Air Glow. In its decade review, UK's Classic FM listed Du Yun's winning of the Pulitzer as No. 6 in "10 ways the 2010s changed classical music forever." Rolling Stone Italia named her as one of the women composers who defined the 2010s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tomeka Reid</span> American jazz musician (born 1977)

Tomeka Reid is an American composer, improviser, cellist, curator, and teacher.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Berlier</span> American artist

Terry Berlier is an artist and sculptor whose work addresses themes of the environment and queer practice. Her work incorporates kinetic and sound based media to address these themes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothy Hindman</span> American composer and music educator (born 1966)

Dorothy Hindman is an American composer and music educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leilehua Lanzilotti</span> Kanaka Maoli composer, performer and scholar of contemporary classical music

Leilehua Lanzilotti née Anne Victoria Leilehua Lanzilotti, is a Kanaka Maoli composer, multimedia artist, curator, and scholar of contemporary classical music.

Claire Olivia Edwardes is an Australian classical percussionist, artistic director, composer and advocate for change in the classical music sector. Edwardes is the co-founder and artistic director of Ensemble Offspring, roles she shared with composer Damien Ricketson until his retirement from the group in 2015. In 2016, she won two APRA Art Music Awards, with one going to Ensemble Offspring for "sustained services to Australian music for 20 years", and Edwardes receiving an individual award "for performance, advocacy and artistic leadership”. She is the only Australian to have won the Luminary Art Music Award for an Individual 3 times. In 2019, Edwardes created and performed the music and dance theatre work RECITAL with dancer Richard Cilli and director Gideon Obarzanek for Dance Massive 2019. Edwardes composed the music and sound design for RECITAL in collaboration with Paul Mac. In 2011 and 2017, Edwardes was a member of the Australian World Orchestra. In 2015-216, Edwardes was the Vice President of the New Music Network. Edwardes has appeared on television as an occasional host of Play School, and as a panelist on Spicks and Specks. In 2021, Edwardes created The Australian Marimba Composition Kit and a comprehensive list of percussion works by female composers. Additionally, Edwardes has composed numerous works for solo waterphone. She is currently on staff as a percussion teacher at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Kathryn Alexander is a Guggenheim Award-winning American composer and a professor of composition at Yale University.

Mark Campbell is a New York-based librettist and lyricist whose operas have received both a Pulitzer Prize in Music and a GRAMMY Award. Mark began writing for the stage as a musical theatre lyricist, but turned to libretto-writing after he premiered Volpone, his first full-length opera in 2004 at Wolf Trap Opera Company.

References

  1. Andor Brodeur, Michael (January 22, 2022). "22 for '22: Composers and performers to watch this year". The Washington Post.
  2. "Queer Percussion". Sound American. Retrieved 2023-04-14.
  3. "Tone Glow 032.2: Sarah Hennies". 22 September 2020.
  4. 1 2 "Edition manifold | nicholas hennies". Archived from the original on 2002-09-03.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Smith, Steve (October 15, 2020). "Sharing an Intimate Musical Vision". The New York Times.
  6. 1 2 Storring, Nick. "Sarah Hennies, Linguist in the Land of Noises". MusicWorks Magazine. Retrieved 4 June 2022.
  7. Saavedra, Chloe. "Composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies doesn't think you should assume things are simple". Tom Tom Magazine . Retrieved 5 June 2022.
  8. "Listen to Bent Duo featuring Sarah Hennies". The Wire . No. May 2018.
  9. 1 2 Cardew, Ben (September 30, 2019). "Reservoir 1: Preservation". Pitchfork.
  10. 1 2 Dixon Evans, Julia (March 23, 2021). "Sarah Hennies' 'Contralto' Lets Women's Voices Be". kpbs.
  11. Tynes, Jayde (May 25, 2018). "Film exploring transgender women's voices makes debut in Halifax". CBC News.
  12. "2019 RECENT WORK FINALISTS". Queer-Art. Retrieved 2 June 2022.
  13. Selvin, Claire (January 23, 2019). "Foundation for Contemporary Arts Names 2019 Grants to Artists, Including Tania Bruguera, Trisha Donnelly". ART news.
  14. "United States Artists announces 2024 USA Fellows". Philanthropy News Digest. January 24, 2024.
  15. "The Fromm Music Foundation Announces 2022 Commission Recipients, Prize Winners, and Project Grant Recipients". frommfoundation.fas.harvard.edu. 14 March 2023. Retrieved 2023-04-14.
  16. Thomas, Nathan. "Sarah Hennies – Everything Else". Fluid Radio. Retrieved 6 June 2022.
  17. Storring, Nick. "Sarah Hennies. Gather & Release". MusicWorks. Retrieved 6 June 2022.
  18. Williger, Jonathan (September 25, 2020). "The Reinvention of Romance- Sarah Hennies". Pitchfork.
  19. "Sarah Hennies: Getting at the Heart of a Sound". NewMusic. Retrieved 6 June 2022.