LE151

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Time:Spans (NYC), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Ensemble Dedalus, The Living Earth Show, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.

Katie Porter plays clarinet, bass clarinet, sings, writes songs and curates performances. She exists mainly in the experimental realm, but can sometimes be found elsewhere.

Madison Greenstone is a New York based clarinetist whose ‘beautiful and haunting’ playing ‘creeps noisily away from the void’ (Foxy Digitalis). They perform across a wide range of experimental music contexts as a soloist, improvisor, and chamber musician. Madison’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, pushes the limits of innate instrumental expressivities by treating the meeting of instrument and embodied technique as creative of a site of indeterminacy and generative instability. Their approach to the clarinet embraces and instigates chaotic timbral actions, difficult-to-reign sonorities, and the harmonically rich and noisy resonances that have a vivid inner life and movement. Their practice embraces responsive listening as a mediator between embodied technique and latent instrumental agency.


Artist notes:
Standing Water is a musical response to a large pond of frogs behind my house in Red Hook, NY (the small rural village in the Hudson Valley, not the neighborhood in Brooklyn). Every spring the peepers start their sparse chirping at night (similar to those that inspired Pauline Oliveros’s electronic work “Alien Bog”) but as the weather warms up the frogs erupt into a dense chorus of mating noises that plays on a loop for hours at a time outside my living room window. Similar to my older vibraphone piece Gather & Release” the guided improvisation in Standing Water is a way of interacting and existing with the frogs that makes no attempt to “blend” or integrate with their world and rather, perform music that is evocative of how alien it feels to be alone with a loud, noisy, promiscuous group of another species. The trio with Madison and Katie was formed for the purposes of playing Michael Ranta’s “Continuum II” but we wanted something else to play together and since we’re unaware of another piece for this instrumentation, we had to make it ourselves.

Madison Greenstone & Katie Porter: bass clarinet
Sarah Hennies: percussion and field recording

Recorded live on February 9, 2024 at Anderson Auditorium, SMFA at Tufts University, Boston, MA. Presented by Non-Event www.nonevent.org

Engineered and mixed by Matthew Azevedo
Field recording by Sarah Hennies in spring 2024, Red Hook, NY