Sharing and Intimate Musical Vision
by Steve Smith / Oct. 2020
“One of the things that I’m drawn to is living with someone for a long time, being in love, and what that’s like after you’ve lived together for 10 years,” the composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies said recently. “It becomes, somehow, more banal and routine, but also more intimately bonded at the same time. So that’s the piece I wanted to write.”
Speaking by phone from Ithaca, N.Y., where she lives with her partner, the visual artist Mara Baldwin, and their young son, Ms. Hennies, 41, was explaining what had led her to compose “The Reinvention of Romance.” The duet for cello and percussion comprises some 90 minutes of spare, economical gestures, played not quite in sync. A recording of the 2018 piece by Two-Way Street, the duo that commissioned it, arrived recently on Astral Spirits. The arresting cover image, a photograph by Ms. Hennies, depicts a pink party balloon resting atop a compact bed of nails.
What Two-Way Street — the cellist Ashlee Booth and the percussionist Adam Lion, who are romantically involved — requested from Ms. Hennies was simply a very long piece. Embarking on what would become “The Reinvention of Romance,” Ms. Hennies experimented with the cello, notating ideas she found compelling and grouping them into concise cells. She then visited the duo at an artists retreat, and adopted a collaborative approach to complete the work.
What resulted was an extended sequence of simple figures arranged in succinct packets, each repeated at length until a timer prompts moving on to the next. Ms. Booth might bow a keening interval over and over without variation, paired with Mr. Lion’s similarly uninflected glockenspiel strokes; moments later, bowed metal shrieking at length threatens to obliterate the cello’s modest plucks and strums. Weaving together the kinds of fragmentary figurations with which Morton Feldman might have evoked twirling mobiles or intricate tapestries, Ms. Hennies instead evokes the slightly akimbo biorhythms of lives intimately conjoined.
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