SARAH HENNIES : “MOTOR TAPES”
WEST COAST PREMIERE | ECHOI ENSEMBLE, PERFORMERS
Sunday, November 24, 2024 | 8 PM
2220 Arts and Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
2220 Arts and Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
TICKETS:
PROGRAM:
John CAGE - IN A LANDSCAPE (1948) [8']
Sarah HENNIES – MOTOR TAPES (2023) [56']
Vicki RAY, piano (Cage)
ECHOI (Hennies):
Andrew McINTOSH, violin
Wendy RICHMAN, viola
Niall FERGUSON, cello
Matt KLINE, double bass
Michael MATSUNO, flute
Brian WALSH, clarinet
M.A. TIESENGA, saxophone
Nev WENDELL, trumpet
Mason MOY, trombone
emma denney, guitar
Richard AN, piano
Jonathan HEPFER, percussion
Jonathan HEPFER, artistic director
Joshua RUBIN, technical consultation
This concert is underwritten by a generous gift from Margaret Morgan & Wesley Phoa
PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Taking its name from neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás’s characterization of the human brain as containing innumerable “tape loops” that run continuously within the mind, Motor Tapes is composed of densely overlapping patterns of sound, with musicians representing synapses that both fire independently and work together to achieve complex activities. Llinás’s description of this phenomena is strikingly musical: “The activity in the basal ganglia is running all the time, playing motor patterns and snippets of motor patterns amongst and between themselves […] they seem to act as a continuous, random, motor pattern noise generator.” “I am interested in the motor tapes theory,” Hennies has said, “because it suggests that alongside lived experience there is a mysterious biological basis for our inclinations, talents and identities.”
COMPOSER BIO:
SARAH HENNIES:
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 queer & 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.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.
As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.
She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.
As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.