The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
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Originally published on National Sawdust Log, Nov. 29, 2017
Even for an artist as versatile and unpredictable as Sarah Hennies—a percussionist, improviser, and composer originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and now based in Ithaca, New York—her newest work represents a substantial achievement. Contralto, an hour-long work for vocalists on video with strings and percussion (either live or recorded), is named for the musical term that denotes the lowest female voice type. The principal source material is provided by a cast of trans women, filmed by first-time director Hennies as they speak, sing, and perform vocal exercises designed to help trans women develop a more conventionally female vocal sound.
Hennies is best known to new-music cognoscenti as a solo artist and for her work alongside fellow percussionists Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart in the protean percussion trio Meridian. In indie-rock circles, she's the former drummer for Austin combo The Weird Weeds, and the current time keeper for Philadelphia slowcore outfit Obody. For Contralto, which will be presented its world premiere on Nov. 30 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Hennies has assembled a stellar band of old friends and regular collaborators: Meridian bandmates Feeney and Stuart, violinist Erik Carlson, violist Wendy Richman, cellist T.J. Borden, bassist James Ilgenfritz, and percussionist Ashley Tini.
Speaking by telephone from her home in Ithaca, Hennies talked about the personal and stylistic discoveries that led her to imagine and assemble Contralto, as well as the circuitous creative path that gave her the tools and determination to get it done.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: To judge by the evidence I've seen thus far—a video trailer, a descriptive essay, and some sections of the score—Contralto is unlike anything you created before it. So let's get rolling with the most basic question: How did you come to conceive this piece?
SARAH HENNIES: It started a few different ways. Around three or four years ago, when I was first dealing with any kind of trans stuff and I didn’t know anything, this friend of mine had this really squeaky voice: super, super high. The first time we hung out, I don’t even remember how it came up, but she was like, “Oh, I can still do my old voice.” She started talking in this really profoundly deep, low voice, and I thought it was so startling. So when I started to think about making a piece that was about voices, at first I wanted to try to get a bunch of trans women to expose their quote-unquote “natural” voices. And the more I thought about that, the more wrong it felt for a lot of reasons… not that interesting, and not something that I wanted to do, because I felt like it would sensationalize physical things and focus on body stuff instead of actual identity.
And then, there’s a course that is offered at Ithaca College for free that is basically like trans voice training. They say it’s for trans people, but really only women take it, because what I learned years ago was that when a trans man transitions, his voice changes, because when you take testosterone, it causes your vocal chords to thicken, and your voice drops and gets more profound. And that does not go the other way. So I started to think of this as: when you think about trans women’s place in the world, you can change all of these things and go to all of this effort to do what’s called “passing,” and kind of assimilate into society, but there’s this one thing that you just can’t fix… or I wouldn’t use the word “fix”…
Alter?
Right. There’s this one pesky thing that none of us can really deal with. And what I found from the class… one of the women in the piece—the older woman in the pink sweater, her name is Dreia [Spies]—when we were filming her part, we talked about the class, because I met her there. She was asking me to explain the piece a little bit. I was like, well, I think the class is asking people to do something that is basically impossible. This is someone who’s taken the class repeatedly, and she was like, yeah, I think that’s basically true.
The class is designed to help you essentially pass, vocally?
Right, but what I found is that it does not… you know, it depends on the person. A different person, who I really wanted to be in the film, but she maybe just decided she didn’t want to, has one of the deepest speaking voices I’ve ever heard. I feel for her, because that’s really hard. But also, I started to think that the piece I needed to make was not that we all need to change our voices so that we can fit into society better, but that people need to change their definition of what they think a woman sounds like. This idea that it was trying to do something impossible is something that I was already doing in my music a lot. And from taking this class, there’s all of these exercises that started to remind me of pieces that I had already made before I ever thought about this class. [Laughs]
Oh, now that’s really curious and interesting.
The music in the trailer for the film, the kind of droney humming and sine-wave music, I actually made about six years ago. It was a test for a vocal piece that I never wrote, for a concert that a group I was in was doing in Austin, the Austin New Music Co-Op. We did a concert with a vocal group called Convergence…
A contemporary-classical kind of situation?
Right, right. The thing that ended up in Contralto I ended up releasing on a tape, just as its own piece. It’s a recording of myself multi-tracked four times, where all I’m doing is humming across my vocal range, so that one part is as low as I can possibly hum and one part is as high as I can hum. The highest part is kind of squeaky, it’s the only part that kind of wavers, and you can tell it was a little bit difficult. I wasn’t thinking about this in relation to trans- anything when I made the piece; I just made it. And there’s a lot of stuff like this where I can look back to 10, 20 years ago and be like: oh, that’s why I was thinking about this, and that’s why I was doing this.
Which tape includes the vocal piece?
It was called Casts. It’s on Astral Spirits. That tape ended up being sort of an odds-and-ends collection, just four pieces for something-plus-sine waves. There was one where I’m repeating a word over and over again, one for hi-hat, and one for vibraphone, and then this voice thing.
It’s interesting, [Contralto] is a convergence of all these things that I’ve been interested in, and they’re all just sort of happening at the same time. But it’s not explicit… I didn’t think of it as trying to do that. It just kind of happened on its own. I started to see that this was a link between all of these different things that I was doing. So that’s why I initially wanted to make the piece.
Continue reading "Sarah Hennies: The Art of Exposing Hidden Possibilities." »
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The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
[link]
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The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
[link]
[link]
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The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
[link]
| |
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The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the images to enlarge them, or hit the links to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
[link]
[link]
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The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, replaced with a mix of album reviews and listings for events taking place online—some live, others pre-recorded. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
[link]
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The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, and album reviews linger. But with a marked uptick lately in the number of live online events planned and announced well in advance, the possibility of "events listings" has resumed. For the May 4 issue, I've written about two streaming events: a week-long replay of Angel's Bone, the arresting opera by Du Yun and Royce Vavrek, streamed as "Opera of the Week" on the Beth Morrison Projects website; and the first-ever wholly online Bang on a Can Marathon. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
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Change is upon us once again, and with it a fresh start for Night After Night—elsewhere. As of Thursday, April 23, the primary focus of my work has shifted over to a newly launched Substack newsletter, also called Night After Night. That title has provided my online identity – my "brand" – for more than two decades; no reason I would change that now.
From the new site, my explanatory preamble:
As in all of my previous ventures – from blogging and freelancing through stints with Time Out New York, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and National Sawdust Log – I’ll be covering music in its infinite richness and variety, emphasizing what’s happening here and now. I’ll interview composers and performers about their newest projects, as well as bigger, broader ideas. I’ll review current recordings… and concerts, too, when the opportunity returns. I’ll direct your attention toward pertinent news and reviews published elsewhere, too.
I plan to post twice a week, and some posts will be available to everyone. But paying subscribers will have access to premium content now in planning stages… stay tuned.
Following that preamble, the first real entry – a biographical prelude, an extensive interview with Quince Ensemble and composer David Lang, and a postlude to my New York Times obituary of Richard Teitelbaum – was sent out on April 23. You can read it now, for free.
You'll notice that subscriptions are available, and at some point soon I'll start to roll out features meant exclusively for those who subscribe. That said, I completely recognize that this is a difficult time, and I intend to keep a substantial portion of my work freely accessible to all.
As for this long-serving Typepad blog, well, it's staying right where it is, and shifting to serve, even more than it does already, as an archive for past writings—both my original posts and the work I make for others. The playlists will stay here, too, and I'll try to be diligent about them.
I'll continue to add more past content when I find time (ha!). But for now, the Substack newsletter is where I'll be moving forward.
I hope that you'll join me…
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The Goings On About Town section in The New Yorker remains suspended indefinitely in its conventional format, and album reviews linger. But with a marked uptick lately in the number of live online events planned and announced well in advance, the possibility of "events listings" has resumed. For the April 27 issue, I've written up a brief preview of subtracTTTTTTTTT, a new web-native opera by the music-theater performance-art troupe thingNY, which treats glitch, echo, connection issues, and so on not as a bug, but as a feature. (Click on the image to enlarge it, or hit the link to read the text on the New Yorker website.)
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You can watch the world premiere performance on Friday evening, April 24 at 6pm (EDT), on the thingNY website. It will repeat in the same place at the same time on Saturday and Sunday.
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