Sarah Hennies: Motor Tapes

It feels like I'm composing a person. A vivid, rich picture of a life, of a brain. --Sarah Hennies. Sarah Hennies (b. 1979) is a composer and percussionist 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.

The booklet for this, her second New World recording, features an extensive and wide-ranging conversation with the composer, wherein Hennies discusses her compositional practice and how these three pieces--all in some way related to brain activity, specifically mood disorders and circadian rhythm--represent an important step in the evolutionof her work.

"These works do signal a transformation. Up until Clock Dies, for instance, every piece I had written involved a stopwatch. But Talea Ensemble wanted a work with a conductor, and so Clock Dies was the first piece I made where I thought, "Let's see if I can make chamber music." So Clock Dies is through-composed; of course there's lots of repetition, there's a form with sections and climaxes--things happen. There's a more traditional kind of contrast in Clock Dies and really in all three of these pieces. But Clock Dies specifically was the first piece where I challenged myself in a practical way to see if I could make "normal" music.

Motor Tapes is . well, it came about in a similarly practical way, where because of when the commission [from Ensemble Dedalus] came and where it was being played, I had a long time to make it. And I really, really wanted to challenge myself to make something with a lot of detail, to work harder on something than I had in the past. There's a Word-doc outline of Motor Tapes that's pages long because it got so complicated. And finishing the last 20% was so challenging; it had become so unwieldy that I had to make a to-do list of tasks because I couldn't view it as a totality anymore. And now that it's done and I can see it as a whole, there's a very clear order of events, a script, it follows a very birth-to-death trajectory ."

Disc 1
1: Zeitgebers
2: Clock Dies

Disc 2
1: Motor Tapes

Composer: Sarah Hennies

Conductor: James Baker

Number of Discs: 2

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