Sarah Hennies

Artist Statement

I am an independent artist involved with every aspect of the creation, execution, and dissemination of my work. I compose immersive solo and chamber works that explore identity, intimacy, queerness, and transness by experimenting with timbre, repetition, and endurance. In many works, the repetition of seemingly banal material reveals unusual depth and variety within sounds and the spaces in which they are heard, provoking the audience to notice and ask questions about the peculiar world we inhabit. Informed equally by Western avant-garde composers and 25 years spent in indie/punk bands, my practice occupies a unique space that exists comfortably between the worlds of academia and "underground" music. My current work is focused on various neurological and music concepts with an interest in the type of brain activity that underlies creative thought, exemplified by my latest 2xCD "Motor Tapes" (New World Records).

Sarah Hennies: "Motor Tapes" (2022), world premiere performance at the 2023 Darmstadt Summer Course, Germany.

Bio

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York 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 chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. 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 was a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

www.sarah-hennies.com