ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Ithaca, NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of solo and chamber works, but is also active in improvisation, film, performance art, and dance. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). She is a receipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She also performs regularly with Meridian (with Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart), performance/sound artist Jason Zeh, and is a founding member of the Queer Percussion Research Group.
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE PIECE: Fleas
“Fleas” is a work for solo vibraphone with an ensemble of bell ringers who are scattered around the performance space. The piece is the culmination of several years of research and performance on the vibraphone, exposing an instrument usually relegated to harmonic and melodic playing as a resonant body with highly anomalous acoustic and psychoacoustic properties. “Fleas” functions both a tour de force performance piece and a demonstration of the techniques and discoveries that use the vibraphone to its fullest potential.