Sarah Hennies: Fleas

Saturday, November 16th, ISSUE is pleased to present WITH, the second evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions and works by iconoclast composers Eva-Maria Houben, Sarah Hennies, Katherine Young, and Ryoko Akama. Now in its third year, the series celebrates the collaborative process between performer and composer, the spirit of spontaneity in contemporary music, and the ever-present search for the new.

Organized by performer, composer, and 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley, FOR/WITH simultaneously premieres distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of the series’ commissioned composers. The festival continues to subtly revolve around Wooley’s project to commission artists outside the sphere of “capital T” trumpet repertoire to write solo pieces that feature the trumpet player as a whole, rather than the capabilities of the trumpet as a machine.

The second evening of the series opens with the world premiere of Monologue for solo trumpet by Sarah Hennies, followed by von da nach da by Eva-Maria Houben performed by Sara Schoenbeck, Mariel Roberts, and Russell Greenberg. This year’s festival concludes with an ensemble performance of Sarah Hennies’s Fleas.

Her first-ever piece for trumpet, Sarah Hennies’s Monologue is a celebration of the trumpet as frustrating machinery, taking the tubing and valves as instruments in themselves activated, or not, by the player’s breath. In this sense, the work is a deconstruction of what it is to be a trumpet player, blowing into a machine in hopes of something meaningful coming out the other end.

The series closes with Sarah Hennies taking center stage herself to perform her piece Fleas (2017). The music here is made entirely from objects found at thrift stores and flea markets and will feature Greenberg, Roberts, Schoenbeck, and Wooley in a supporting role. In Hennies’s words, Fleas is “Not exactly music made from trash, but music made from objects of little monetary value that someone decided they didn’t want anymore. Objects usually tell you how to play them if you’ll allow it."

The 2019 FOR/WITH Festival performances are the closing events of Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, an exhibition of mixed media work from ISSUE’s late founder Suzanne Fiol. Organized in collaboration with Suzanne’s daughter, Sarah Fiol, the exhibition runs from October 4th until mid November, marking ten years since Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz issued a proclamation officially declaring November 15th “Suzanne Fiol Day in Brooklyn, USA." Suzanne brought artists from a wide array of disciplines together forming new trajectories and models for presenting experimental work, particularly through her commitment to emerging practices highlighted by ISSUE's Artists-in-Residence Program, of which Nate Wooley -- and many of the FOR/WITH 2019 artists -- have participated.

"Suzanne Fiol once told me that I should only make music that scared me. I tried to make that the parameter surrounding my time in residence at ISSUE in 2011; and, since then, I have found the greatest satisfaction in whatever I'm doing when it comes closest to that standard. Suzanne lives in my heart as a great hero and a caring friend; caring not only about me as a human, but about what, why, and how I presented my thoughts and ideas to the world. I know I'm only one person that had this experience with her. There are many others. And, for all of them I celebrate her." — Nate Wooley

Nate Wooley grew up in Clatskanie, Oregon. He works in contemporary classical, jazz, noise, and electronic music as an interpreter, improviser, and composer. While a large part of his work has consisted of solo improvisation and composition, he has collaborated with Anthony Braxton, Éliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood, Yoshi Wada, Christian Wolff, Wadada Leo Smith, and others. Mr. Wooley has performed as a soloist or commissioned composer at SWR Donaueschinger Musiktage, Musica Polonica Nova, Jazztopad Festival, Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, A L’ARME! Festival, music unlimited, and international jazz festivals. He has been an artist-in-residence at London’s Cafe OTO and Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room. He was a 2016 recipient of a Grants to Artists award in Music / Sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Nate Wooley is the editor of Sound American, an online journal intended to demystify contemporary experimental music with the intention of expanding and perpetuating a base audience for the radical and avant-garde. He is currently the curator of the Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM) and teaches at The New School for Social Research.

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), The OBEY Convention (Halifax), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven (NYC), Bent Duo (NYC), Cristian Alvear (Santiago), Claire Chase (NYC), R. Andrew Lee (Denver), LIMINAR (Mexico City), The Living Earth Show (San Francisco), The Thin Edge New Music Collective (Toronto), Two-Way Street (Knoxville), and Yarn/Wire (NYC). In 2017, she premiered her audio-visual work Contralto at ISSUE Project Room and has since presented the work over 20 times around the world to widespread critical acclaim. She is the recipient of 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 has received additional support from New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.