Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause

At 8pm and 9pm on both Thursday, October 19th & Friday, October 20th ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary with two evenings featuring work from influential composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies. Each presentation will feature a showing of Hennies' short film Passing plus the premiere of a new collaborative work with bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause. 

Between Friday, Oct 13th and Saturday, Nov 4th, ISSUE invites audiences to experience numerous programs including new commissions and restaging of programs specifically designed for a limited capacity environment of 74 people. The program includes Hennies’ film Passing, which was originally presented as part of ISSUE’s 2020 Artist Fund Benefit, a critical fundraising initiative that enabled ongoing commissions through the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Hennies, who is a member of ISSUE’s Artistic Advisory Council, has an important history with the organization where in 2017 she debuted her monumental piece "Contralto", a one-hour work for video, strings, and percussion that exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary. The piece featured a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes a variety of conventional and "non-musical" approaches to sound-making. At ISSUE, Hennies also participated in the Queer Trash (2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship) symposium, an auspicious meeting of some very bright and very queer minds, that showcased the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life. At the event, Hennies performed a solo rendition of Fleas (2017), a composition made entirely from objects found at thrift stores and flea markets including a dozen small bells and a bass drum someone had converted into a lamp with Lou Reed’s face painted on it before throwing it out. Fleas was again presented in 2019, this time with an ensemble, as part of Nate Wooley’s FOR/WITH festival organized by performer, composer, and 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley. The festival, which ran at ISSUE 2017-2019, simultaneously premiered distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of commissioned composers. In 2019, Wooley presented the world premiere of Monologue for solo trumpet by Hennies, her first-ever piece for trumpet, in which she instructed Wooley to take the tubing and valves as instruments in themselves to be activated, or not, by the player’s breath. The 2019 performance of Fleas was the closing event aligned with Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, an exhibition of mixed media work from ISSUE’s late founder Suzanne Fiol, marking 10 years since her passing. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with Suzanne’s daughter, Sarah Fiol. 

Notes from Sarah Hennies on the duo with Tristan Kasten-Krause:

I am a great admirer of two works from the early 1980s by French composer Jean-Claude Eloy made in collaboration with American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta, “Yo-In” and “Anahata.” These works each last three and a half hours and move at an almost impossibly slow pace, and yet fully engage the listener at every moment. I have been pushing my practice towards increasingly extreme durations over the last decade and have found in duo partner Tristan Kasten-Krause’s rich, virtuosic and beautifully simple explorations of the double bass a great potential for a multi-hour work. We recently spent a week together in rural New Hampshire generating material, and for our performance at ISSUE Project Room we present to you the opening sections of this in-progress work.

Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY 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 ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has worked with a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, ensemble 0, Judith Hamann, R. Andrew Lee, The Living Earth Show, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire. Her groundbreaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.

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 the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund. As a scholar and performer she is engaged with ongoing research about the percussion music of Iannis Xenakis and a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

Tristan Kasten-Krause is a bassist and composer living in Brooklyn, New York who’s work enlarges the minutiae of close tones and subtle gestures. As a bassist he has been credited with lending his “low-end authority to vital New York institutions” (the New Yorker) and praised for his “heavenly” (the Guardian) original compositions. His work exploring duration and expanded time has led to multiple sets on the Hudson Basilica’s 24-Hour Drone festival, performances of extended, endurance-based works with extreme metal band Scarcity, and the premiere of a marathon 6-hour opera (2023’s Stranger Love) for the LA Phil. Over the last decade Tristan has worked with adventurous and experimental artists such as Alvin Lucier, LEYA, Denardo Coleman, David First, Man Forever and Henry Threadgil. He has served as bassist in contemporary chamber ensembles including Argento New Music, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink, Ensemble Signal and Contemporaneous. Tristan’s debut album of original compositions, 2021’s Potential Landscapes, features performances by soloists Lisel, Matt Evans and members of the Glenn Branca Ensemble and Cloud Nothings that have been elongated, warped and extended to create “beautiful, unearthly soundscapes” (WNYC). His most recent album of collaborative compositions, Images of One with violist Jessica Pavone, was released February 17th on Relative Pitch Records.