093228084426

Motor Tapes

Sarah Hennies

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Format: 2CD

Cat No: NW80844

Release Date:  28 June 2024

Label:  New World

Packaging Type:  Digipak

No of Units:  2

Barcode:  093228084426

Genres:  Classical  Contemporary Classical  

  • Description

    "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 ..."

  • Tracklisting

      Disc 1

      Side 1

      • 1. Zeitgebers (2021)
      • 2. Clock Dies (2021)

      Disc 2

      • 1. Motor Tapes (2023)