Catching Up: Sarah Hennies, Georgia Denham

Saturday 27 July 2024

I’ve been listening to the latest batch of releases from Kory Reeder’s Sawyer Editions label. Bodies of Water presents two instrumental trios by Sarah Hennies which give further insight into her unusual way of mixing up expressive subjectivity with rigorous formality. The two pieces here employ both of these tendencies at once to exploit the tension between the emotive and the impassive. Lake for violin, percussion and piano proceeds in short sections of repeating units with off-kilter melodic cells that comply with a tendency to settle into new forms of stasis, while the longer Abscission for violin, cello and guitar extends and propagates small amounts of material in which all momentum would appear to be exhausted. In both works, the unassuming material is reiterated and varied in ways that give the appearance of following a strict process, yet the only logic that appears to be at work here is that of intuitively feeling a way through what has already been given. As such, each piece develops through neither building up nor breaking down, but always suggesting that either outcome may be possible if they were not averted by Hennies’ compositional strategies. Each piece taps into a selection of musical ideas from the past fifty years to create a synthesis reminiscent of all of them without being reducible to one specific reference. The musicians (violinist Ilana Waniuk and Duo Refracta, Arcana New Music Ensemble) are steadfast but refuse to be misled into pursuing soulless precision, enhancing the experience of music that alternately takes and gives.

Georgia Denham is new to me. Her collection of chamber pieces with love is a modest thirty-nine minutes long, which along with the lowercase titles seems to match the deliberately understated nature of her music. No audible processes or method here: emotion is at the forefront, with five pieces that are expressive and vulnerable to interpretations and explanations. Denham’s way of conveying emotion is unusual, manifesting as subdued melodic lines and dynamics, in many cases with melody apparent more through inference of voice leading and texture, with the line itself rendered almost flat. Where this method is more typically expected as an evocation of quiescence, Denham manages to present it as though it were constraining an excess of emotion into a coherent form. The piano quintet subject of breathing briefly surges, but only so far, for the ensemble to unite in a profound sonority that needs no lyrical outpouring laid on top of it. The most overt lyricism comes in the pair of violin-viola duets, if bells could sing and if bells could weep, yet even in the former a gentle melancholy reins in exuberance, while in the latter it precludes despair. (To be clear, I instinctively approve of this restraint as it dignifies emotion with classical timelessness.) The final work, to gwen, with love is for piano and string trio and the only work here that barely exceeds ten minutes’ duration. It feels the most complete work here, in the way that it takes up a melodic fragment for contemplation, essaying possible continuations before breaking off and starting over. Somehow Denham makes this feel natural and tender, without seeming timid. It also owes a lot to the sensitive performances from the various ensembles here (the pieces were recorded in the UK and Canada), who know how to apply melancholy in all its shades.