Saviet/Houston Duo: Hennies

Program Notes

Sarah Hennies
The Blue Hour (2025)

My work for the past nearly twenty years has been based primarily on repetition, often exploring the ways in which repetition affects my life in non-musical ways. One such repetition is that of recurring dreams in which the content of the dreams changes, but the themes are often similar: being chased, pursued for a crime I did not commit, being unable to reach a destination, and so forth. As I began writing this piece for Sarah Saviet and Joe Houston, I had no plan or concept in mind, but as the piece went on, I realized that much of the music I had written without any sort of plan or concept was somehow related to those types of dreams. I came to the work with the idea of exploring scales and melodies because these don’t appear in my music, and I wanted to try something new. I assumed their ‘meaning’ would later be revealed to me, which turned out to be the case. There are, of course, many kinds of repetition. Listening to a song I love over and over is comforting. The unwanted recurrence of a traumatic memory from which I cannot be fully freed, or the drudgery of a day job I was once unable to leave for much of my adult life, is not. In the case of this new work, I found the repetitions I was writing to feel somehow unfulfilled, never reaching a resolution or destination, which is the subject of dozens of dreams I’ve had in my life. I wanted to work at this long durational scale because I’ve found from my earlier piece, Reinvention of Romance (2018), that something happens to my consciousness onstage when I go beyond seventy minutes or so of focused playing. It somehow becomes more casual and ‘normal’ for me, but also reaches a new kind of focus that can only be achieved over such long durations. It is here I also think of my recurring dreams which are so frequent and span such a long period of time. Although these dreams are often tense and occasionally upsetting, their occurrence is now commonplace and expected for me—always taking place early in the morning, just before I wake up—and often extremely vivid and, sometimes, lucid so that I am consciously aware that I am dreaming while experiencing the dream. David Lynch once said that what happens in your dreams is no less real than anything else in your waking life; it is all consciousness, but one’s reality is simply experienced differently in dreams than when awake. It’s not my goal necessarily to analyze my dreams as a psychologist might, but to take the material qualities of my dreams and place them into this new context as music, to experience them in a different way and outside of myself.