Ten Years Alive: Sarah Hennies — The Blue Hour

Sarah Hennies has long been celebrated for her ability to transform the simplest musical materials into profound listening experiences. Demanding a deep connection between the two performers, The Blue Hour pairs Hennies’ distinctive focus on repetition with an exploration of scales and melodies new to her work – their ‘meaning’ in this case revealing itself to her only as the piece developed.

For Hennies, repetition is never only a musical device. As she writes, “my work for the past nearly 20 years has been based primarily on repetition and often exploring the ways in which repetition affects my life in other, non-musical ways.” In The Blue Hour, those repetitions take on the qualities of her recurring dreams: vivid and often unsettling states of being chased, unable to reach a destination, or caught in cycles that never resolve. The music too feels “unfulfilled, never reaching a resolution or destination,” drawing the listener into a fragile, suspended terrain.

Spanning ninety minutes, the work also reflects Hennies’ interest in how extended duration alters perception. Beyond seventy minutes, she explains, performance itself “somehow becomes more casual and ‘normal,’ but also reaches a new kind of focus that can only be achieved over such long durations.” In this dreamlike space, where sound and time blur, Sarah Saviet and Joseph Houston bring Hennies’ vision into being with patience, empathy and quiet intensity.

The Blue Hour is both intimate and expansive: a rare chance to experience music that transforms repetition, memory and dream into a profound listening encounter.

Saviet/Houston Duo:

Sarah Saviet, violin

Joseph Houston, piano

Commissioned by Saviet/Houston Duo with support from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, SWR, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.