In an engrossing 87-minute piece in which cello and percussion circle each other through passages of sweetness and strife, the American composer explores the daily experience of intimacy.
Love can be overpowering. That’s the side of it we most frequently hear in song—less so the slow process of building trust, or the gentle practice of persistent gratitude. Grand statements supersede the steady work of maintenance, with its more intricate drama. Percussionist Sarah Hennies offers a different perspective on The Reinvention of Romance, a new composition for cello and percussion that elegantly represents the give and take of two individuals in a relationship. The players cyclically find each other and drift apart over the course of the piece’s 87 minutes, moving through passages of sweetness, awkwardness, and unity.
Hennies’ music is intimate, immersive, and often unusually empathetic. One of her most impactful works, Contralto, features trans women speaking and singing in lower registers. It is a moving account of dysphoria, making connections between sound and experiences of gender and self. Often Hennies’ recordings feature instruments and other sound sources captured at extremely close range, placing the listener next to or inside of them in the sonic landscape. The Reinvention of Romance does this to powerful effect; you can hear the granularity of the bow on cello strings, the clarity of a mallet hitting the xylophone. The crispness of the recording has the effect of personifying the instrumental parts, turning them into characters in Hennies’ carefully plotted drama.
Listening to The Reinvention of Romance requires a great amount of patience. Its narrative arc is slow to unfold; the tonal palette is limited to plucked or bowed cello, rounded mallet tones, the screech of bowed metal, and a smattering of percussive clatter. The musicians trade off playing drones and pulses across a series of repetitive patterns, each lasting between 15 to 20 minutes, separated by stretches of silence. At times metallic percussive tones dance nimbly around stretches of grinding cello, and at others the thrum of sporadic low-end cello pizzicato punctuates the biting ring of horse hair on steel. Some configurations cause strife, yet even in the piece’s most disorienting moments, the instruments seem to be closely attuned to one another, playful and mimetic.
Seeing the contours of an intimate relationship in the way these unadorned sounds push and pull against each other requires an imaginative leap, and a fair amount of trust in the composer, but Hennies has a talent for making the abstract approachable. Once the romantic frame is in place, it becomes easy to see the core tenets of the piece—patience, the inexorable meshing of difficulty and beauty, the power of circumstance and change—as commentary on the daily experience of intimacy. Hennies utilizes space and silence to conjure a sense of intensity; it’s as if the two voices are drawn together instinctively, returning to one another again and again after periods of separation, searching for common ground. She draws the ear to the dynamic between the two players by emphasizing minute differences in tone. When those two voices are the only sonic elements for an hour and a half, each change in how they relate to one another becomes monumental.
In the final 15 minutes of the composition, the cello and mallet percussion finally meet, ringing out simultaneous long tones. They are not in unison, however, or even in consonant harmony, and just as the passage seems to reach a climax, they begin to fade very slowly. There is no satisfying ending, and no real resolution. As the final, lonely silence sets in after the piece’s conclusion, we’re left with the poignancy of the struggle to find one another and the inherent value in that journey.
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