The Music of Michael Ranta and Sarah Hennies
The Music of Michael Ranta and Sarah Hennies
Performed by Madison Greenstone (clarinets), Sarah Hennies (percussion), Katie Porter (clarinets)
Friday, February 9, 2024 at 8pm
SMFA at Tufts, Anderson Auditorium
230 The Fenway, Boston
$15 general admission / $10 members + students / FREE for SMFA and Tufts students
No one turned away for lack of funds
Program
Michael Ranta — “Continuum II for bass clarinets, percussion, and 4-channel tape (1998)”
Sarah Hennies — untitled new work
About the artists
Michael Ranta is a legendary but now almost totally unknown percussionist, composer, and improviser who left the U.S. in the late 1960s and has lived abroad ever since. He worked closely with some of the most important composers of the 20th century including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harry Partch, Jean-Claude Eloy, Mauricio Kagel, and Helmut Lachenmann. In 1977, after seven years in Taiwan learning tai chi, he settled in Cologne and opened the shop Asian Sound, a source of hard-to-find Asian percussion instruments. Since 2010, the Belgian record label Metaphon has been unearthing hours of unheard music from Ranta’s archives of percussion and electroacoustic music. Composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies has recently undertaken a project to perform and record a large body of scored chamber music mostly from the 1970s that has never been recorded and heard by very few.
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, New Music USA, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
Madison Greenstone is a New York based clarinetist whose “beautiful and haunting” playing “creeps noisily away from the void” (Foxy Digitalis). They perform throughout a wide range of experimental music contexts as a soloist, improvisor, and chamber musician. Madison is the clarinetist of TAK Ensemble, “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen). Madison’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, explores the extremes of innate instrumental expressivities by treating the instrument as a site of indeterminacy, chaos, and generative instability. Their recent solo album, Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch Records), was praised for its “deft and skillful authorship” and as an “incredible exercise that pushes the possibilities of this instrument into a new realm.” (Bandcamp Best of Experimental Music, and Foxy Digitalis).
Katie Porter is a clarinetist and curator specializing in experimental music. Passionate about creating musical communities, she co-founded the venue Listen/Space (Brooklyn) and curates the Listen/Space Commissions, responsible for 46 new works for mixed chamber group. She also co-directs the biennial VU Symposium for experimental, improvised and electronic music (Park City, Utah) and is working on a giant multi-year project of experimental works for solo clarinet at Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, a land artwork in remote northern Utah.
