Bent Frequency presents: Sarah Hennies’ Contralto: Music/Video/Art/Documentary exploring the voice of transgender women
GSU ensemble in residence, Bent Frequency, is bringing Sarah Hennies to Atlanta for a four-day residency directly preceding Atlanta Pride Festival in October 2018. The feature event during this residency will be a performance/screening of Sarah’s film Contralto at the historic Plaza Theater on Thursday, 11 October 2018. In addition, she will present outreach events to the GSU and Atlanta LGBTQIA+ communities and perform with Bent Frequency on a portrait concert on Friday, 12 October 2018.
Contralto is an hour-long work that combines video art, documentary, and experimental music. Contralto features a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises and is accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for strings and percussion and includes a variety of conventional and “non-musical” approaches to sound-making.
When a transgender man begins taking testosterone it causes his vocal cords to thicken and his voice deepens and drops into the so-called “masculine range.” It is not widely known, however, that trans women’s voices are unaffected by higher levels of estrogen in the body. Being a woman with a “male voice” creates a variety of difficult situations for trans women including prolonged and intensified dysphoria and higher risk of harassment and violence due to possibly exposing someone as trans unintentionally. This creates a situation where trans women’s identities are betrayed by their bodies.
Meet the Artist
Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist from Ithaca, NY. Fluid Radio described her music as
“a highly sophisticated and refined performance . . . that starts and ends with listening and encourages a different way of listening from its audience.”
She received her M.A. in percussion from UC-San Diego in 2003. She now plays with noted percussion trio Meridian and in 2016 Sarah was chosen as a fellow in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hennies has recorded and performed music by numerous composers and can be found on a wide variety of labels including Quakebasket, and Quiet Design and on the record label Weighter Recordings.
List of Events
Composer Talk
Tuesday, October 9, 3:30pm
Join the composition seminar class in the Standard building room 400 as Sarah Hennies discusses her composition process and how Contralto was conceived.
This event is free and open to the public (composition students will have priority seating)
Performance/ Screening
Thursday, October 11, 7:30pm
Performance/screening of Sarah’s film Contralto at the historic Plaza Theater.
Lecture with Sarah Hennies
Friday, October 12, 12:00pm
Join us in Student Center West, Room 468, at Georgia State University for a lecture from Sarah Hennies. This event is co-hosted by the Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity.
This event is free and open to the public
Performance with Bent Frequency
Friday, October 12, 7:30pm
This concert will feature Sarah Hennies’ performing her work Live Fleas and Everything Else, along with Bent Frequency.
This event is free and open to the public
This program is supported in part by the Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly, the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, the Plaza Theater Foundation, Atlanta Film Society, and CENCIA. GCA also receives support from its partner agency the National Endowment for the Arts.