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 the Saviet/Houston Duo, with support from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Donaueschinger Musiktage, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist currently residing in Ithaca, NY. Her work is primarily concerned with an immersive, psychoacoustic presentation of sound brought about by an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice that Nathan Thomas of Fluid Radio described as "a highly sophisticated and refined performance technique...that starts and ends with listening and encourages a different way of listening from its audience."
"The two Berlin-based musicians are among the most important, versatile, and curious figures in contemporary music, and when they join forces and aesthetic concerns their power seems to expand exponentially" - Peter Margasak
Formed in Berlin in 2019, the Saviet/Houston Duo focuses on collaboration with composers, new and experimental music, our own compositions, and 19th- and 20th-century music.
Their debut album “a clearing”, featuring five jointly-composed pieces for violin and piano, was released on Marginal Frequency in 2024 and was selected for Bandcamp’s “Best Contemporary Classical Music of 2024” list. Our latest album, “Lines We Gather”, was released in 2025 on Winter & Winter and was nominated for the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.
