Memory Box
Memory Box w/Sarah Hennies, Poiesis Quartet, Queen City Freedom Band, Lizzy DuQuette + concertnova
March 18, 2025 | 7:30 PM
Contemporary Arts Center (Black Box Theatre)
44 E 6th St, Cincinnati, OH 45202
Scroll down for bios, photos and more
PROGRAM
SARAH HENNIES: Memory Box
Poiesis Quartet
Max Ball, violin
Sarah Ma, violin
Jasper de Boor, viola
Drew Dansby, cello
concertnova
Henrik Heide, flute
Gabe Napoli, viola
Joanne Wojtowicz, viola
Queen City Freedom Band
Al White, flute
Daniel Outlaw, oboe
Justin Broyles, saxophone
Matt Gardner, trombone
Alynn Rousselle, percussion
Jeff Martin, percussion
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Memory Box (2021)
"Memory Box" was originally conceived as a remote recording project developed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic where any number of participants record sounds and short text readings to create a dense sound collage whose content is drawn directly from the identities of the performers. Participants are instructed to record a series of pitched events, sounds related to personal memories, and recordings of brief speeches that describe these "sound memories." These recordings are then ordered randomly in time using chance procedures and presented as a unified linear piece the presents a dense forest of sound consisting of musical tones, noises, and speech. Inspired in part by Freud and Jung’s writings on memory and Drew Daniel’s essay, “All Sound is Queer,” “Memory Box” is a piece concerned with how our brains serve as filing cabinets, preserving significant or traumatic memories and sometimes saving memories that seem insignificant and mundane with clarity and persistence.
OGA: the earth the air the fire the water return return return return
(world premiere)
Poiesis Quartet
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the earth the air the fire the water return return return return
for Poiesis Quartet
The title of this string quartet comes from the lyrics of a round that carries a strong personal meaning: something I learned in high school and sang often with friends.
The Greek work “poiesis” means “to bring something into being”. What is brought into being at a string quartet performance?
Textures of time
Shapes of silence
Bodies of relations
…Aristotle believed that everything in the terrestrial sphere was composed of four elements, and each element is related to two sensible qualities: Earth—cold and dry; Water—cold and wet; Air—hot and wet; Fire—hot and dry. These elements are unstable; they transform into each other when one of the qualities alters. Aristotle believed that there’s also a fifth element from which heaven is made out of— an incorruptible substance called “Aether”.
Constructed with sounds that appear most “immediate” to the each instrument, this music does not have roots in the Aether, but rather in the earthly cycles of change, stirring in motions of emergence, deviation and decay.
INTERMISSION
JUAN HIDALGO CODORNIU (arr. Hennies): Rrose Sélavy
(world premiere)
Joe Bricker, glockenspiel
Drew Dansby, cello
Brandon Coleman, guitar
Michael Culligan, xylophone
Kyle Lamb, bass drum/resonant metal
Sarah Hennies, percussion
6 accumulations (Lizzy DuQuette)
2025
overhead projectors, rotisserie motors, record player, handmade abaca paper, wire, sugar cubes, plant matter, frozen pizza boxes, flowers, soil, glass crystals, cat whiskers, string
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Rrose Sélavy (1975, arr. by Sarah Hennies 2025)
Juan Hidalgo (1927-2018) was a Spanish composer from Las Palmas, Canary Islands who studied in Paris and Geneva before moving to Milan in the mid-1950s where developed most of his musical career. Although trained as a musician, encounters with John Cage and a lifelong friendship with Walter Marchetti (with him he founded the performance art group ZAJ) were influential and led him to develop a multifaceted practice that included books, writing, postal art, photography, and performance art.
“Rrose Sélavy” until now has existed only as a recording with Hidalgo overdubbing himself with various piano timbres (and one track of electrical feedback) and released on the obscure but highly collectible Italian record label Cramps in 1977, and more recently reissued by Discos Trangénero in 2018 but despite this, both Hidalgo and “Rrose Sélavy” remain relatively obscure and highly inscrutable. Named for Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego (a French pun that sounds as “Eros, c’est la vie” or in English “Eros, such is life”) its six movements also often bear titles of Duchamp works, that include “L.H.O.O.Q.,” a mustache painted on the Mona Lisa, and “Belle Haleine, Eau De Voilette,” a perfume bottle with a photo of Duchamp dressed as Rrose.
Wikipedia tells us that Duchamp was dressing as a woman as, “a comment on the fallacy of romanticizing the conscious individuality or subjectivity of the artist” but being the curious transsexual that I am, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the true reason is much simpler. Was Duchamp a woman? Language and knowledge around gender nonconformity in the west was largely nonexistent in Duchamp’s lifetime with the word “transgender” not even coming into existence until the 1960s. We artists often make art to try and understand ourselves and Duchamp returned to the Rrose character again and again, even attributing many artworks to her rather than his own name.
What does all this have to do with Juan Hidalgo’s music? Composed entirely in C-major (sort of), how this strange music that begins like a child’s music box and rapidly develops into something the likes of which we’ve never heard before relates to Duchamp, his artwork, gender, or anything else at all is a mystery. The piece makes no attempt at explaining itself and, to my knowledge, Hidalgo left behind no writing or explanation of the work. Only a photo of Rrose on the record cover and this strange, enthralling music unlike anything I have heard before or since. What is queer or trans about this music, aside from the mundane fact that the composer himself was queer. What about this music activated something visceral within me the first time I heard it and every time since then, even when I knew nothing of its backstory. Is there something trans about this that simply hasn’t revealed itself yet?
As queers and especially as trans people, we often have to figure out who we are by ourselves, in isolation, because no one around us understands our experience or worse, actively discourages it. Hidalgo’s piece is “trans art” beacuse I say it is, because it stirs something in me that I don’t yet understand, a feeling still so raw and visceral as the memory of that young “boy” trying on a dress in secret. Now more than ever, the world is demanding that we not be trans and we are under a political regime that are quite literally trying to kill us but no amount of legislation, discrimination, of violence will stop us. By bringing this work into a live performance for the first time, perhaps I’ll learn something about it and, more importantly, about myself, and the ultimate protest is to survive, to thrive, to take up space, to feel as beautiful as Rrose in her hat and fur. - Sarah Hennies.
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The evolving constellation of overhead projectors and contraptions are little islands of glowing sculptures that cast shadows on the walls like out-of-focus memories. They reference spinning cardboard disks in Anemic Cinema, attributed to Rrose Sélavy, a short film of optical illusions, puns, and sexual innuendos. Here and there we find dualities and spectrums within the moving sculptures and short film: murky shadow and blinding light, softness and hard edges, the preciousness of handmade objects and others seemingly trash, but embedded with stories. We try on different versions of ourselves and project these temporal selves as cast shadows on the walls.
Rrose Sélavy
Composers: Sarah Hennies, OGA, Juan Hidalgo Codorniu
Collaborators: Sarah Hennies, Midwestern Lesbian, Queen City Freedom Band
A Special Thank You
concert:nova gratefully acknowledges our friends, donors and sponsors, whose support turns ideas into reality. Each contributed dollar makes a real and important impact.
Season Sponsor:
RANDOLPH WADSWORTH
Concert & Commission Sponsor:
Ann & Harry Santen
Dee & Tom Stegman
Sallie Wadsworth Future Fund
Karlee Hilliard
Catarina & Bob Toltzis
Kathy & Josh Sands
Thank you so much to the generous donors who have supported our
2024-2025 General Operating Fund and SuperNova Campaign!
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Season Sponsorship
Randolph Wadsworth
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