Hannah Kendall (born 1984)
Hannah Kendall grew up in Wembley, a suburb of London, the child of parents from Guyana. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father was a jazz musician. She majored in voice and composition at the University of Exeter, was awarded a Masters at the Royal College of Music, and studied arts management of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. She is currently a Doctoral Fellow in composition at Columbia University.
Hannah Kendall has composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments. Her first opera The Knife of Dawn is based on the incarceration of Guyanese political activist Martin Carter, and takes place in his prison cell at the end of a hunger strike in 1953. An opera-in-progress is based on a short story Tan-Tan and Dry Bone by Jamaican-born writer Nalo Hopkinson.
Artwork and activism often work as springboards for Hannah Kendall’s music. Her 2018 piano composition Processional is inspired by a 1965 painting by Normal Lewis of the Selma to Montgomery March:
Of her first string quartet, Glances / I Don’t Belong Here from 2019, Hannah Kendall writes:
Glances / I Don’t Belong Here is inspired by the British-Guyanese artist Ingrid Pollard’s Pastoral Interludes, a series of photographs in which her Black British subjects are posed in the Lake District, the epitome of rural Britain; exploring the notion of alienation and ‘otherness’ in such spaces. In a similar way, this collection of seven miniatures are musical snapshots of my most cherished non-urban settings, and the experiences that can accompany each visit.
The seven movements are quite short and are titled after the composer’s favorite places: Vik [a village in Iceland], Eryri [in Wales], Kaieteur [Guyana], Vigia [Portugal], Portrush [Northern Ireland], Henlow [England], and Argyll [Scotland].
She has so far written 10 compositions in her “Tuxedo” series, which are based on various sections of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s large 1982 painting of the same name. Here is Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water from 2020 for cello and hand-cranked (and hand-punched) music box. The cello also vocalizes and blows an ACME Metropolitan Whistle:
This video is of her 2021 composition Tuxedo: Crown: Sun King for cuffed violin, voice, and five wind-up music boxes. (A “cuffed violin” is a violin whose sound has been altered by placing dreadlock cuffs — jewelry for decorating dreadlocks — around some of the strings.)
This video begins with an introduction. The music begins at about 6 minutes in. At about the 14:15 mark, the violinist is joined onstage by the composer to discuss the piece.