How many times can one repeat a gesture? At what point does it become something else, does the mind become moulded to its contours and is then free to do something else? Notice something else? These were my questions when listening to Sarah Hennies’ Bodies of Water, and it turns out they were also questions that Hennies had herself when composing Lake (2018) and Abscission (2017), the two pieces comprising the album. They are not companion works, but they are nice companions together, and it's worth listening to how Duo Refracta and Arcana New Music Ensemble tackle similar conceptual frameworks carried through by audibly different processes.

Lake feels like a series of still videos. Fifteen minutes long and composed for an intimate trio of violin, vibraphone and piano (Ilana Waniuk, Michael Jones, Shaoai Ashley Zhang), the piece is arguably six vignettes that are two or three minutes long. The title evokes a placid landscape – whether sombre or peaceful, the listener is free to superimpose their current frame of mind – but the form is not a rolling camera as per a nature documentary, panning across. It's rather a camera set on a tripod, capturing a seemingly unchanging scene. Yet when one looks for long enough, there are subtle changes: perhaps waterfowl float slowly in the distance from one side of the frame to the other, or the cattails sway ever so slightly. Dear reader, we leave the details to your vivid imagination since a specific natural description of a lake is not the point, as I understand it. Though how does one compose the feeling of a lake? For Hennies, there are piano chords that imbue atmosphere. There are short violin artificial harmonics that recall crickets or cicadas. Taken as a whole, the metaphor here is that something serene on the surface upon closer observation reveals that a lot is actually going on. Continuing the analogy, I sometimes wished that there was a musical zoom function (maybe in a future album?); instead, Hennies allows extra time in the musical gesture to do that work of noticing.

Abscission, for violin, cello and guitar, also has the minute or half-minute as its timescale, but the compositional blocks are less picturesque and greater in number. They morph and build forward momentum, though still invested in the idea of repeating. Two of the instruments (violin and cello, performed by Carlos Santiago and Erin Busch) have a closer relationship to each other than to the other (guitar, Jonathan Pfeffer). I did not pick up on this hierarchy immediately, but I did find it very interesting that in a conversation with Hennies she divulged that this trio in her mind could represent two parents and a child.Footnote ¹ Hennies surprised herself, as she normally isn't so prescriptive about the meaning of her pieces in interviews. But I understand, in a way – family is complicated, and it's not hard to view the world through the lens of relationships. It adds to the piece, I think, to listen with ‘family’ in mind, if not this particular iteration of a nuclear family, because Abscission lends itself to humanistic thoughts. Though there are loops, normally shaded ‘machine’ in this composition, ‘errors’ are embraced. In the performance notes, Hennies asks for a context in which traditional musical mistakes are bound to occur – players should be synchronised, but they should also sit facing the audience without looking at each other. The musicians are tasked with the impossible, but instead of sounding anxious, the recording contains beautiful moments of just-after: the sound of one musician catching the other with trust.

The impossibility of togetherness is a sublime concept, attractive in its heady Romanticism. Unlike Romanticism in music, though, there's very little material in both pieces, yet unfiltered humanity is communicated almost more clearly. Hennies says that this is why she likes working with small chamber groups and limited musical elements: ‘because there's more thought space for what's going on, if you're not being brushed with a million notes at the same time’.Footnote ² There is an art to how much to repeat, though – and this mastery is present in Bodies of Water. Just when one feels sated by the repeating gesture, having stayed as long as one can in one place… when the mind ceases to notice differences that penetrate the moment and starts to wander… the scene changes, perfectly felt in time.