April 2nd, 2026 — Hannah Kendall‘s (CRF 2021) building a burning house will premiere as part of a portrait concert of her music in New York City on April 23rd, 7:30 PM at Columbia University’s the Miller Theatre. building a burning house was co-commissioned by Crash Ensemble, Barbican Centre, Ensemble Musikfabrik, and Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and will be performed by the adventurous International Contemporary Ensemble.
About Hannah’s Music
Her work will continue to take enormous creative risks; and it will appeal to a new kind of audience that is ready to hear something that we have not heard before. — George Lewis (CRF 1998)
The British composer’s music is marked by striking and often polarizing dynamics and features staggeringly intricate details that encourage further listening. Known for her attentive arrangements and immersive world-building, her work pushes the limits of compositional boundaries. It’s no surprise that she is often inspired by disciplines outside her own: building a burning house, comes from a line in Ocean Vuong’s (CRF 2016, DG 2022) poem Homewrecker and captures the sense of machinery spinning toward demise.
Kendall wonders how such a collapse might translate into sound. “What happens when the machine blows everything up?” she asks. She aims to craft a sound world that conjures “the heightened danger of the present … and what I imagine to be the sounds of a possible desolate future.”
About the Program
building a burning house
In building a burning house, Kendall writes for strings prepared with dreadlock cuffs placed across the instrument. Depending where the bow meets them, she says, the sounds can be “brittle and fragile,” “warm and throaty,” or produce “harsher” timbres. She welcomes the unpredictability this creates, letting unstable sounds suggest a post-combustion world. “We don’t have traditional pitch content. The musicians can’t control it, and I can’t control it as a composer.”
Some performers wear tiny wrist bells, evoking those on the heavy iron collars forced upon enslaved people working on plantations to prevent escape. Elsewhere, a music box chimes Greensleeves. “I had to have a bit of historical England in there,” she quips.
A “chorus” of five players inhales and exhales into stovetop kettles, producing loud singing and whistling at high, unpredictable pitches. At the boiling point, Kendall says, “The whistle creates this incredible sound world with a duality of both wailing and singing.” And they hold many symbols. On the plantations, enslaved people would sing and pray inside kettles so as not to be heard by their masters, depositing both sorrows and hopes into the chambers.
For Kendall, the sound holds that same tension between despair and endurance. “It’s a symbol of hope—even though everything around you is destruction and atrocity, still having a human need to fight against that, and to sing and pray.”
Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2. (2021) #5 of 10
In Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2., Kendall writes for solo harp—but not the harp we think we know. The piece is the fifth in a ten-part series responding to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work Tuxedo. Basquiat’s set of sixteen small silkscreen prints is dense with handwritten text, including the phrase “Diving Bell 2.,” and explores the tuxedo abstractly as a symbol of status and authority.
Kendall translates these visual symbols into sound, bringing Afro-diasporic materials into direct contact with a European concert instrument. In Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2., the harp is prepared and played with Afro hair accessories—dreadlock cuffs and clips—that evoke Basquiat’s iconic crown motif. As Kendall says, “this tiny piece of malleable metal for Afro hair can change and distort the instrument.” She loves that the piece sounds different each time it’s performed.
Kendall connects Basquiat’s water references to the Middle Passage, a history she returns to throughout her work. Diving bells—early, dangerous underwater chambers lowered to the seabed—were used by enslaved divers forced to recover cargo from shipwrecks. In the score for Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2., Kendall embeds water references as expressive indicators, drawing on both Afro-diasporic and European sources: “Lord, the water’s so cold,” from the spiritual Wade in the Water, and, from a radically different tradition, “the boat travels on the waves so softly,” from Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube.
Even sweetness can scratch the throat and when flesh is pressed against the dark
Kendall continues to explore creolization and the Caribbean on her debut album shouting forever into the receiver (NMC Recordings, 2025). Three of its works—the title track, along with Even sweetness can scratch the throat and when flesh is pressed against the dark—form a triptych drawing on Cuban novelist Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s concept of the “Plantation Machine.”
Kendall describes the Plantation Machine as “the enduring legacy of the plantation system—a network of repeating systems across space and time.” Beyond the plantations themselves, it includes other interlocking systems—such as naval, political, religious, and commercial—that continue to shape the present.
Writers are a frequent point of departure for Kendall. She often returns to Ocean, a Vietnamese American poet. “We both have multiple heritages which are steeped in colonialism,” she says. All three works in the triptych take their titles from lines in Ocean’s writing, including his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
Learn more and get tickets at www.millertheatre.com.