Hosted by artist and composer Byron Westbrook, Chromatic Fields explores threads of overlap between ideas in contemporary art practice and music making. The program features new and historical avant-garde music ranging from minimalism to maximalism, including intermedia works, sound sculpture, electro-acoustic music, deep listening and sound artists operating in a conceptual field.


This month’s special episode of Chromatic Fields showcases renowned composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies, featuring two hours of music curated by Hennies - one hour of works selected from the span of her career thusfar, followed by an hour of works from other artists that she has chosen for this program. 

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Warsaw Autumn, Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Archipel Festival (Geneva), the Darmstadt Summer Course, Time:Spans (NYC), the Edition Festival (Stockholm), and is Composer-In-Residence at the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK). As a composer, she has received commissions across a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, Ensemble Dedalus, Mivos String Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, fellowships in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2016 and 2025, and was a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Since 2019, Sarah has taught experimental and electronic music at Bard College. She works collaboratively in a duo with double bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause and is also currently involved with a recording project to document music by the American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.