Hannah Kendall

Hannah Kendall’s new work was nearly done when, as she puts it, “it's these kettles, you see. They kind of threw everything.”

The British composer doesn’t resist such unexpected turns in her music—she embraces them. “I came across these new ideas quite late in the process. Sometimes that happens.”

With this openness and flexibility, Kendall seizes every opportunity to expand her musical vocabulary. Her music is rigorously constructed yet deliberately unstable, with atmospheric textures that shift and slide like plates under pressure.

Kendall also uses seemingly ordinary materials—hair accessories, walkie-talkies, cardboard, even whistling tea kettles—to conjure and challenge histories and narratives, holding them in tension and inviting listeners to inhabit uncertainty.

Kendall is not interested in easy answers; she wants to know what all of this sounds like. “I want to find sounds that no one else has found before.”

Harp, Interrupted: Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2. (2021) #5 of 10

That search has made Kendall one of the most distinctive musical voices of her generation. Working across many forms and forces, she rethinks basic assumptions about instruments and sound.

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.

Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2. begins with a sharp ping from the harp and a vocal pitch dissolving into breath. Spiky rhythms unfold in episodic bursts. The brittle gestures develop into perpetual motion, the harp rumbling in the depths with gong-like resonance.

Later, the voice returns, softly and briefly. Kendall thinks of vocalization as “speaking or singing in tongues,” an invocation that points to other dimensions. “It’s a way to suggest something outside of this present space.”

Interwoven Routes

Taken together, these layered symbols and materials reflect a broader process at work in Kendall’s music: creolization, the process by which different cultures interact and create something new. The concept emerges from the colonial histories of the Caribbean.

For Kendall, this is more than just a compositional strategy; it is also a personal exploration. Her family traces its heritage to Guyana, though within a British colonial framework—complicating any singular sense of origin.

Kendall’s musical beginnings are easy to trace. “I didn’t really have a choice,” she says, laughing. She grew up in Wembley in northwest London in a household alive with music and theatre. Her grandfather, a jazz saxophonist, encouraged her creativity; she studied violin from the age of four and later, piano and voice. She later majored in voice and composition at the University of Exeter before earning a master’s in composition at the Royal College of Music.

Questions of history soon surfaced in her work. Kendall’s chamber opera The Knife of Dawn (2016) depicts the imprisonment of the Guyanese poet and activist Martin Carter under British rule. The opera has since been produced at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London and, this season, at the Dutch National Opera. Her profile in the United Kingdom continued to grow. Kendall was named one of the “brilliant female composers under 35,” featured on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week, and received a 'Women of the Future Award' in the Arts and Culture category. In 2017, Chineke!, Europe’s first majority-Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, premiered her orchestral work The Spark Catchers at the BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Yet as a composer, Kendall struggled to bring her Afro-Caribbean heritage into her music within that environment. She describes it as a “strange situation to be in…to have the formation of your identity in the space of the colonizer.” It challenged the development of her compositional practice. “I just couldn’t find a way to do that in the UK.”

Those artistic questions led Kendall to New York in 2018. She earned a doctorate in composition at Columbia University, studying with George Lewis, who recruited her to the program and supervised her dissertation, and Georg Friedrich Haas. Lewis, a composer whose scholarship and music engage deeply with Black experimental traditions, helped her shape the philosophical aspect of her practice and articulate her understanding of creolization.

In 2022, Kendall received the prestigious Hindemith Prize, awarded to outstanding contemporary composers. The award committee cited her “enormous compositional diversity, ranging from classical heritage to experimental ideas,” as well as the “clear structure, energy and lack of compromise” in her music.

The Plantation Machine

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 Vietnamese American poet Ocean Vuong. “We both have multiple heritages which are steeped in colonialism,” she says. All three works in the triptych take their titles from lines in Vuong’s writing, including his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

The Sugar Machine: Even sweetness can scratch the throat (2023)

In the Caribbean, the heart of the Plantation Machine was sugar, one of its most lucrative commodities. Kendall’s work Even sweetness can scratch the throat confronts that history. “I’m using that line to suggest how, in the old world, the production of sugar was a sweet, profitable thing,” she says, “but that was obviously not the case for those who produced it.”

In the piece, strings and woodwinds create an anxious, shimmering texture that is anything but sweet. The music rumbles across bass clarinet, harmonicas, and trombone, scraping forward with mounting tension.

Suddenly, the sound clears, revealing tinkling music boxes. They sound innocuous—but aren’t.

The boxes spin out familiar melodies: Ode to Joy, Für Elise, African American spirituals—and, in Even sweetness can scratch the throat, the theme from Swan Lake. “It’s a very intimate listening experience,” Kendall says. “I find that people retune their ear. You hear the whole room entering into a kind of intimacy with the sound.” The music boxes are also literally machines, with overlapping melodies mirroring the web of mechanisms within the Plantation Machine.

Later in the piece, walkie-talkies move into the foreground. Scratchy, muffled voices speak in fragments between beeps and static, with only occasional words discernible.

Kendall—who grew up fascinated by BBC radio—treats radio as an unpredictable space where anyone might hear anything. Is it business chatter or a shopping list? Some listeners perceive police radio or wartime communications. In the case of Even sweetness can scratch the throat, the phrases are from The Book of Job. Kendall notes that in some performances, outside voices such as those of construction workers break through on the same channel. “You can hear the conversation,” she says. “That’s the whole purpose.”

Radio channels also suggest surveillance, or even escape. “Maybe you can escape the machine by the radio,” Kendall says. The ambiguity is intentional, and Kendall links it to creolization. She cites the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s idea of the “right to opacity”: that people or cultures need not be fully transparent to others.

“You're not really meant to hear what they're saying,” Kendall says, “but sometimes you might catch something and think, what is that?”

The final scratchy beep of Even sweetness remains an open question.

The body at sea: when flesh is pressed against the dark (2024)

The plantation system Kendall traces through these works leads inevitably to the ocean. Developed in collaboration with ensemble loadbang, Kendall describes when flesh is pressed against the dark as a meditation on the “oceanic suspension” of the Middle Passage. She draws on the essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book by Hortense J. Spillers, who argues that disorienting violence reduced enslaved bodies to ‘flesh’ and stripped them of social identity, leaving captives “culturally unmade.”

The piece opens in a haze of harmonicas. Like music boxes and Afro hair accessories, the harmonica appears frequently in her work as a way to “creolize” sound. Kendall points to the harmonica as “an instrument associated with the blues and with Afro-diasporic sorrow.” Breath itself becomes a gesture of resistance—what scholar Ashon T. Crawley calls “the cultivation and care of flesh.”

Through the wash of harmonicas, a voice surfaces, sometimes singing, sometimes humming, alongside crackling walkie-talkies and a Bosun’s whistle. British naval officers historically used the whistle to command sailors and enslaved laborers aboard ships.

The sound swells. Bass clarinet and trombone shout, and bursts of trumpet flash across the surface. The music rocks and heaves like an unstable sea. Then the lone voice remains, growing increasingly muffled before fading away.

Whistling spreads through the ensemble—harmonicas, brass mouthpieces, the upper reaches of the bass clarinet—until the tumult cuts away, leaving only a faint hand-cranked music box playing the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

That might be the sound of hope. Even amid suffering, Kendall says, “there is something that keeps us going.”

Kendall grew up near a mosque and a Hindu temple, in a community that also celebrated Diwali, Eid, and Ramadan. “I’m fascinated by how people wrestle with and practice faith,” she says. She weaves this sense of spiritual searching into her music. Kendall writes, “In other words, when flesh is pressed against the dark, it can, does, and will seek to have a singing soul in the light.”

A precarious future: building a burning house

Kendall recalls the summer of 2023, when smoke from disastrous Canadian wildfires blanketed New York City and turned the sky an unsettling orange. For her, the event echoed the “Plantation Machine,” and the destructive, extractive structures of the Transatlantic Slave Trade whose consequences remain with us today. The title of her new work, building a burning house, comes from a line in Ocean Vuong’s 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.”

In the piece, 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.

And then there are the tea kettles. 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.”

A living language

For Kendall, the Composer Portrait program reflects her years in New York and doctoral research at Columbia University. “It’s a wonderful culmination,” she says. “It was in this space that I felt liberated to take my music in the directions I wanted.”

Many musicians of the International Contemporary Ensemble performing on the Composer Portrait program are longtime collaborators. “You have to find the right people to do that with,” she says. Kendall now helps continue that spirit of experimentation by teaching in Columbia’s Department of Music.

Composer George Lewis has written of Kendall, “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.”

For Kendall, the search remains the point. “It's important to stretch yourself. Otherwise, what are we here for?”

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