Premiere performances of 'building a burning house'

Hannah's new work for large ensemble, building a burning house, will be performed by Crash Ensemble and International Contemporary Ensemble in April.

Commissioned by Miller Theatre, Crash Ensemble, Barbican Centre and Ensemble Musikfabrik, the world premiere will take place on Sunday 19 April with Crash Ensemble, conducted by Ryan McAdams, as part of New Music Dublin. International Contemporary Ensemble and Vimbayi Kaziboni will perform the US premiere on Thursday 23 April. The concert will be the last of the 2025-2026 season's Composer Portrait series at Miller Theatre in New York, and will feature other recent pieces by Hannah, including Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2., when flesh is pressed against the dark, and Even sweetness will scratch the throat. See here for more information.

There will be additional performances of building a burning house in London and Cologne later in the year, which will be announced in due course. The piece's title is taken from Ocean Vuong's poem Homewrecker. Hannah's thoughts on the work can be read below. 

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In the summer of 2023, the skies of New York turned a hazy amber as the city became engulfed by smoke from wildfires in Canada. I was in the throes of completing my doctoral dissertation on resisting the Plantation Machine, which is the term that cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo uses to describe the complex, repetitious workings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. As part of my research, I had watched Prof. Dale Tomich’s lecture entitled The Slave Plantation: Environment, History and Cycles of Capital Accumulation. The presentation was hosted as part of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University’s Entanglement Project, which says, “Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North.” 

Benítez-Rojo asserts that the Plantation Machine is a system, first formed during the establishment of the plantations, which continues to repeat in renewed, yet interconnected, ways as part of an extensive framework. Indeed, as I sat in my apartment, unable to leave due to the acrid smog outside, I considered how the plantation system produced local climate changes through their fuel-intensive processes, effects now replicated on a much larger scale. However, I also wondered about the inevitability of our current global climate predicament. In other words, despite attempts to obstruct the Machine, has it always been primed, from the very beginning, to overpower such acts of resistance and to repeat continuously until it causes total collapse and combustion? After all, the plantation system was driven by meticulous planning, layout, and assembly designed to ensure optimal processing conditions and maximum output for a competitive market. This is why the phrase “building a burning house” stood out to me when reading Ocean Vuong’s poem Homewrecker.

My recent string quartet hounded earth (2025), inspired by Wangechi Mutu’s video The End of carrying All, aims to conjure an imagined soundscape of the Earth following its combustion, as explored in Mutu’s work. The strings of the violins, viola, and cello are bound with dreadlock cuffs, which are small metallic Afro hair accessories. The cuffs are used in a similar way in building a burning house, including the double bass. The sounds range from brittle and fragile, such as when the bows are drawn over the cuffs placed behind the bridge, to warm, throaty multiphonics when the cuffs placed over the fingerboard are played. Harsher timbral qualities are produced when the strings themselves are bowed. This sound world evokes the sense of heightened danger of the present, and what I imagine to be the sounds of a possible desolate future. The past creolised situation of the plantations is also represented: the blending together of the Euro and the Afro (the instruments and cuffs, respectively, in this case). Indeed, I aim to conjure the past, present and future at the same time through this method, in the same way that Benítez-Rojo describes the interconnected nature of the Plantation Machine across time and space.  

Echoes of the plantations are brought to the piece through tiny bells. Those enslaved and working the land might very well have been wearing an iron collar with bells attached to deter escape. In building a burning house, some players wear wrist-bells that ring in a hauntingly distant, intermittent way in quieter moments, which becomes more feverish and agitated as the players work harder during fast-paced passages.

Also, five performers play whistling kettles. Consider the sound of five stove-top kettles collectively wailing at boiling point. The players recreate this sound by exhaling into and inhaling out of the kettles’ chambers, creating an urgent sense of alarm. However, it also symbolises an act of hope and invocation. According to John Minton’s book chapter “Turning the Pot Down” from Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives, enslaved people “sang and prayed in pots” on the plantations, “they had to take a kettle and turn it down bottom upward and then old master couldn’t hear the singing and prayin’.” The sound of the kettles simultaneously represents despair and faith, and indeed, faith in spite of despair. In other words, even with the relentlessness of the Machine’s repetitions, or the inevitable collapse of the house from its very construction, it cannot and will not suppress the human need to sing and pray.  

HK.