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Hub New Music
This concert is part of the Festival’s Subscription Series and Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music. The Gamper Festival represents a sustained commitment to nurturing and promoting the music of our time.
Hub New Music
Michael Avitabile, flutes • Gleb Kanasevich, clarinets • Magnolia Rohrer, violin/viola • Jesse Christeson, cello
ANGÉLICA NEGRÓN
Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado
TYSHAWN SOREY
For Alvin Singleton
DONNACHA DENNEHY
Concertina
DAI WEI
How the Stars Vanish
DANIEL THOMAS DAVIS
What If We’re Beautiful
Program Notes
ANGÉLICA NEGRÓN
Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado (2023)
Angélica Negrón has provided the following note to accompany Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado:
Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado (Intermittent Fragments of a Fractured Place) is a piece inspired by attempts at reconstructing memories connected to specific places and people. The piece is part of a series of pieces I’ve been writing recently which use field recordings taken from my trips to visit family and friends in Puerto Rico. It reflects on the construction of identity when attempting to create a sense of belonging in two places simultaneously as well as in the complexities that come with it.
Pedazos was commissioned by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music for Hub New Music’s 10th Anniversary. Sponsored by Boyer Rickel.
TYSHAWN SOREY
For Alvin Singleton
Tyshawn Sorey is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer whose innovative work bridges contemporary classical music, improvisation, and Black/Afrodiasporic creative practice. He was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith) and was a 2023 finalist for Monochromatic Light (Afterlife). A 2017 MacArthur Fellow and 2018 United States Artists Fellow, Sorey has received numerous honors including the Pew Fellowship, Fromm Commission, and the Koussevitzky Prize. His compositions have been commissioned and performed by leading artists and ensembles including Julia Bullock, JACK Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Roomful of Teeth, in venues such as Lincoln Center, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Donaueschinger Musiktage. Sorey continues to expand the boundaries of contemporary music through his rigorous, genre-defying compositional voice. He is currently on the composition faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.
DONNACHA DENNEHY
Concertina (2023)
Donnacha Dennehy has provided the following note to accompany Concertina:
The concertina, with its expanding and contracting bellows, seems like an apt metaphor for the way this piece works. In fact, I thought of the name very early on, and this oscillating motion of filling out and squeezing in influences the piece on every level, from the pattern through the metrically shifting phrases to the larger shape. It was a joy to write this piece for the wonderfully focussed players of Hub New Music.
Concertina was commissioned by Hub New Music for the ensemble’s 10th anniversary.
DAI WEI
How the Stars Vanish (2021)
Dai Wei has provided the following note to accompany How the Stars Vanish…:
The title How the Stars Vanish… came from a phrase of a poem written by the Persian poet Rūmī. This piece is based on my observation and imagination of the stars. I think stars always try their best to be stable in their whole life. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it swells, suddenly collapses, and a very dense core will be left behind, along with the expanding nebula. Looking at stars sometimes can be a very personal thing. It doesn’t require this knowledge to create an intimate, poetic conversation between you and the stars. When it comes to dark, I look up at the sky. We are just a mote of dust floating among the vast and tranquil Milky Way. Suddenly, a shooting star glides down the sky, while Orion and Pegasus are silently sharing their stories. Some of the stars are coming towards us, while some of them are vanishing.
Notice how each particle moves.
Notice how everyone has just arrived here
from a journey.
Notice how each wants a different food.
Notice how the stars vanish as the sun comes up,
and how all streams stream toward the ocean.
—Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, Notice
How the Stars Vanish was written for Hub New Music as part of a residency with Princeton Sound Kitchen.
DANIEL THOMAS DAVIS
What If We’re Beautiful (2023)
Daniel Thomas Davis has provided the following note to accompany What If We’re Beautiful:
What if We’re Beautiful is an experiment in musical gift-craft. I don’t knit or crochet, but even so, I imagine these movements as something akin to handknit musical objects woven from modest sonic threads, each made with a particular recipient in mind. And although there are countless fine examples of composers making imagistic portraits or reflective dedications, I’ve aimed for something a little different here – each piece feels to be less portraiture of any particular person and more as an opportunity to make something enjoyable for a few folks I hold very dear. In doing so, it’s my hope that others who hear and play this piece – including my friends in Hub New Music – also find something meaningful, too.
To be sure, the gifts offered in this piece are themselves the refraction of the countless and intangible gifts of queer (and queer-adjacent) friendship and joy I have received from the band of fellow travelers acknowledged in these movement titles. And although I didn’t immediately set out to write a piece about queer joy, that’s basically what happened here anyway; as the piece came together, it became increasingly clear to me that it’s also an appreciation of the boisterous, delicate, wacky, campy, and sorrowful joy that we can offer to one another.
Commissioned by Hub New Music.