TCM presents Hub New Music
AS TAOS CHAMBER MUSIC GROUP
continues its 30-year anniversary, we can look forward to yet another incomparable collective of performers as they welcome to the stage Hub New Music.
Hub New Music is a chamber music quartet that has established itself as a trailblazer in the contemporary classical music world. Founded in 2013, Hub has commissioned dozens of contemporary pieces and, more importantly, used their position to shine a brilliant light on female, queer and BIPOC composers, giving voice to marginalized musicians and composers.
The Grammynominated group has chosen to celebrate its 10-year anniversary alongside Taos Chamber Music Group by commissioning new pieces by young up-and-coming musicians. “This kind of programming reflects TCMG’s ongoing commitment to presenting young artists and composers,” said Nancy Laupheimer, TCMG’s director. “Hub is a diverse group of virtuosi who are commissioning some of today’s most powerful voices in the contemporary music world and giving platforms to emerging artists across genres, genders and ethnicities.”
Seventeen-year-old Sage Shurman is just one of those composers. Winner of a collaborative competition between Hub and the Luna Composition Lab, Shurman is a high school senior who calls Pasadena home. Having been in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Composer Fellowship program since 2020, and being the winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Shurman is a composer worth keeping an eye on. She has composed a commissioned piece, by both Hub and TCMG, called “Shatter Me” for flute, clarinet, violin and cello. “My music strives to take listeners on a journey and make them feel or understand something in a way they hadn’t before.”
Says the young composer, “The new piece is about an insatiable desire to be broken. It is a mixture of minimalism and maximalism, where ideas both breathe life and run out of breath.”
James Diaz, a Colombian composer, wrote “Lines of acid dreams” for Hub New Music in 2022. Diaz is influenced by Latin-American landscapes, graphic design, photography and psychedelia. “The four instruments playing almost entirely from beginning to end is a metaphor for twirling infinity lines, lines that intercut, contradict and feedback mutually…” Diaz says about the piece, “Although we cannot separate time from space, the textures were imagined as different spaces or locations, and the timbral counterpoint strives to create vocal sounds and unison-like moments in a 3D harmonic space.” Diaz is currently working on a studio album “[speaking in a foreign language]” as well as on a new orchestra work to be premiered by The New York Philharmonic and Juilliard at Lincoln Center in 2023.
Dai Wei, the next composer featured in Hubs Program, is originally from China. She describes her musical journey as navigating “in the spaces between east and west, classical and pop, electronic and acoustic, innovation and tradition.” Her commissioned piece entitled “How The Stars Vanish” was inspired by a Rumi poem called “Notice.”
“This piece is based on my observation and imagination of the stars… which can be an intimate, poetic conversation.” Says Wei, “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.” I am certainly looking forward to interpreting the piece myself and greasing my ears with the sounds of one of The Washington Post’s “22 for 22: Composers and Performers to watch this year.”
The next featured composer, Michael Ippolito’s music has been performed by leading musicians in venues around the world. Hub will be performing his piece “Capriccio.”
“’Capriccio’ began as a response to the work of Hans Hofmann, the influential German-American artist and teacher…Hofmann was clearly aware of the expressivity in his abstract art, giving his paintings evocative titles that demonstrate a poetic sensibility I found as irresistible as the images themselves.”
It wouldn’t be a TCMG feature without the talents of its director, Nancy Laupheimer, gracing the stage. The local flutist will be joining Hub musician Michael Avitabile for their final piece “Pathways.” The flute duet, composed by Venezuelan-American composer Efraín Amaya, was inspired by Carlos Castañeda’s “magical passes.”
Says Amaya, “I wanted to convey through music the feeling of wellbeing, of wholeness, which is the purpose of these passes. I also wanted to reflect how, in nature, everything is balanced and how everything is part of something else.”