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Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music is a “prime mover of piping hot 21st century repertoire” (the Washington Post). Founded in 2013, the “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinctive ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Hub actively collaborates with today’s most celebrated composers on projects that traverse today’s rich musical landscape.
Recent and upcoming performances include concerts presented by the Kennedy Center, Seattle Symphony, Kaufman Music Center, Suntory Hall (Tokyo), the Williams Center for the Arts, Yale Schwarzman Center, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center, King’s Place (London), Soka Performing Arts Center, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, and the Celebrity Series of Boston.
To celebrate its recent 10th anniversary, Hub co-commissioned and premiered new works by Angélica Negrón, Nico Muhly, Tyshawn Sorey, Andrew Norman, Jessica Meyer, and Donnacha Dennehy. Upcoming commissioning projects include substantial electroacoustic works by Christopher Cerrone and Daniel Wohl (2025); a work by Yaz Lancaster co-created with Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center (2025); and a collaborative project with composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon (2026).
Hub New Music’s recordings have garnered consistent acclaim. The group’s most recent record with Silkroad’s Kojiro Umezaki, a distance, intertwined, features five works for Hub and shakuhachi, which award-winning multimedia hub I Care if You Listen called “beautiful, haunting music that presents a clear and authentic dialog between varied cultural paradigms and traditions.” Hub’s debut album, Soul House, released on New Amsterdam Records, was called “ingenious and unequivocally gorgeous” (Boston Globe) and “intensely poignant.” (Textura) In 2022, Hub’s album with Carlos Simon, Requiem for the Enslaved , was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition.
Hub is also dedicated to educating, inspiring and guiding future generations of artists. The ensemble has been a guest at leading institutions including Princeton University, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, and Indiana University. In 2021, Hub was a resident ensemble for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Nancy and Barry Sanders Composer Fellowship program for high school aged composers. As part of its 10th anniversary celebration, Hub designed a fellowship program with the Luna Lab in NYC that was awarded to Luna Lab alumna Sage Shurman.
Hub New Music is Michael Avitabile (flutes), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinets), Magnolia Rohrer (violin/viola), and Jesse Christeson (cello). Currently based in Detroit, the ensemble’s name is inspired by its founding city of Boston’s reputation as a hub of innovation. Hub New Music is exclusively represented by Unfinished Side.
(Photo by Clay Larsen)
Yaz Lancaster (they/them) is an experimental artist whose practice is grounded in queer, DIY, and liberatory frameworks. Their work utilizes improvisatory forms, electroacoustic composition, sampling/collage, and relational aesthetics. Cultivation of care & intimacy, Marxist praxis, and accessibility are priorities of their artistic ethos.
Yaz performs as violinist, vocalist, electronic musician & steel pannist in a variety of genres and settings. They’ve had the opportunity to perform at Lincoln Center, The Shed, MoMA, National Sawdust, Public Records, Roulette Intermedium, Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, MASS MoCA and The Poetry Project – as well as iconic DIY spaces like Trans Pecos & Nublu. Their debut album AmethYst released in April 2023 on people | places | records (PPR). Currently, Yaz performs solo sets with violin/voice + extended techniques & electronics that comprise improvisations, songs, and composed music; and with their ambient/noise duo project medium. with gg200bpm (aka gg).
They’ve worked with artists including Andrew Noseworthy, Andy Akiho, BAKUDI SCREAM, ContaQt, Dorothy Carlos, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Lisel, JACK Quartet, Jacolby Satterwhite, Massa Nera, Miss Grit, Nyokabi Kariuki, and Wadada Leo Smith. Yaz has been commissioned by A Far Cry, Beth Morrison Projects, Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center (with Hub New Music), Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Castle of our Skins, the Minnesota Philharmonic; and Opera Philadelphia – for which they created PAPER TIGER (2023) with filmmaker Sean Pecknold. Recent projects include scoring + music directing Asia Stewart’s evening-length Fabric Softener at The Shed, a chamber work for International Contemporary Ensemble (2025), and collaboration(s) + offerings with PTP Vision collective.
Yaz is currently a label manager of PPR & a freelance music/arts writer. They hold degrees in violin & poetry from NYU. They enjoy powerlifting, poetics of horror, digital (sub)cultures, QTPOC-led raves, and being an Aquarius stellium. Yaz lives in Lenapehoking (Harlem, NYC) with their little dog Nori.
“The changeability of Lancaster’s music comes from their belief in being adaptive to others as an act of care, and from their vision of art as something defined by the relationships it creates.” – Sara Constant, Musicworks
“Defying genre, they veer from rich R&B to white noise avant-garde in one sweep of their violin bow.
– Gordon Rutherford, Louder Than War
(Photo by Connie Li)
Program Notes:
Angélica Negrón, Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado (Intermittent Fragments of a Fractured Place), (2023)
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.
Commissioned by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music for Hub New Music’s 10th Anniversary. Sponsored by Boyer Rickel.
Elijah Daniel Smith, Stagnation Blues, (2024)
Growing up playing electric guitar in Chicago, the Blues were my natural first musical stop. As I got older and fell in love with other genres and traditions, Blues fell by the wayside, at least until a few years ago. During the long overdue reckoning with America’s racist history following George Floyd’s murder, I decided to dig a little deeper into my own family’s history and lineage.
Blues originated in the early 1900s in the Mississippi Delta, and it eventually made its way north to Chicago during the great migration. All of my grandparents passed away before I was born, but my dad’s parents were born in the heart of the Delta, and both came to Chicago during the Migration. It was the realization that my musical roots in the Blues were more than just a geographic circumstance, but a cultural and hereditary tradition that goes deeper than I had previously realized. This piece explores the way in which Blues has subtly and subconsciously influenced my compositional voice while also experimenting with the sound of iconic blues riffs and licks.
Written for Hub New Music as part of a residency with Princeton Sound Kitchen.
Nico Muhly, Drown, (2023)
Drown takes its title from an unusual object carved by James Drown, a man about whom little is known who, in the early 19th century, spent around 5 months on the remote island Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. Drown, to mark time, carved a notch in a stick for each day he was there, along with the year, and the place-name “Providence, Rhode Island.” A sailor found the stick a few years after it was carved, and brought it back to Providence and presented it to Drown’s family, who hadn’t heard from him in years. A decade later, Drown appeared in Providence; there are no records detailing his reunion with his family. Drown is a piece about the marking of time, indicated by sharp, jagged notes always on D. The jagged notes appear as anchor-points through a series of variations: some quite peaceful, some angular and difficult, others frenzied and desperate. The piece ends in a state of oceanic suspension, a nod to the unknown and unknowable arc of this object’s journey across the globe. The so-called Calendar Stick is in the permanent collection of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and I would like to thank their curatorial staff, in particular Bethany Beatrice Gravel, for introducing me to this object.
Commissioned by the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA) & Hub New Music. Written for Hub New Music for the ensemble’s 10th anniversary.
Tyshawn Sorey, For Alvin Singleton
2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey is celebrated for his extraordinary ability to blend composition and improvisation in his work, while also offering incomparable virtuosity, and effortless mastery of highly complex scores. He has performed globally with his own ensembles, as well as alongside industry titans including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, King Britt, Claire Chase, Roscoe Mitchell, and Steve Lehman, among many others. Sorey has composed works for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, soprano Julia Bullock, PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, cellist Seth Parker Woods, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, Alarm Will Sound, pianist Awadagin Pratt and vocal group Roomful of Teeth, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as well as for countless collaborative performers. Sorey joined the composition faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 2020, where he maintains a vigorous touring schedule in addition to his academic duties. He was selected as a Peabody Resident at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2023, and has taught and lectured on composition and improvisation at an impressive assortment of institutions, including: Columbia University, Harvard University, Darmstadter Ferienkurse, Wesleyan University, The New England Conservatory, University of Michigan, The Banff Centre, Berklee College of Music, Mills College, University of Chicago, and The Danish Rhythmic Conservatory.
Andrew Norman, Hubbubs, (2024)
Hubbubs, written in celebration of Hub New Music’s 10th anniversary, is an exploration of group dynamics and joyful noises. Cast in seven short movements, it charts a course of transformation from happy chaos to focused unanimity.
Commissioned by Hub New Music for the ensemble’s tenth anniversary.