Composer and sonic artist Nina C. Young (b.1984) creates works, ranging from acoustic concert pieces to interactive installations, that explore aural architectures, resonance, timbre, and the ephemeral. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Aizuri Quartet, Sixtrum, Matt Haimovitz, and others.  Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, Young has received recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Koussevitzky Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the Fromm Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, and BMI.

Young’s current interests are collaborative, multidisciplinary works that touch on issues of sustainability, historical narratives, experiences with contemporary technologies, and women’s rights.  In 2023, the American Composers Orchestra with vocalist Sidney Outlaw premiered the Carnegie Hall commissioned work Out of whose womb came the ice: a monodrama for baritone, orchestra, electronics, and generative video, commenting on the ill-fated Ernest Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition.  Other recent projects include Tread softly that opened the NY Philharmonic’s Project 19 series, Violin Concerto: Traces for Jennifer Koh from the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, to hear the things we cannot see for Hub New Music featuring the poetry of Rosie Stockton, and Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light - an immersive audio-visual installation experience commissioned by EMPAC (The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer) that showcases their High-Resolution Wave Field Synthesis Loudspeaker Array and recordings by the American Brass Quintet. Upcoming projects include new works for the Grossman Ensemble and Decoda.

A graduate of MIT and McGill University, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University.  This year she has joined the faculty of the Juilliard School and is the Slee Visiting Associate Professor in Music Composition at the University at Buffalo. Prior to joining the faculty of the Juilliard School, Young was an Associate Professor of Music Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music.  She serves as Co-Artistic Director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé.  Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.

ninacyoung.com

PROGRAM NOTE

to hear the things we cannot see is a collaboration with poet Rosie Stockton and Hub New Music. In creating the score for this piece, I analyzed the spectrum and envelope of Stockton’s voice in recordings of the poet reading their work. Recordings filter through the quartet’s playing to unite spaces past and present. Live electronic sounds are triggered using MaxMSP. Throughout the work I play with ideas of space - particularly in exploring the creation of aural architectures using the ensemble, voice, and embedded electronics. 

• Nina C. Young

Commissioned by Hub New Music. 

Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics as well as for chamber ensembles, orchestras, choir, and film. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise.” Negrón has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, loadbang, Prototype Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Opera Philadelphia, the Louisville Orchestra and the New York Botanical Garden, among others.  Angélica received an early education in piano and violin at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico where she later studied composition under the guidance of composer Alfonso Fuentes. She holds a master’s degree in music composition from New York University where she studied with Pedro da Silva and pursued doctoral studies at The Graduate Center (CUNY), where she studied composition with Tania León. Also active as an educator, Angélica is currently a teaching artist for New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program.  She has collaborated with artists like Sō Percussion, Lido Pimienta, Mathew Placek, Sasha Velour, Cecilia Aldarondo, Mariela Pabón & Adrienne Westwood, among others and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún.  She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at WNYC’s The Greene Space working on El Living Room, a 4-part offbeat variety show and playful multimedia exploration of sound and story, of personal history and belonging. She was the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize. Upcoming premieres include works for the Seattle Symphony, LA Philharmonic, Louisville Orchestra and NY Philharmonic Project 19 initiative and multiple performances at Big Ears Festival 2022. Negrón continues to perform and compose for film.

Program Note

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. 

Aaron Holloway-Nahum (b. 1983) is one of his generation’s leading composers, conductors and recording engineers.   

Characterized by experimental narrative structures, a growing interested in live multi-media, detailed, ornate timbres and bold melodic unisons, Aaron’s music has been performed in nearly twenty countries. He was one of two composers on the 2018/19 Peter Eötvös Foundation inaugural mentoring programme and his commissions include the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Plural Ensemble, The Pannon Philharmonic, HOCKET, the London Sinfonietta, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Chartreuse, duo Harperc and the Atea Wind Quintet.

Aaron’s career combines this compositional knowledge with a variety of additional skills: As a conductor and arts entrepreneur, he most prominently serves as the conductor, Chief Executive, and co-Artistic Director of Riot Ensemble, an organization that gives more than thirty performances per year and has premiered over 350 original works. A growing interest in spatial audio – alongside is experience as a recording engineer and managing director of Coviello Productions (the Arditti Quartet, Sandbox Percussion, Ensemble Intercontemporain, etc…) recently led Aaron into a role as the Head of Soundscape with Southby Productions. Aaron is on the composition faculty of the Royal Academy of Music, and he lives in London with his wife and three sons.

Program Note

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale was inspired and shaped by Dan Albergotti’s short poem of the same title. Written long before the pandemic, the short sentences imagine activities that (I assume) Jonah might have used to fill the time while living in the belly of the giant beast. Read, reread, and reread many times again – the activities which range from the pithy (‘Count the ribs.’) to heart-wrenching (‘Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats.’) took on steep, exaggerated meanings as the days of lockdown passed.

I treated the sentences both personally (in composing the music) and as impersonally as possible: I sent the poem to two percussionists (Sam Wilson and David Skidmore) and asked them – with no further input from me – to interpret the various sentences in the form of a video diary. Their ‘entries’ (including a full reading by Sam) make their way back into the piece, triggered at the appropriate moment by the Bass Clarinetist. Layered on top of these videos are captions that I harvested during months of watching Netflix with a small baby in the house: The volume turned down in the hopes of some unbroken moments of entertainment.

Commissioned by Hub New Music

Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music is a “prime mover of piping hot 21st century repertoire” (Washington Post). Founded in 2013, the Detroit-based ensemble has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinctive ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Hub’s “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) 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, Morgan Library, Suntory Hall (Tokyo), the Williams Center for the Arts, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center, King’s Place (London), Soka Performing Arts Center, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, and the Celebrity Series of Boston. 

Hub continues its 10th Anniversary Commission Project in 2023-24 with new works by Andrew Norman, Tyshawn Sorey, Angélica Negrón, Marcos Balter, Donnacha Dennehy, Nico Muhly, and Jessica Meyer. As part of the project, Hub also launched a fellowship in collaboration with the Luna Lab, awarded to recent alumna Sage Shurman. The coming season also brings continued performances of Gala Flagello’s concerto The Bird-While and Carlos Simon’s Requiem for the Enslaved. Upcoming commissions include Nina C. Young’s to hear the things we cannot see, and major new works from Christopher Cerrone. 

Hub New Music’s recordings have garnered consistent acclaim. In 2022, Hub recorded Carlos Simon’s Requiem for the Enslaved (Decca Classics), which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. This season, Hub releases its fourth album, a distance, intertwined with Silkroad’s Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and the Asia-America New Music Institute on In a Circle Records. Hub’s debut album, Soul House, released on New Amsterdam Records, was called “ingenious and unequivocally gorgeous” (Boston Globe) and “intensely poignant.” (Textura)

As educators, Hub is dedicated to empowering future generations of artists. The ensemble was recently in residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Nancy and Barry Sanders Composer Fellowship program, working  with 10 outstanding high school aged composers. Hub has been guests at leading institutions such as Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Texas, CCM, University of Southern California, and Indiana University.