What If We’re Beautiful

works

Angélica Negrón, Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado Yaz Lancaster, New Work  Donnacha Dennehy, Concertina Elijah Daniel Smith, Stagnation Blues Daniel Thomas Davis, What If We’re Beautiful

about

Hub New Music’s program, What If We’re Beautiful, features five works exploring concepts of chosen family and what it means to define one’s “home.” Pieces by Daniel Thomas Davis, Angélica Negrón, Elijah Daniel Smith, Yaz Lancaster, and Donnacha Dennehy all offer a distinct perspective on these concepts. 

Negrón’s Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado is a poignant work in which the composer ruminates on her relationship to her two homes of Puerto Rico and New York City. Accompanying electronics feature found sounds from the composer’s trips to Puerto Rico. Yaz Lancaster’s New Work (title TBD) is being created in collaboration with the Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center (Asheville, NC), and is inspired by BMC’s legacy as a safe haven for experimental artists, many of whom fled persecution to seek refuge in the mountains of Asheville. 

Dennehy’s Concertina references the accordion-like Irish folk instrument of the same name. Embedded in the piece are both expanding/contracting gestures emulating the concertina, along with motifs from traditional Irish music. In Smith’s Stagnation Blues, the composer uses Hub to recreate the sound of a slowed-down, distorted blues guitar, nodding to his family’s roots in Chicago by way of the Mississippi Delta, the birthplace of the blues.

The concluding work by Daniel Thomas Davis, What If We’re Beautiful, serves as the point of departure for crafting this program. Davis’ five movement, 20-minute piece is structured as a series of musical gifts for members of the composer’s chosen queer family, and is a powerfully resonant celebration of queer joy and community.