new addresses
Out November 6, 2026 on Better Company Records.
tracks
New Addresses (2020)
To Breath 3:18
To My Heart at the Close of Day 3:26
To “Yes” 3:00
South Catalina (2014)
South Catalina 10:00
Barnes Dances (2024)
First Dance: Reykjavík, Iceland 4:15
Second Dance: Jersey City, NJ 3:57
Third Dance: Brooklyn, NY 2:45
Fourth Dance: Paris, France 3:41
Fifth Dance: Barnes Dance 4:06
Music
Christopher Cerrone
Performed by Hub New Music
Michael Avitabile, flute
Gleb Kanasevich, clarinet
Magnolia Rohrer, violin
Jesse Christeson, cello
With Guest Artists
Ian Rosenbaum, percussion
Adam Tendler, piano
Christopher Cerrone, electronics
Credits
Recorded December 2025–July 2026 at Fieldnotes Studio, Brooklyn, NY; Sandbox Percussion Studios, Brooklyn, NY; and Mannes School of Music, New York, NY.
Recorded, mixed and edited by Mike Tierney.
Produced by Mike Tierney, Christopher Cerrone, and Hub New Music.
Mastered by Alan Silverman.
Design by Greystudio
Notes
Please be warned: this recording may be cursed. Someone or something does not want Detroti ensemble Hub New Music to commission new works from Christopher Cerrone.
Their first encounter was promising enough. Cerrone and Hub flautist Michael Avitabile met for coffee, then dumplings, and each quickly realized that he had found a kindred spirit. “We figured out we were both Italian-Americans from the New York ‘burbs with a lot of opinions,” says Cerrone, “and a friendship was born from there.”
But when it came time to create New Addresses, fate intervened, in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both Hub and Cerrone practice a workshop-heavy approach to creating new works: the composer testing new ideas on the ensemble, and the performers offering feedback and playing demonstrations. During the summer of 2020, when the world seemed to be opening up again, they were finally able to try things out in person—but as the winter premiere date drew closer, pandemic shutdown protocols fell back into place, and the piece premiered as a streaming video.
COVID restrictions bit into every part of the process: “It was pure chaos,” says Avitabile; “I remember that the recording venue had set a deadline when we had to be done recording, because Boston, as in the city, was like, ‘You have to be done in an hour, because we’re gonna chase you out with a stick, because you have the plague.’”
The piece is named after poet Kenneth Koch’s collection of odes addressed to different people, things, or ideas—“To Breath,” “To My Heart at the Close of Day,” and “To ‘Yes’” are the poems that inspired these movements; others include "To World War Two," "To Orgasms," and “To The Italian Language”—but where Koch’s poetry veils its wisdom and heartbreak behind a deceptively loose, almost conversational cadence, Cerrone’s writing is taut and terse.
But through the music of Koch’s incantatory reading style, and his deliberate choice of seemingly everyday subjects, Cerrone connected deeply with the poet’s work. He describes, in each poem, a specific moment of “evocation,” when the text, in dealing with the “quotidian,” suddenly reveals itself to be about something more profound.
He attempted to mirror this strategy in this music, with one subtle moment in each movement that causes the piece to pivot into something else. “Each moment of New Addresses has a moment of revelation,” Cerrone says: “a sudden slide down a half-step in the first movement, or the sudden revelation of a low note in the second.” Like Koch’s subjects, he suggests, “the materials in New Addresses are incredibly banal,” but Cerrone attempts to make the listener feel—without necessarily understanding—that these materials have been somehow transfigured: “There’s an element of magic, achieved through careful manipulation of time.”
•
The next calamity struck at Hub’s performance of an all-Cerrone program presented by Sean Ritenauer’s Rocket City New Music. A twister touched down in Huntsville, uprooting trees on the east side of town with hundred-mph winds. “I landed in Alabama,” Cerrone recalls, “and they said, ‘Yeah, we have to go into the basement now, because there’s a tornado’—and then I tried to drive to my hotel, and the road was blocked!”
Fortunately, the tornado made its way out of town in time for the concert, and Cerrone was able to hear Hub’s first performance of South Catalina, originally premiered by Chicago-based sextet Eighth Blackbird. Rocket City invited pianist Choo Choo Hu and percussionist Andrew Lynge to play alongside Hub’s four-person lineup, and the composer was dazzled enough to ask Hub to take this piece for this release, even though it had already been recorded by the original performers—one of the US’s leading new-music ensembles.
Hub “really brought something new to the piece that I had not heard before,” says Cerrone, a deep understanding of what he was trying to achieve. “Playing 12 minutes of multiphonics on the clarinet requires a special kind of clarinetist, and Gleb [Kanasevich] is that special kind of clarinetist.”
The out-of-tune-ness of multiphonics—using unconventional fingerings, embouchure and air pressure to force two pitches out of a monophonic instrument designed to produce only one—points to another facet of Cerrone’s approach to collaboration. In writing South Catalina, he consulted multiple clarinetists to confirm the feasibility of executing the gestures precisely, then combined these sounds with the nearest pitches on the equal-tempered scale to produce an audible “beating” effect—a quick, regular throbbing sound—from the interference patterns of the two frequencies.
It would be nearly impossible for a performer trained in the Western tradition to reproduce this sort of precise, predictable “inaccuracy” on command, Cerrone argues, “and so you have to create scenarios where the imperfection is built in.”
•
Like South Catalina, Cerrone’s suite of Barnes Dances also practices a certain controlled detuning—and like New Addresses, it aims at a transfiguration of the quotidian. Named for the intersections whose all-way WALK signals allow for diagonal pedestrian crossings, Barnes Dances samples the everyday sound of audio crossing signals for the blind, weaving field recordings into an accompaniment for the live ensemble.
“I heard a crosswalk in Reykjavík that has a 5/8 lilt, and I thought, ‘That's a really good crosswalk!’ And I recorded it,” says Cerrone. “And then I thought, ‘Maybe this is a piece,’ and so I started collecting all these crosswalks all over the place.” In a bit of dark humor, Cerrone used software to extrapolate a whole monologue from a talking crosswalk near his home in Jersey City, turning its insistent Wait! into something more forlorn—as if the signal were flickering into consciousness to deliver a halting Beckett monologue.
Cerrone decided to use electronics partly because of Kanasevich’s addition to the Hub lineup post-New Addresses: “I wouldn’t have written a piece with electronics the first time around.” (“I can’t work a toaster,” confesses Avitabile. “No, Gleb does everything, and he’s really terrific, and now we have so many electro-acoustic commissions coming as a result of Gleb knowing how to work a toaster and a Max patch.”)
He derives the detuning effect here from a variety of different techniques: at one point, the flautist uses different fingerings for the same note, producing two microtonally distinct pitches; elsewhere in the score, he asks the violinist—on this recording, Magnolia “Meg” Rohrer—to play the string’s natural harmonics rather than a pitch found on the piano keyboard, or to imitate the pitch of a natural harmonic rather than an ordinary tone.
In each case, Cerrone calls for a precisely rendered out-of-tuneness, rather than simply allowing the player to produce the effect intuitively. This is by design: in his classes on notation, Cerrone says, his students are “always trying to give freedom to players. Mike will, I think, say that he doesn’t want freedom! He wants to be told what to do.”
Avitabile concurs. “When there’s too much freedom, people default to what's easy and what's natural. And when there is specificity—whether it's building in an imperfection, or defining what an exact technique is to be—that's what triggers the musician brain to go, ‘Okay, how am I going to make this sound? How am I going to realize this vision? How does this fit into the texture?’ and then it prompts actual interpretation.”
Cerrone remembers asking cellist Jesse Christeson about an especially difficult passage: “Is this impossible?”
“Chris,” said Christeson, “all new music is impossible, to a degree. It’s just a matter of solving it.”
Dan Johnson