What If We’re Beautiful
Released June 27, 2025
Tracks
Song for L.H. [2:45]
Prelude for J.W. & K.H. [3:03]
Anthem for M.M. [4:16]
Arietta for M.A. [2:38]
Verses for A.L. & H.R. [4:40]
Verses for A.L. & H.R (Hurdy-Gurdy Cover) [4:50]
Total Duration: 22:12
Composer
Daniel Thomas Davis
Musicians
Hub New Music
Michael Avitabile, Flute & Piccolo
Gleb Kanasevich, Bass & Eb Clarinet
Magnolia Rohrer, Violin
Jesse Christeson, Cello
Daniel Thomas Davis, Hurdy-Gurdy
Credits
Producer: Mike Tierney, Daniel Thomas Davis
Recording Engineer, Editing, Mixing, Mastering: Mike Tierney
Cover Art: Four/Ten Media
Design: Greystudio
Notes
What if We’re Beautiful is an experiment in musical gift-craft. I don’t knit or crochet, but even so, I imagine these movements as something akin to handknit musical objects woven from modest sonic threads, each made with a particular recipient in mind. And although there are countless fine examples of composers making imagistic portraits or reflective dedications, I’ve aimed for something a little different here – each piece feels to be less portraiture of any particular person and more as an opportunity to make something enjoyable for a few folks I hold very dear. In doing so, it’s my hope that others who hear and play this piece – including my friends in Hub New Music – also find something meaningful, too.
To be sure, the gifts offered in this piece are themselves the refraction of the countless and intangible gifts of queer (and queer-adjacent) friendship and joy I have received from the band of fellow travelers acknowledged in these movement titles. And although I didn’t immediately set out to write a piece about queer joy, that’s basically what happened here anyway; as the piece came together, it became increasingly clear to me that it’s also an appreciation of the boisterous, delicate, wacky, campy, and sorrowful joy that we can offer to one another.
The last movement of What if We’re Beautiful, which was actually the first part I wrote, started out as a little tune I made and played on hurdy gurdy – a magical platypus of an instrument that combines seemingly incongruent features: a truncated piano keyboard, a viola-ish wooden body with strings capable of the wildest vibrato imaginable, built-in sympathetic reverb, and a mesmerizingly mechanical wheel. Two years into Hub New Music’s glorious adventure with What if We’re Beautiful, it seemed fitting to bring this original tune back to its source on the gurdy and hear what happened. After all, this millennium-old instrument strikes me as itself deeply resonant with the spirit of What if We’re Beautiful – a stitched-together celebration of the beautifully otherwise.
– DTD