What If We’re Beautiful

works

Angélica Negrón, Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado

Julius Eastman, Joy Boy 

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 four commissioned works exploring concepts of identity, chosen family, and what it means to define one’s “home.” Pieces by Daniel Thomas Davis, Angélica Negrón, Elijah Daniel Smith, and Donnacha Dennehy all offer a distinct perspective on these concepts. On this program, Hub also offers its own arrangement of Julius Eastman’s Joy Boy.

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.

Written in 1974, Julius Eastman’s Joy Boy showcases the richness of his identity and reclaims the word “boy” from its negative connotations. In the composer’s own words, “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.”

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 family, and is a powerfully resonant celebration of queer joy and community.