Daniel Thomas Davis
Composer Daniel Thomas Davis’ array of musical activities has taken him from the stages of Carnegie Hall and the Royal Opera House to monasteries in the Horn of Africa to playing electric hurdy-gurdy alongside life-size puppets. Praised as “fun and unpretentious” by The New Yorker, he creates music singled out for its “soul-wrenching” connection to the human voice and its “deft and beautiful, rich harmonic and textural language.” (Classical Voice North America).
Dan’s music has been performed, commissioned and featured by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Metropolitan Museum, cellist Lynn Harrell, New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Momenta Quartet, Modern Medieval, Yarn|Wire, Lontano, Lexington Philharmonic, Charlotte Symphony, London Sinfonietta, Ossian Ensemble, Ensemble X, 21st-Century Consort, Locrian Players, eighth blackbird, and members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Roomful of Teeth. In the past few years, he has enjoyed the premiere productions of a handful of acclaimed works for the stage – including three evening-length operas: Six.Twenty.Outrageous, Family Secrets: Kith & Kin, and The Impossible She. A frequent collaborator with writers, filmmakers, directors and choreographers, he recently scored Doug Fitch and Tommy Nguyen’s Stuffed Happens for the Moody Center for the Arts (Houston) and the feature films An Encounter with Simone Weil and Pushed Up the Mountain.
Originally from rural North Carolina, Dan holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Royal Academy of Music, Peabody Conservatory, and Johns Hopkins University. The recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Yaddo, and British Government (Marshall Scholar), Dan holds the position of Professor of Music Composition at Binghamton University (State University of New York).
What If We’re Beautiful
out june 27, 2025
Hub New Music’s sixth studio recording, What If We’re Beautiful, showcases Daniel Thomas Davis’ work of the same title. Davis’ five movement piece is a resounding celebration of queer joy, with each movement bearing the initials of a member of the composer’s chosen family.
Out June 27 on via Bandcamp.
From the composer
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
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
Daniel Thomas Davis, Hurdy-Gurdy
Credits
Producer: Mike Tierney, Daniel Thomas Davis
Recording Engineer, Editing, Mixing, Mastering: Mike Tierney