The Park City Institute

PRESENTS

Program

Nico Muhly, Drown (2023)

Elijah Daniel Smith, Stagnation Blues (2024)

Nickitas Demos, WHITE OUT (Premiere)

Daniel Thomas Davis, What If We're Beautiful (2023)
I. Song for L.H.
II. Prelude for J.W. & K.H.
III. Anthem for M.M.
IV. Arietta for M.A.
V. Verses for A.I. and H.R

About the Theater

The Eccles Center is the largest theater in Park City, Utah with 1,240 seats. It is home to Park City Institute's Winter Season from October through April each year, presenting a broad range of world-class performing arts from international dance companies to Broadway icons to beloved author/humorists to virtuosos in a host of musical styles from Chamber Music to rock'n'roll.

About Hub New Music

Called “contemporary chamber trailblazers” by the Boston Globe, Hub New Music is a “nimble quartet of winds and strings” (NPR) forging new paths in 21st-century repertoire. The ensemble’s ambitious commissioning projects and “appealing programs” (New Yorker) celebrate the rich diversity of today’s classical music landscape.

Founded in 2013, Hub New Music has grown into an international touring ensemble-driven by its unyielding dedication to groundbreaking new art. Over the past decade, Hub has commissioned dozens of new works for its distinct combination of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. The group actively collaborates with today’s most celebrated composers to build a fresh and culturally relevant body of work tailor-made for Hub.

Recent and upcoming performances include concerts presented by the Kennedy Center, Seattle Symphony, Morgan Library, Suntory Hall (Tokyo), the Williams Center for the Arts, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center, King’s Place (London), Soka Performing Arts Center, Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, and the Celebrity Series of Boston. In 2023-24, the group is in residence at Indiana University, Princeton, and the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Hub continues its 10th Anniversary Commission Project in 2023-24 with new works by Andrew Norman, Tyshawn Sorey, Angélica Negrón, Marcos Balter, Donnacha Dennehy, Nico Muhly, and Jessica Meyer. As part of the project, Hub also launched a fellowship in collaboration with the Luna Lab, awarded to recent alumna Sage Shurman. The coming season also brings continued performances of Gala Flagello’s concerto The Bird-While and Carlos Simon’s Requiem for the Enslaved. Upcoming commissions include Nina C. Young’s to hear the things we cannot see, and new works from Christopher Cerrone and Yaz Lancaster.

Hub New Music’s recordings have garnered consistent acclaim. In 2022, Hub recorded Carlos Simon’s Requiem for the Enslaved (Decca Classics), which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. In 2004, Hub releases its fourth album a distance, intertwined with Silkroad’s Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi) and the Asia-America New Music Institute on In a Circle Records. Hub’s debut album, Soul House, released on New Amsterdam Records, was called “ingenious and unequivocally gorgeous” by the Boston Globe.

As educators, Hub is dedicated to empowering future generations of artists. The ensemble was recently in residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Nancy and Barry Sanders Composer Fellowship program, working with 10 outstanding high school aged composers.

Hub has been guests at leading institutions such as Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Texas, CCM, University of Southern California, and Indiana University

Hub New Music is

Michael Avitabile

Praised for playing that is "warm and vocal" (Boston Musical Intelligencer), Michael Avitabile is a flutist, entrepreneur, and educator dedicated to the music of our time. He is the Founder and Executive Director of Hub New Music, a Boston-based mixed quartet that has quickly become a prominent force among younger contemporary music organizations.

Under his leadership, HNM has commissioned quartets and collaborative projects from a diverse cohort of innovative musical minds including Hannah Lash, Robert Honstein, Kati Agocs, Takumah Itoh, Angel Lam, and the composer-collective Oracle Hysterical. He has also spearheaded collaborations with Boston’s Urbanity Dance, the Silk Road Ensemble’s Kojiro Umezaki, and the Asia-America New Music Institute. The ensemble maintains an active touring schedule and has been featured in the Boston Globe, WQXR (NYC), WFMT (Chicago), New York Times, WBUR (Boston), and the Oregon Artswatch among several others.

As an educator, Avitabile focuses on empowering students with skills to build the arts organizations of tomorrow. His lectures translate the day-to-day experiences of running an artist-led organization into a series of workshops covering topics such as self-management, non-profit development, and commissioning new work. He has been a guest lecturer on Arts Entrepreneurship and Contemporary Music at institutions such as Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Colorado Boulder, New England Conservatory, the University of Texas at Austin, and others.

Outside of his work with HNM, Avitabile has worked with prominent composers including Harrison Birtwhistle, John Zorn, Brett Dean, and Christian Wolfe. As an orchestral musician, he has received fellowships to play with the National Repertory Orchestra, Banff Festival Orchestra, and has also performed with the New World Symphony.

He holds degrees from the University of Michigan (BM) and New England Conservatory (MM), graduating with top honors from both schools.  At Michigan, he was a Shipman Scholar, one of the highest awards given to an incoming student university-wide. While at NEC, he received the John Cage Award for Outstanding Contribution to Contemporary Music. In his free time, Avitabile enjoys developing recipes, practicing yoga, and exploring Boston’s many coffee shops. Avitabile is a Powell Flutes Artist.

Jesse Christeson

Versatile cellist Jesse Christeson wears a number of musical hats around the country. Usually, in the creative workshop with Boston-based Hub New Music, he also travels to serve as Principal Cellist of the Huntsville (AL) Symphony. He held the same position in the Mississippi Symphony for several years prior. Jesse is a founding member of the Inaugural Piano Trio in Jackson, MS, and also returns to collaborate with New JXN. In Boston, he can often be heard performing with start-ups Phoenix and Cape Cod Chamber Orchestra.

For several years Jesse was very active as a multi-faceted performer and teacher in Houston, TX. In addition to working as a freelance cellist, he performed as a vocalist in the Houston Grand Opera and Bach Society of Houston choruses. He taught a cello studio at the Rice Preparatory Program and local public schools.

Mr. Christeson has frequently spent summers performing at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he featured in the New Fromm Players and orchestra festival. His other summer engagements have included the festivals of Aspen, Brevard, and the National Orchestral Institute. Jesse received his MM from Rice University (studio of Norman Fischer), and his BM from Stetson University in DeLand, FL, where he studied cello (studio of David Bjella), voice, and philosophy.

Gleb Kanasevich

Gleb Kanasevich is a clarinetist, composer, and noise/drone musician. He currently works primarily with feedback and modified instruments, while exploring expressive possibilities in very simple electronic processing. He works often as a soloist and collaborates with composers, chamber music groups, improvisers, noise musicians, death metal bands, and many more types of artists. His blackened noise album Asleep (Unknown Tapes) and the immersive 45-minute Subtraction (Flag Day Recordings) came out to critical acclaim in 2019.

Most recently, he was commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Callithumpian Consort, and No Exit New Music Ensemble. In 2020, he released a new improvisation project for a modified recorder and guitar amplifiers Capacity. It came out as a very limited edition of 20 lathe-cut vinyl records with unique hand-drawn sleeves in July, 2020. Capacity has been survived by fully composed follow-up works for cello (written for Peter Kibbe, commissioned by NakedEye Ensemble) and bass clarinet (scheduled for a 2021 premiere by Ashley Smith, commissioned through the Cultural Council of Australia).

Since 2013, he has been a core member of Ensemble Cantata Profana – a group based in New York City. In August 2018, he has taken on the duties of the ensemble's Associate Artistic Director after moving to New York City. From 2016 until Spring, 2019, Kanasevich also worked as a curator/video maker for the online new music database and audio/video/score resource ScoreFollower/Incipitsify. In March 2021, he transformed Unknown Tapes from a self-release platform into a recording artist community dedicated to showcasing work by artists with unique approaches to spontaneous music-making and improvisation techniques, regardless of genre. As of July 2022, he is the new permanent member of Hub New Music.

Meg Rohrer

Meg (they/them/she/her) centers much of their work around chamber music.  Meg is the violinist of Hub New Music, a touring quartet dedicated to commissioning and performing new chamber music repertoire. Meg is also the violinist and violist in Virago, a Southeast Michigan-based quartet that melds contemporary chamber music with free improvisation. They are a member of the Kalkaska String Quartet, with whom they frequently perform in the metro Detroit area in a variety of settings. For two years, Meg was a member of the award-winning Converge String Quartet, a group dedicated to premiering new works by University of Michigan composers. Rohrer has recently performed with New Music Detroit and has been featured in the Riot Ensemble Festival in London, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, the University Musical Society’s Parable Path A2Ypsi Series, the Third Place Concert Series, the Midwest Composer Symposium, and Fever’s Detroit Candlelight Concert Series. 

As an orchestral musician, Meg has performed with the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, the Mendocino Music Festival Orchestra, and the Ann Arbor Symphony. Meg has made concertmaster appearances with the Michigan Philharmonic and the Campus Philharmonic Orchestra at the University of Michigan.  As a soloist, Meg performed a double concerto with violin and erhu with the National Chinese Orchestra Taiwan in 2019 and a violin concerto with the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra in 2012.

As an educator, Meg has trained in the Suzuki method and is influenced by the pedagogies of Mimi Zweig, Mark Mutter, Marilyn O’Boyle, Blair Milton, Danielle Belen, and Ed Sarath. Meg has a private violin studio and has taught through the Sphinx Organization, Crescendo Detroit, the Crowden Music Center in Berkeley, CA, the Ann Arbor Public Schools camp at Interlochen Center for the Arts, the Àkójọpò Music Festival, The People’s Music School in Chicago, and the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra summer workshop. Meg’s pedagogical philosophy focuses on teaching physicality, balance, and expression, challenging students to listen more deeply to each sound they produce and exploring creative processes in conjunction with building technique.

Meg earned their masters degree at the University of Michigan studying with Danielle Belen and Caroline Coade and holds a bachelors degree from Northwestern University where they studied with Blair Milton.  They have had the privilege to work closely with composers Tyshawn Sorey, Nina C. Young, Augusta Read Thomas, Shulamit Ran, and world-class ensembles such as yMusic, the Aizuri Quartet, the Dover Quartet, the Viano String Quartet, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. 

Meg is a New Mexican who grew up in California and is now embracing life as a Michigander. In their free time, Meg enjoys baking sourdough bread, the ever-expanding Star Wars universe, coffee, sunshine, and spending time with their eight younger siblings.

Nico Muhly, Drown (2023)

9 Minutes

Drown takes its title from an unusual object carved by James Drown, a man about whom little is

known who, in the early 19th century, spent around 5 months on the remote island Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. Drown, to mark time, carved a notch in a stick for each day he was there, along with the year, and the place-name “Providence, Rhode Island.” A sailor found the stick a few years after it was carved, and brought it back to Providence and presented it to Drown’s family, who hadn’t heard from him in years. A decade later, Drown appeared in Providence; there are no records detailing his reunion with his family. Drown is a piece about the marking of time, indicated by sharp, jagged notes always on D. The jagged notes appear as anchor-points through a series of variations: some quite peaceful, some angular and difficult, others frenzied and desperate. The piece ends in a state of oceanic suspension, a nod to the unknown and unknowable arc of this object’s journey across the globe. The so-called Calendar Stick is in the permanent collection of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and I would like to thank their curatorial staff, in particular Bethany Beatrice Gravel, for introducing me to this object.

NICO MUHLY

Commissioned by the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA) & Hub New Music. Written for Hub New Music for the ensemble’s 10th anniversary.

Nickitas Demos, WHITE OUT (2024)

WHITE OUT is a chamber ballet commissioned by the Park City Institute (Park City, Utah) for BalletNEXT, a professional dance ensemble based in Park City, Utah, and the Boston-based Hub New Music. Even though I had already engaged in some great conversations with flutist Michael Avitabile of Hub New Music about the scope of the piece, I didn’t write a note until I also had the opportunity to chat with Michele Wiles, choreographer, and dancer with BalletNEXT. In my mind, more than anything else, dance and the vision of the choreographer had to drive all musical ideas for this chamber ballet.

In talking with Michele, I learned of her desire to give movement to the natural phenomenon of a “whiteout.” This is a term that describes a very severe winter storm condition featuring blowing snow, wind drifts, and high winds. The result of this combination of events is extremely reduced visibility. Given a white, overcast sky with snow already covering the ground, the high winds blowing additional snow in a frenzy throughout the atmosphere renders everything solid white, a world with no visible horizon. As Michele described this to me, I was reminded of the two times I found myself engulfed in whiteouts while living as a graduate student in Cleveland, Ohio. These were terrifying experiences - especially for a person raised in the warm weather of Atlanta!

From Michele’s vision and my own personal experiences, the music for WHITE OUT was created. Within the small confines of this piece, I have tried to capture the small beginning of a winter storm with its first few flakes of snow and its growth into a furious, powerful, disorienting, and dangerous whiteout. The piece is in two general sections. The first section introduces music representing the snow and its escalation into a more severe event. However, before the actual whiteout occurs, the music pulls back giving way to a slow introspective moment. Despite its danger, a whiteout is nevertheless an awesome event and this quiet moment at the center of the piece is meant as a reflection of the power of nature. It is also quite literally the calm before the storm. The gradual increase of musical gestures mimicking snow begins again in the second section of the piece and continues until the music reaches a thunderous climax with all players performing collections of pitches as fast and as loud as possible so that all musical lines and harmony disintegrate into a chaotic soundscape representative of an intense world that has no visible horizon. The music, like all storms, eventually plays itself out and the composition comes to a gentle conclusion and the listener is left to ponder, as had this southern-raised composer who was twice forced to pull over to the side of the road during actual whiteouts, “What just happened???”

Nikitas Demos

Commissioned by the Park City Institute

Elijah Daniel Smith, Stagnation Blues (2024)

6 minutes

Growing up playing electric guitar in Chicago, the Blues were my natural first musical stop. As I got older and fell in love with other genres and traditions, Blues fell by the wayside, at least until a few years ago. During the long overdue reckoning with America’s racist history following George Floyd’s murder, I decided to dig a little deeper into my own family’s history and lineage.

Blues originated in the early 1900s in the Mississippi Delta, and it eventually made its way north to Chicago during the great migration. All of my grandparents passed away before I was born, but my dad’s parents were born in the heart of the Delta, and both came to Chicago during the Migration. It was the realization that my musical roots in the Blues were more than just a geographic circumstance, but a cultural and hereditary tradition that goes deeper than I had previously realized. This piece explores the way in which Blues has subtly and subconsciously influenced my compositional voice while also experimenting with the sound of iconic blues riffs and licks.

Daniel Thomas Davis, What If We’re Beautiful (2023)

18 minutes

I. Song for L.H.
II. Prelude for J.W. & K.H.
III. Anthem for M.M.
IV. Arietta for M.A.
V. Verses for A.I. and H.R. 

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.

Commissioned by Hub New Music

NICKITAS DEMOS - Composer

Nickitas Demos (b. 1962) holds a DMA from the Cleveland Institute of Music, a MM from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and a BM from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His principal teachers were Donald Erb (1927-2008) and Roger Hannay (1930-2006).

Commissions include works for the Cleveland Orchestra, Atlanta Ballet, Nashville Chamber Orchestra, Atlanta Chamber Players, and the National Association of College Wind & Percussion Instructors. Awards include Special Distinction in the 43rd Annual ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize (2023); Winner of the 2021 American Prize in Composition – Chamber Music; Finalist in the 2016 American Prize in Composition – Orchestra; Semi-Finalist in the 2015 Rapido! Composition Competition; MacDowell Fellowship (2012); Grand Prize in the 2004 Millennium Arts International Competition for Composers; Grand Prize in the 2005 Holyoke Civic Symphony Composition Competition; and 25 ASCAP Awards. His works have been programmed at festivals and conferences including the Bellingham Festival of Music; Dimitria Festival (Thessaloniki, Greece); International Review of Composers (Belgrade Serbia); and at National and Regional Conferences of the Society of Composers, Inc. and the College Music Society. His music is self-published through Sylvan Lake Press (ASCAP) and recorded on Ablaze Records, Albany Records, Petrichor Records, MSR Classics, Neuma Records, and Capstone Records.

Demos is Professor and Coordinator of Theory and Composition at the Georgia State University School of Music and the Artistic Director of the neoPhonia New Music Ensemble. He served as Director of the GSU School of Music (2017-2021) and Director of the Center for Collaboration & Innovation in the Arts (2016 – 2021). Demos served on the Board of Directors for MacDowell (2013-2016), the Executive Committee of the Society of Composers, Inc. (2005-2014), and was a Co-Founder of Bent Frequency, a professional contemporary music ensemble based in Atlanta, serving as Composer-In-Residence and Artistic Board member (2003-2008). He is the Co-Artistic Director of the SoundNOW Contemporary Music Festival (2015 to present).

The 2023-24 Main Stage Series was made possible with the generous support from the following individuals and organizations:

John & Jean Yablonski
Beano Solomon
Kim Li
The Ioannides Family Foundation
DPM Family
Jeanie and Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Goldberg Foundation
Joe & Cathy Cleary
Anonymous

St. Regis Deer Valley
Pendry Park City
Mountain Express Magazine
Waldorf Astoria Park City
Wicked Fast Internet
Marley Construction
Marcella Club
Flanigan’s Irish Pub
Warehouse Park City

Taylor Adams, Gretchen Anderson, Paul Aronzon & Michelle Hackley, Jo Ann & Jim Askins, The Blank Family Foundation, Marsha Bloom & Bobby Stevenson, Jill & Peter Borst, Roy Buchta, Jana Cole, Holly Etlin, Don & Teresa Epperson, Tom & Lynn Fey, Beth & John Goodwin, Josh Goodwin, Kimberly Gray, Sarah Harding, Robin Hauser, Terry & Ann Marie Horner, Macie House, Eileen & Pete Kitner, Mairi Leining, Jan Manning, Arthur Nicholas, Pat & Charlotte O'Connell, Allen & Rocio Poe, Patti Polster, Craig Reece, The Rosh Foundation, Harris & Debra Rose, Laurie & Owen Schwartz, Julie & Brad Senet, Robert Shallenberg, Claire Schilling & Tim Daniel, Bob Sertner & Steve Batiste, Joel & Lisa Shine, Kirk Sisson, Diane Sontheimer, Theresa & Jay Wrobel, Betsy Wallace & Ed Godycki, Mike Whitaker & Mariana Baserga

JW Bennett Hat Company, Explore Park City Real Estate LLC, Doubletree Hotel, KPCW, Park City Community Foundation, Park City Storage, Summit County RAP Grant, Jeremy Ranch, Summit County Restaurants, The Peaks Hotel, The Promontory Foundation