By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Flutist Michael Avitabile’s musical career has developed in a way he never anticipated. As he pursued his classical music studies, he had his sights set on landing a job in a symphony orchestra.
Then a couple sour audition experiences, and call to action from fellow flutist and MacArthur Fellowship winner Claire Chase helped change his tune.
“The speech was a call to arms for the graduating class students (at Northwestern University) to start their own organizations, build their own projects, essentially be their own employers in an industry that wasn’t employing the entire graduating work force,” Avitabile said in a recent telephone interview.
At the time he encountered Chase’s call, the University of Michigan alumnus was pursuing graduate studies in Boston at the New England Conservatory.
From Ann Arbor, he’d brought with him a love of new music — something he disliked when he was in high school.
So in 2013 he pulled together some fellow conservatory students and started staging concerts in churches, galleries, any place that wouldn’t charge him to use the space.
The instrumentation varied at first, but soon settled on the unusual mix of flute, clarinet, violin, and cello.
There was a practical element to this — the venues tended not to have pianos and it’s difficult to haul around percussion.
But also, Avitabile said, the blend of strings and winds was attractive. The musicians also discovered a “treasure trove” of pieces written for this instrumentation.
“Just getting these pieces ready we found we really enjoyed playing with this combination of instruments, learning the techniques of the other instruments, and exploring the very large color palette.”
Some of those compositions, Avitabile said, are still in the ensemble’s repertoire. They started reaching out to composer friends to write pieces for them. In 2015 Hub New Music started touring. “So what started as a school project turned into my full-time job,” Avitabile said.
Hub New Music — Avitabile, clarinetist David Dzardziel, violinist Zenas Hsu, and cellist Jessie Christenson — will visit Bowling Green State University this week as guest ensemble for the New Music Festival. The quartet will perform Friday at 8 p.m. in Kobacker Hall on campus.
Avitabile is the ensemble’s executive director. The members handled all management duties until this summer when they contracted with Stuart Wolferman of Unfinished Side Productions. But even that relationship is highly collaborative with the musicians still handling many administrative duties.
Avitabile’s musical education, he said, did not prepare him for this business side. So he took on as many internships and jobs as he could in Boston and New York to learn how to book concerts, set up tours, and commission music.
Those are now essential skills for musicians wanting to launch independent careers.
The ensemble is devoted to new music, working closely with a widening circle of composers. “New music is such a tight community, you’re never more than two degrees of separation from anyone.”
At BGSU, they will play “Soul House” by “one of our really really good friends” Boston-based composer Robert Honstein. It’s a signature work for the ensemble that has performed it about 20 times.
The 35-minute-long piece is “a love letter” to the composer’s childhood home. Each of the nine movements reflects one of the features of the house — the bay window, the alcove, the stairs.
“It’s centered around concepts of nostalgia and memory,” Avitabile said.
It pairs well, both in terms of length and theme, with Anna Clyne’s “1987.” The quartet plays with taped sounds, including from a carnival and from a music box the composer’s father gave to her mother before they were married.
The other piece on the program will be “Pieces of Winter Sky” by the festival’s featured guest composer Aaron Jay Kernis.
The piece was written for Eighth Blackbird, one of Hub’s models, and was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013.
“Pieces” requires piano and percussion. For the composition the ensemble will collaborate with two musicians from College of Musical Arts — doctoral student Henrique Batista on percussion and faculty pianist Yevgeny Yontov
Such collaborations are not unusual for Hub. They’ve worked with a variety of other artists including dancers and the alt-classical collective Oracle Hysterical.
Avitabile said the collaboration adds another dimension to the visit to BGSU.
“Pieces of Winter Sky” is a showcase for the ensemble that has the instruments stretching into their highest and lowest notes.
It employs, Avitabile said, “colorful harmonic language and rhythmic movement you hear in jazz and swing, it’s very genre-fluid.”
Avitabile said as a University of Michigan student he as very familiar with the contemporary music scene at BGSU. “We’re excited just for a week to join that community and be part of the incredible work in contemporary music in Bowling Green.”
