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Princeton Sound Kitchen presents Hub New Music
Presented by Princeton Sound Kitchen
date & time
Tue, Mar 19, 2024
8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
ticketing
Free, unticketed
- This event has passed.
Flute, clarinet, violin, and cello ensemble Hub New Music performs new works by Princeton University faculty composer Donnacha Dennehy and graduate student composers Francisco del Pino, Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, Hope Littwin, Elijah Daniel Smith and Max Vinetz.
Hub New Music:
Michael Avitabile, flutes
Jesse Christeson, cello
Gleb Kanasevich, clarinet
Meg Rohrer, violin
Program
Hope Littwin guided meditation
Francisco del Pino Passacaglia
Elijah Daniel Smith Stagnation Blues
Max Vinetz let it ring
Aliayta Foon-Dancoes traceries
Donnacha Dennehy Concertina
About PSK
A lab for Princeton University composers to collaborate with today’s finest performers and ensembles, Princeton Sound Kitchen is a vital forum for the creation of new music. Serving the graduate student and faculty composers of the renowned composition program at the Department of Music at Princeton University, PSK presents a wide variety of concerts and events throughout the year.
Program Notes
Hope Littwin
guided meditation
Francisco del Pino
Passacaglia
More and more, my work converses with ancient forms. I don’t intend the music itself to sound old, but—perhaps paradoxically—sometimes it’s only by looking back that I can fish for ideas that feel exciting. In this piece, the expressive marking at the beginning of the score is “nostalgically joyful,” words that in hindsight are like a metaphor for that other, broader program.
The idea of the passacaglia works more as an allusion rather than as a straight description, but still seems apt due to both the persistent ternary nature of the music and its circular harmonic progression. Only hiccup is, the passacaglia was first of all a form of dance—and this one might be a hard one to dance to.
Elijah Daniel Smith
Stagnation Blues
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 (and I guess St. Louis too) 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.
Max Vinetz
let it ring
While composing let it ring, I envisioned resonant melodies and harmonies that would keep the violin and cello ringing throughout the piece. To do this, I extensively used open harmonies based on the open strings of both string instruments. As a result, I ended up writing a fiddle tune and orchestrated it out for the entire ensemble, attempting to bring resonance to the full quartet. While this work deviates in harmonic content in relation to most of my body of work, I had lots of fun writing this piece and hope to bring more of this musical language into my musical practice.
Aliayta Foon-Dancoes
traceries
Opposing entities are woven together, forming an emulsion, a juxtaposition, an argument, a unified form. Endless thanks to Steve Mackey for his guidance and Hub for their sound.
Donnacha Dennehy
Concertina
The concertina, with its expanding and contracting bellows, seems like an apt metaphor for the way this piece works. In fact, I thought of the name very early on, and this oscillating motion of filling out and squeezing in influences the piece on every level, from the pattern through the metrically shifting phrases to the larger shape. It was a joy to write this piece for the wonderfully focused players of Hub New Music.
About
Francisco del Pino is a Buenos Aires-born composer and guitarist with an affinity for music that is meticulous, expressive, and patient. Drawing influence from both classical and vernacular traditions, his work revolves around process and pattern and is usually characterized by an extensive use of counterpoint. Francisco’s debut album Decir, a song cycle on texts by Argentinian poet Victoria Cóccaro, was released on New Amsterdam Records in 2021. His music has been described as of “sheer beauty” (Bandcamp Daily), “lucid, entrancing” (I CARE IF YOU LISTEN), and “ethereal, yet heavy, distinguished, yet humble—and always beautiful” (Classical Post). Francisco is a PhD candidate in the Music Department and a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities.
Called “thrilling” by The Guardian and “arrestingly beautiful” by The New Yorker, Donnacha Dennehy’s music has featured in festivals and venues such as the Berliner Festspiele; Edinburgh International Festival; Beethovenfest, Bonn; Royal Opera House, London; Carnegie Hall, New York; Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam; Barbican, London; the Huddersfield Festival; and BAM, New York, among others. In addition to a trilogy of operas with the writer Enda Walsh, recent large-scale works include Land of Winter for Alarm Will Sound, Tessellatum, a microtonally shifting forty-minute piece for strings, The Hunger, a docu-cantata, and a violin concerto for Augustin Hadelich that has received performances in Europe and the US. The Konzerthaus Orchester gave the German premiere, conducted by Joanna Mallwitz, at MusikFest Berlin in the Autumn of 2023. Portrait albums of his music have been released by Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe, NMC, and Bedroom Community. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021 and is a professor at Princeton University.
Aliayta Foon-Dancoes is an award-winning Canadian violinist, composer and interdisciplinary collaborator. Until this Fall, she was living in London, England, working with the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC, and 12 Ensemble. She has performed at the Musikverein, Wigmore Hall, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris and the BBC Proms. Collaboration is central to Aliayta’s practice. She is a co-founder of the commissioning project Orbit Duo and the interdisciplinary collective THIRTYMINUTES. Through these projects, Aliayta has composed for new instruments designed by sound sculptor Marla Hlady, commissioned and performed pieces by Olivia Shortt, Cris Derksen and Robyn Jacob, premiered work at the Canadian Opera Company, and exhibited experimental audiovisual pieces Sub Tei (Berlin) and Espacio Gallery (London). Recently, Aliayta recorded on Esmerine’s Juno award-winning album Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, and, with her sister, Rebecca Foon, co-wrote the soundtrack for One & One Other, a film commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts Centre. Other work includes a collaboration with Patti Smith and Pathway to Paris, performances alongside Patrick Watson at Live At Lost River, and a tour of Phases, a live violin and multi-channel sound performance co-created with London based new media design studio Kai Lab. Aliayta holds a BA from the University of Victoria, a MA from the Royal Academy of Music and has held Chamber Music Fellowships at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music (London). This Fall, she will begin a PhD in Composition at Princeton University.
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” (The 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 – 2024, the group is in residence at Indiana University, Princeton University, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Hub continues its 10th Anniversary Commission Project in 2023 – 2024 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, the members of Hub are 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, University of Michigan, University of Texas, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, University of Southern California, and Indiana University. Hub New Music is Michael Avitabile (flutes), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinets), Meg Rohrer (violin/ viola), and Jesse Christeson (cello). The ensemble’s name is inspired by its original home of Boston. Hub is currently based in Metro- Detroit and maintains active ties to Boston. Hub New Music is exclusively represented by Unfinished Side.
American composer and music producer Hope Littwin grew up in dance and theater before she took to music, first as a singer-songwriter then as a classical singer and now as a composer and music producer. She loves to collaborate with artists of all kinds on embodied, expressive works. Hope’s compositions fuse chamber music, vocal music, electronics and choreography. She has been commissioned by choirs, chamber ensembles, theater and dance companies to lead the creation of original works that pull from the idiosyncratic desires and abilities of the ensembles that she is engaged with. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University. The Daily Princetonian says Hope Littwin’s music explores the “euphoric realm, where the physicality of musical expression is fully embraced— where music is not only something we do, but something we are.” Hope’s original works are available for streaming on band camp and YouTube, her albums can be found on Spotify and iTunes. Find Hope on Instagram @hopelittwin
Elijah Daniel Smith is an African American composer whose music has been described as “gnashing and relentless” (Chicago Tribune), “seductive” (Gramophone), and as “an ingenious study in clarity and distortion” (San Francisco Classical Voice), and ranges from orchestral compositions to experimental electronic music. His music has been premiered and performed by world renowned ensembles including The Chicago Symphony Orchestra for MusicNOW, the American Composers Orchestra, the New England Philharmonic, the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Contemporaneous, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Bergamot Quartet, Sō Percussion, Sandbox Percussion, Lorelei Ensemble, ~Nois, TAK Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, DITHER, Copland House, Ensemble Linea, Ecce Ensemble, the Lea Mattson Collective, and Earspace. Upcoming projects include new works for the American Composers Orchestra, and a new octet for Sō Percussion and ~Nois. Elijah is the Composition Studies and Ensemble 20/21 Associate at the Curtis Institute of Music, and he is currently pursuing his PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University as a President’s Fellow. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Composition from the Boston Conservatory in 2017, and a Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University in 2020. Elijah’s music is published by Project Schott New York.
Max Vinetz’s music draws inspiration from various intersections between improvisatory, popular, and traditional forms and aesthetics. His work centers the perception of rhythmic and timbral events and is concerned with the relationships between narrative, musical objects, and sonic artifacts as they relate to music and other forms of media. Max is a recipient of a Fromm Foundation Commission, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Award (2018, 2020), the Paul and Christiane Cooper Prize, and the Gardner Prize from the American Viola Society. He has received additional recognition and awards from Voices of Ascension, the Doug Davis Composition and Performance Endowment, Musiqa, Copland House, and the Mizzou International Composers Festival. As a Yale undergraduate, Max won the Beekman Cannon Friends Prize, awarded for a “musical composition exhibiting unusual originality and promise,” the Abraham Beekman Cox Prize awarded to the “most promising and gifted composer” in the junior class, and was also awarded the Lewis P. Curtis Fellowship, the Tristan Perlroth Prize, and the R.J.R. Cohen Fellowship for Musical Performance (2017, 2018). Upcoming projects include an evening length staged electroacoustic song cycle for panSonus, titled The New Manilla Envelope and an EP written in collaboration with Anson Jones. A graduate of both Yale and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Max is currently pursuing his PhD in Composition at Princeton University as a Naumburg Doctoral Fellow.
About PSK
A lab for Princeton University composers to collaborate with today’s finest performers and ensembles, Princeton Sound Kitchen is a vital forum for the creation of new music. Serving the graduate student and faculty composers of the renowned composition program at the Department of Music at Princeton University, PSK presents a wide variety of concerts and events throughout the year.
Program Notes
Hope Littwin
guided meditation
Francisco del Pino
Passacaglia
More and more, my work converses with ancient forms. I don’t intend the music itself to sound old, but—perhaps paradoxically—sometimes it’s only by looking back that I can fish for ideas that feel exciting. In this piece, the expressive marking at the beginning of the score is “nostalgically joyful,” words that in hindsight are like a metaphor for that other, broader program.
The idea of the passacaglia works more as an allusion rather than as a straight description, but still seems apt due to both the persistent ternary nature of the music and its circular harmonic progression. Only hiccup is, the passacaglia was first of all a form of dance—and this one might be a hard one to dance to.
Elijah Daniel Smith
Stagnation Blues
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 (and I guess St. Louis too) 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.
Max Vinetz
let it ring
While composing let it ring, I envisioned resonant melodies and harmonies that would keep the violin and cello ringing throughout the piece. To do this, I extensively used open harmonies based on the open strings of both string instruments. As a result, I ended up writing a fiddle tune and orchestrated it out for the entire ensemble, attempting to bring resonance to the full quartet. While this work deviates in harmonic content in relation to most of my body of work, I had lots of fun writing this piece and hope to bring more of this musical language into my musical practice.
Aliayta Foon-Dancoes
traceries
Opposing entities are woven together, forming an emulsion, a juxtaposition, an argument, a unified form. Endless thanks to Steve Mackey for his guidance and Hub for their sound.
Donnacha Dennehy
Concertina
The concertina, with its expanding and contracting bellows, seems like an apt metaphor for the way this piece works. In fact, I thought of the name very early on, and this oscillating motion of filling out and squeezing in influences the piece on every level, from the pattern through the metrically shifting phrases to the larger shape. It was a joy to write this piece for the wonderfully focused players of Hub New Music.
About
Francisco del Pino is a Buenos Aires-born composer and guitarist with an affinity for music that is meticulous, expressive, and patient. Drawing influence from both classical and vernacular traditions, his work revolves around process and pattern and is usually characterized by an extensive use of counterpoint. Francisco’s debut album Decir, a song cycle on texts by Argentinian poet Victoria Cóccaro, was released on New Amsterdam Records in 2021. His music has been described as of “sheer beauty” (Bandcamp Daily), “lucid, entrancing” (I CARE IF YOU LISTEN), and “ethereal, yet heavy, distinguished, yet humble—and always beautiful” (Classical Post). Francisco is a PhD candidate in the Music Department and a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities.
Called “thrilling” by The Guardian and “arrestingly beautiful” by The New Yorker, Donnacha Dennehy’s music has featured in festivals and venues such as the Berliner Festspiele; Edinburgh International Festival; Beethovenfest, Bonn; Royal Opera House, London; Carnegie Hall, New York; Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam; Barbican, London; the Huddersfield Festival; and BAM, New York, among others. In addition to a trilogy of operas with the writer Enda Walsh, recent large-scale works include Land of Winter for Alarm Will Sound, Tessellatum, a microtonally shifting forty-minute piece for strings, The Hunger, a docu-cantata, and a violin concerto for Augustin Hadelich that has received performances in Europe and the US. The Konzerthaus Orchester gave the German premiere, conducted by Joanna Mallwitz, at MusikFest Berlin in the Autumn of 2023. Portrait albums of his music have been released by Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe, NMC, and Bedroom Community. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021 and is a professor at Princeton University.
Aliayta Foon-Dancoes is an award-winning Canadian violinist, composer and interdisciplinary collaborator. Until this Fall, she was living in London, England, working with the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC, and 12 Ensemble. She has performed at the Musikverein, Wigmore Hall, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie de Paris and the BBC Proms. Collaboration is central to Aliayta’s practice. She is a co-founder of the commissioning project Orbit Duo and the interdisciplinary collective THIRTYMINUTES. Through these projects, Aliayta has composed for new instruments designed by sound sculptor Marla Hlady, commissioned and performed pieces by Olivia Shortt, Cris Derksen and Robyn Jacob, premiered work at the Canadian Opera Company, and exhibited experimental audiovisual pieces Sub Tei (Berlin) and Espacio Gallery (London). Recently, Aliayta recorded on Esmerine’s Juno award-winning album Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, and, with her sister, Rebecca Foon, co-wrote the soundtrack for One & One Other, a film commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts Centre. Other work includes a collaboration with Patti Smith and Pathway to Paris, performances alongside Patrick Watson at Live At Lost River, and a tour of Phases, a live violin and multi-channel sound performance co-created with London based new media design studio Kai Lab. Aliayta holds a BA from the University of Victoria, a MA from the Royal Academy of Music and has held Chamber Music Fellowships at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music (London). This Fall, she will begin a PhD in Composition at Princeton University.
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” (The 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 – 2024, the group is in residence at Indiana University, Princeton University, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Hub continues its 10th Anniversary Commission Project in 2023 – 2024 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, the members of Hub are 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, University of Michigan, University of Texas, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, University of Southern California, and Indiana University. Hub New Music is Michael Avitabile (flutes), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinets), Meg Rohrer (violin/ viola), and Jesse Christeson (cello). The ensemble’s name is inspired by its original home of Boston. Hub is currently based in Metro- Detroit and maintains active ties to Boston. Hub New Music is exclusively represented by Unfinished Side.
American composer and music producer Hope Littwin grew up in dance and theater before she took to music, first as a singer-songwriter then as a classical singer and now as a composer and music producer. She loves to collaborate with artists of all kinds on embodied, expressive works. Hope’s compositions fuse chamber music, vocal music, electronics and choreography. She has been commissioned by choirs, chamber ensembles, theater and dance companies to lead the creation of original works that pull from the idiosyncratic desires and abilities of the ensembles that she is engaged with. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University. The Daily Princetonian says Hope Littwin’s music explores the “euphoric realm, where the physicality of musical expression is fully embraced— where music is not only something we do, but something we are.” Hope’s original works are available for streaming on band camp and YouTube, her albums can be found on Spotify and iTunes. Find Hope on Instagram @hopelittwin
Elijah Daniel Smith is an African American composer whose music has been described as “gnashing and relentless” (Chicago Tribune), “seductive” (Gramophone), and as “an ingenious study in clarity and distortion” (San Francisco Classical Voice), and ranges from orchestral compositions to experimental electronic music. His music has been premiered and performed by world renowned ensembles including The Chicago Symphony Orchestra for MusicNOW, the American Composers Orchestra, the New England Philharmonic, the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Contemporaneous, JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Bergamot Quartet, Sō Percussion, Sandbox Percussion, Lorelei Ensemble, ~Nois, TAK Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, DITHER, Copland House, Ensemble Linea, Ecce Ensemble, the Lea Mattson Collective, and Earspace. Upcoming projects include new works for the American Composers Orchestra, and a new octet for Sō Percussion and ~Nois. Elijah is the Composition Studies and Ensemble 20/21 Associate at the Curtis Institute of Music, and he is currently pursuing his PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University as a President’s Fellow. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Composition from the Boston Conservatory in 2017, and a Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University in 2020. Elijah’s music is published by Project Schott New York.
Max Vinetz’s music draws inspiration from various intersections between improvisatory, popular, and traditional forms and aesthetics. His work centers the perception of rhythmic and timbral events and is concerned with the relationships between narrative, musical objects, and sonic artifacts as they relate to music and other forms of media. Max is a recipient of a Fromm Foundation Commission, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Award (2018, 2020), the Paul and Christiane Cooper Prize, and the Gardner Prize from the American Viola Society. He has received additional recognition and awards from Voices of Ascension, the Doug Davis Composition and Performance Endowment, Musiqa, Copland House, and the Mizzou International Composers Festival. As a Yale undergraduate, Max won the Beekman Cannon Friends Prize, awarded for a “musical composition exhibiting unusual originality and promise,” the Abraham Beekman Cox Prize awarded to the “most promising and gifted composer” in the junior class, and was also awarded the Lewis P. Curtis Fellowship, the Tristan Perlroth Prize, and the R.J.R. Cohen Fellowship for Musical Performance (2017, 2018). Upcoming projects include an evening length staged electroacoustic song cycle for panSonus, titled The New Manilla Envelope and an EP written in collaboration with Anson Jones. A graduate of both Yale and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, Max is currently pursuing his PhD in Composition at Princeton University as a Naumburg Doctoral Fellow.