| Contemporary music |
Christopher Cerrone & Hub New Music: New Addresses – The Everyday Turned Into Wonder
New Addresses, the new recording by American composer Christopher Cerrone and the quartet Hub New Music, make you listen differently to the world. After a few minutes you realise that a pedestrian crossing, a line of poetry or a slightly out-of-tune note can hold a whole universe, and that you had simply never paid enough attention. Out on November 6th, 2026, on Better Company Records, this is a delicate, intelligent, wonderfully human record, and one that we love very much.
Born in New York in 1984, Christopher Cerrone is one of the most admired American composers of his generation, and the list of his achievements is dizzying. His first opera, Invisible Cities, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and was staged to sold-out houses in Los Angeles’s Union Station; his second, In a Grove, travelled from Pittsburgh and Los Angeles to New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival and ended up on The New York Times’s list of the year’s best classical performances. He has written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony and the Louisville Orchestra, won the Rome Prize, and his album Don’t Look Down, recorded with Sandbox Percussion, earned a GRAMMY.
What strikes you in everything he writes is an extraordinary delicacy with timbre and resonance, a taste for literature, and a way of balancing richness and austerity. The Times described his music as “coolly caressing”, and the phrase is exactly right. It is music that never shouts, yet it holds you completely.
Founded in Boston in 2013 as a school project and now based in Detroit, Hub New Music has become one of the finest champions of living composers, with more than forty commissions to its name and a fascinating line-up of flute, clarinet, violin and cello. Here it is Michael Avitabile (flute), Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet), Magnolia Rohrer (violin) and Jesse Christeson (cello), and it would be hard to imagine four players better suited to this music. Their playing is clear, supple and fearless, and they never treat difficulty as an obstacle: as Christeson told the composer, all new music is impossible to some degree, it is just a matter of solving it. You can hear that attitude in every bar.
The album gathers three works that seem very different on the surface and are in fact deeply related:
New Addresses (2020), the title piece, is a trio of miniatures inspired by odes from the poet Kenneth Koch’s collection of the same name, poems addressed directly to things, people and ideas. “To Breath” is carried by the insistent chuffing of the flute, “To My Heart at the Close of Day” lets a long, melancholy violin solo float in the dusk, and “To ‘Yes’” is a lively march that affirms, again and again, the same note. Each movement hides a moment of revelation, a sudden half-step slide here, an unexpected low note there, which makes the whole piece pivot, the way Koch’s apparently casual poems suddenly reveal something much deeper. Written in the middle of the pandemic and first heard in a livestream, it has finally found the studio recording it deserved.
South Catalina (2014), first played by the Chicago sextet eighth blackbird, is here joined by two guests of the highest quality, percussionist Ian Rosenbaum of Sandbox Percussion and pianist Adam Tendler. The clarinet’s multiphonics, two pitches forced from a single instrument, rub against the notes of the piano and produce a slow, hypnotic “beating”, a throbbing that comes from the interference between frequencies. It is a fascinating idea: imperfection is not corrected but built into the music and turned into beauty. Cerrone was so struck by Hub’s reading that he asked them to record it even though another top ensemble had already done so, and when you listen you understand why: Kanasevich’s clarinet is breathtaking.
Barnes Dances (2024) is the most surprising of all. The title refers to those intersections where every vehicle stops and pedestrians can cross in any direction, and Cerrone weaves recordings of audible crosswalk signals, collected in Reykjavík, Jersey City, Brooklyn and Paris, into the live ensemble. The five dances become a kind of poetic travel diary, with the electronics, handled by the composer himself, adding a faint, ghostly halo. The idea could have been a gimmick, but in Cerrone’s hands it becomes moving, even melancholy, a talking signal that seems to flicker into consciousness and mutter its own little monologue. The microtonal detuning that runs through the work, produced by the players with specific, carefully notated techniques, gives the whole suite a strange glow, at once familiar and slightly out of reach.
What unites these three pieces is a belief that the ordinary becomes something else if we look at it closely enough. A poet’s address to his own breath, a clarinet that sings two notes at once, a pedestrian light in a foreign city, all of them are transfigured without any heavy-handed effects, simply through careful handling of time, sound and space. It is poetry in the most literal sense, and it is never cold or intellectual. There is wit here, tenderness, a quiet sadness, and always the pleasure of four exceptional musicians completely engaged in what they play.
The recording, made between December 2025 and July 2026 in Brooklyn and at the Mannes School of Music, and handled by Mike Tierney, is crystalline and warm, with every breath, harmonic and electronic shimmer perfectly placed. The booklet, with a lively and funny essay by Daniel Stephen Johnson, is a pleasure in itself and tells how the project survived a pandemic, a tornado and a few other mishaps (the “curse” of the album is part of its charm).
At barely thirty-eight minutes, New Addresses is concise, generous and beautifully paced, a perfect introduction to Cerrone’s world for newcomers and a joy for those who already know it. We recommend it with all our heart, and we will be coming back to it often. Hub New Music celebrates the release at Miller Theatre in New York on November 10.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, October 24th, 2026
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Tracklisting:
New Addresses
1.New Addresses: I. To Breath
2.New Addresses: II. To My Heart at the Close of Day
3.New Addresses: III. To “Yes”
4.South Catalina
Barnes Dances
5.Barnes Dances: First Dance: Reykjavík, Iceland
6.Barnes Dances: Second Dance: Jersey City, NJ
7.Barnes Dances: Third Dance: Brooklyn, NY vidéo
8.Barnes Dances: Fourth Dance: Paris, France
9.Barnes Dances: Fifth Dance: Barnes Dance
Musicians:
Hub New Music: Michael Avitabile – flute, Gleb Kanasevich – clarinet, Magnolia Rohrer – violin, Jesse Christeson – cello
Ian Rosenbaum – percussion (South Catalina)
Adam Tendler – piano (South Catalina)
Christopher Cerrone – electronics (Barnes Dances)
Credits:
All works composed by Christopher Cerrone.
Produced by Mike Tierney, Christopher Cerrone and Hub New Music
Recorded, mixed, and edited by Mike Tierney
Mastered by Alan Silverman
Album design by Greystudio, Molly Haig and Laura Grey