Memory, nostalgia, longtime associations, and enduring relationships: these are the raw materials from which Soul House, the recording by the vital Boston ensemble Hub New Music, was constructed. Out via New Amsterdam’s Windmill Series on June 29th and available on all digital platforms on August 7th, the recording comprises a single work by New York composer Robert Honstein, who formed a close bond with Hub during a period when he lived and worked in Boston.

That connection formed the foundation for this present, ambitious collaboration: a 35-minute piece in nine movements, custom built for Hub. The group, founded in 2013 by Michael Avitabile, the talented, expressive flutist who serves as its executive director, had played several pieces by Honstein already when it commissioned what was envisioned as a 20-minute piece.

“Around the time Mike asked me to write this piece, I'd actually been thinking of writing about my grandmother's house,” Honstein says. “She had recently passed away, and had been living in the same house in Espanola, New Mexico, for about 65 years. At the time of her death I spent some time walking through her house, and found myself overwhelmed by the memories and experiences located in that space.”

Honstein was inspired further by the notion of a “soul house,” an ancient funerary tradition associated with Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (ca. 2040-1782 BCE), in which tiny clay model domiciles stocked with facsimile food, furniture, and sometimes servants were buried with the deceased. But when he set out to compose, the dwelling he ended up evoking in musical memory was his own childhood home in New Jersey. As he wrote, more and more details and impressions crowded their way into his blueprint.

“As Rob was delivering the piece, we kept getting additional movements inspired by different sections of his house,” Avitabile says. “It turned into a little joke in the group about how many more rooms he would keep including, and kept us wondering how big this house was.” Ultimately, Soul House would represent nine memory spaces. In a program note prefacing the score, Honstein denotes each succinctly:

…a contemplative nook in a sun filled Bay Window; a cozy Alcove; the rush of action through the Hallway down the Stairs and a triumphal arrival on the Landing; the running, chasing play of the Backyard; the morning rush (and endless struggle for the “front seat”) of the Driveway; a stately old Copper Beech, majestic and noble in its rooted splendor; and finally a Secret Place, somewhere just for myself where all the dreams and frustrations of childhood mingle in private, a wondrous cocktail of confusion and delight.

What’s evident from the opening bars of “Bay Window” – “light dancing on a wall, relaxed and carefree,” the score directs, enacted with shimmering string harmonics and wistful woodwind lines – is that the subject of Soul House is not the materiality of a physical structure, precisely. Rather, the piece illuminates how emotional impressions are formed and retained in a specific place, what distinct features might come to dwell in one’s mind and heart, and how a gifted composer might transform such impulses into sounds that suggest the textures and contours of lived experience—while also accommodating a listener’s own associations.

Another expressive marking in “Bay Window” – “fragile, wide-eyed,” at bar 22 – confirms that what’s being conjured is less construction than perception. If similar instructions throughout the piece – “contemplative, with some mystery” melds with “expressive, but with some restraint” in “Alcove”; “weathered but wise” prefaces “Copper Beech” – show how deeply individual these impressions are, their interpretation in this recorded performance confirms a familiarity and authority rooted in long, fruitful association between composer and interpreters.

What’s more, Honstein says, the unconventional quartet provided by Hub’s core roster – flute, clarinet, violin, cello – helped to facilitate the evanescent qualities he set out to achieve. “There is a beautiful, viscous kind of blend that happens as you move back and forth between the winds and strings,” he explains. “I tried to create textures that exploited this quicksilver quality. That sense of color fluidly shifting became, I suppose, a metaphor for the memories themselves: fleeting, changing, difficult to grasp, but present.”

—Steve Smith

Steve Smith writes about music for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and publishes an independent newsletter, Night After Night.

Soul House

Tracks
Bay Window. 6:42
Stairs. 2:08
Alcove. 1:51
Hallway. 1:44
Backyard. 5:16
Driveway. 2:11
Copper Beech. 4:20
Landing. 3:20
Secret Place. 6:18
Total Duration: 33:50