Hub New Music: Soul House
New Amsterdam Records

Anyone who's experienced the nostalgic ache of revisiting a childhood home years later will not only relate to Robert Honstein's Soul House but likely find it extremely moving. The NYC-based composer has distilled his own experiences into a thirty-four-minute piece that's affecting on multiple levels, its nine movements wistfully evoking the carefree spirit of childhood yet also conveying the bittersweet recognition that the period can only ever be recaptured at a remove. The Boston ensemble Hub New Music shows itself the ideal vessel for Honstein's conception, the quartet's woodwinds-and-strings configuration ideal for giving voice to the work's lyrical tone.

Though Soul House is its debut release, Hub New Music—flutist Michael Avitabile, clarinetist David Dziardziel, violinist Alyssa Wang, and cellist Jesse Christeson—has been performing since its 2013 founding; the group had also played a number of Honstein pieces prior to commissioning what the four expected would be a twenty-minute piece. Initially the composer imagined basing the work on a visit he'd made to his late grandmother's house where he found himself overwhelmed by the memories and associations that emerged as he moved through its rooms. But his focus gradually shifted to his own childhood home in New Jersey, which in turn witnessed the expansion of the piece into nine “memory spaces,” each one redolent of a physical space. While the work's title is drawn from an ancient Egyptian tradition whereby clay model houses were buried with the dead to ensure access to food and shelter in the afterlife, the term's greater resonance has to do with the fact that a house isn't a mere physical structure but a teeming repository of associations and impressions.

Much as one inhabits a home, the quartet inhabits Honstein's “love letter” to his childhood domicile in the fullest sense of the word. That's, in part, attributable to the instrumentation involved. As Honstein himself notes, “There is a beautiful, viscous kind of blend that happens as you move back and forth between the winds and strings,” and to that end he fashioned the material so that the timbres and textures generated therefrom would capture the shifting, evanescent character of memory.

Whereas stabbing figures in “Driveway” evoke the morning race to grab the car's front seat, the gossamer, airy textures of “Bay Window” conjure an image of a young boy nestled in a cozy nook and transfixed by the world outside, the creaking string harmonics and buoyant woodwind figures suggesting a bright summer's day and people and creatures going about their daily business. A sense of longing is conveyed that one associates with both the child in the home and the adult he became reviving the memory impression vividly through song. As poignant is “Copper Beech,” Honstein's stately homage to a majestic tree on the family property, and the resplendent “Secret Place,” a moving evocation of a child's safe haven. Soul House isn't programmatic in the strict sense, but there are moments where it's suggested, the rapid, interweaving patterns in “Stairs,” “Hallway,” and “Backyard” evoking the joyful animation of children during spirited playtimes.

Every movement finds the quartet stirringly evoking the world of Honstein's memory, the group's playing an invitation to the listener to partake of the elegiac experience. Soul House is that rare instance where composer and performer are wonderfully matched, the former providing the latter with material that brings out its best qualities, and the latter an exceptional conduit for the former's creative expression. The result is a magnificent, intensely poignant translation of inner experience into sound.

September 2020