RAFAEL RIOS
ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL
There is a longstanding perception of the flute that if it’s not J.S. Bach and early music, it’s Claude Debussy and modernism.
The Montclair-based flutist and composer Allison Loggins-Hull deviates from that quite radically through a body of work that defies genre, from symphonic to film scores, chamber music to electronic. She also has accompanied major pop acts such as Lizzo and Frank Ocean.
She took on a new role, recently, as Resident Artistic Partner with New Jersey Symphony. And concertgoers can catch her as curator, host and solo flutist in a program of her own music, alongside works by Jessie Montgomery and Debussy.
The Oct. 13 concert — which is titled “An Afternoon with Allison Loggins-Hull” and will feature the New Jersey Symphony Chamber Players — is part of the Oct. 9-13 Newark Arts Festival, and will take place at Newark School of the Arts, one of the symphony’s community partners. It will be free, though registration is required; visit njsymphony.org.
The program will introduce her to the symphony community in an intimate chamber music setting, with the music intended to create a celebratory feel. “All the pieces have a very joyous undertone, and I also wanted to have a mix of new and old,” Loggins-Hull says.
The traditional side will include selections from Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor, a four-movement work of expressive tonal shifts and poetic themes. “One of the primary reasons why it landed on the program is that the imagery reminds me of joy and beauty,” Loggins-Hull says. “For me as a composer, because of Debussy’s very impressionistic and colorful writing style, it is very symbolic of joy as far as how I interpret the music and the sound world.”
The 20th century French composer redefined and reinvigorated the flute repertoire through landmark writing, including his famous Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894) and Syrinx (1913), the first solo flute composition written for both the modern Böhm flute and the first of any significance following C.P.E. Bach’s Flute Sonata in A minor from 1747.
RAFAEL RIOS
ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL
He is one of Loggins-Hull’s favorite composers for the flute. “Aside from the Faun excerpt, which is one of our most treasured solos from the repertoire,” she says, “he wrote Syrinx, a really beautiful solo flute piece. There’s also a trio for flute, harp and viola that I think is one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for flute and chamber music.
“I feel his writing for the instrument is so idiomatic; it feels so great in the hands. And I think his harmonic language really lends itself to the instrument in terms of tone color possibilities and the way the flute can just sit so elegantly in that sound world. There is a connection there in terms of the relationship between the sound of the flute and the way it’s very vocal, and how the tone colors can shift in a very colorful way.”
Loggins-Hull’s own flute music will represent the program’s new school with Can You See?, an ensemble piece that plays on the theme of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was her first collaboration with the symphony and its inclusion in the program was “a way to make a full circle moment of how the relationship started a few years ago, and a nice way to tie it all in,” she says. “The ask for that commission was to write something that questioned our role as American citizens to one another, kind of being part of a larger national community and whether or not we were rising to the occasion of the lyrics of our national anthem.”
The collaboration was initiated by Loggins-Hull’s predecessor at the symphony, composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain. In the role of curator and host, he premiered it at a 2021 outdoor New Jersey Symphony Chamber Players concert conducted by Raquel Acevedo Klein, one of Loggins-Hull’s close friends.
She remembers it as nothing short of a good time. “It was one of the first concerts I had done since (COVID) lockdown,” she says. “It was overwhelming because it had been such a long time since any of us had done anything like that. People weren’t really sure how to manage live performances but were hoping to come together and make music again, and we were all very grateful to be there, so there was a really good attitude, and even a feeling of relief to be able to make music again with others.”
A full orchestral version of the work was recently commissioned by The Cleveland Orchestra, where Loggins-Hull is completing the last of three years as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow, and premiered during the 2022-23 season. The orchestra also played its European debut in Berlin this summer.
New Jersey audiences will have the chance to hear the expanded version, conducted by Christoph König, at the symphony’s “Brahms and Chopin” concerts, Feb. 20-23 in Newark, New Brunswick and Red Bank.
At the Oct. 13 concert, Tong Chen, who was assistant conductor of the symphony from 2021-23, will conduct a nine-player ensemble of James Tsao and Maya Shiraishi, violin; Michael Stewart, viola; Jonathan Spitz, cello; LonFon Law, bass; Kathleen Nester, flute; Andrea Menousek, horn; and David Fein and Dan McMillan, percussion. (The New Jersey Symphony Chamber Players is a touring chamber ensemble from the symphony’s roster who play neighborhood concerts across the Garden State.)
Part of Loggins-Hull’s allure as a composer is that she gives the flute a compelling voice without resorting to cliché or rehashing traditional idioms.
“I think it’s the influence of not just the instrument but of me being so immersed in flute repertoire and also flutes from all over the world and in different styles, too, and I think it comes out very naturally in my musical tastes both curatorially and also as a composer,” she says. “Though that’s not to say I don’t favor and appreciate different instruments.” (She cites the string quartet and cello repertoires as favorites, too.)
Ethel members (from left) Dorothy Lawson, Kip Jones, Ralph Farris and Corin Lee, with Allison Loggins-Hull.
She is also a highly collaborative artist, which will be on display in Persist (see video below), the title track she composed for string quartet Ethel’s upcoming album, to be released Dec. 6 on the Sono Luminus label.
The album features Loggins-Hull and four young composers from historically underrepresented backgrounds: Migiwa “Miggy” Miyajima, Xavier Muzik, Sam Wu and Leilehua Lanzilotti. Each composer drew on personal stories of courage and resilience in the face of great difficulty and hardship.
“The pieces are all very storytelling in nature and kind of cinematic, too, with a sense of journey and hope,” she says. “We all have very different musical perspectives and life backgrounds but what’s really wonderful is that, despite it all, there is a real cohesion and a continuity between the pieces, and I think it’s because we all knew who we were writing for — this very unique string quartet — which I think is important as a composer.”
Though Loggins-Hull’s piece was written for flute and string quartet, with live samples, the concert version will be an arrangement she created for flute, string quartet and percussion. “Slightly different, but more or less compositionally the same piece,” she says.
Persist is typical of her signature style, which incorporates orchestral instruments and unexpected electronic elements through sampling and unique sonic components, influenced by Black American music. She explores similar musical language in Flutronix, a flute duo she co-founded in 2007 with flutist Nathalie Joachim.
RAFAEL RIOS
ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL
Her work often centers on social and political themes, and cultural identity viewed through the lens of Black cultures. Persist is no different, honoring her relatives’ and ancestors’ sacrifices while overcoming adversity.
“I imagine what their lives could have been like had they not been subjected to disenfranchisement, segregation, or slavery,” she writes in the album’s liner notes. “When I am having my most difficult days, I remember these ancestors for clarity and perspective. I feel extreme gratitude for the fire they’ve lit inside of me and for their spirit that lives through and within me.”
Loggins-Hull and the musicians of Ethel go way back; she worked in their artistic administration many years ago. The alternative string quartet, founded in 1998 in New York, blends diverse artistic genres into a collaborative musical language of color and texture aimed at community engagement.
“When I think of them, I think of fun music; a good time,” she says. “They’re not a traditional string quartet in that you’re not going to hear Brahms or Mozart or anything like that.”
(The ensemble kicked off The Morris Museum’s Lot of Strings 2023 season with a headbanging string quartet arrangement of Led Zeppelin’s iconic “Kashmir” alongside works by Philip Glass and Ennio Morricone.)
Another close friend, Montgomery, will be on the program with Strum, originally written in 2006 for string quartet/quintet and revised throughout the years until its final version in 2012. The music is expansive and celebratory, and captures the spirit of American folk idioms through dancerly rhythms and motifs. “I’m always so happy to include her voice,” Loggins-Hull says. “I find that her writing style in general is very joyful in nature; it’s very rhythmically exciting and the tonality is often very bright.”
Montgomery is no stranger to the symphony. Her strings rhapsody Banner opened its centennial season in October 2022, followed a couple of weeks later by the East Coast debut of her mini-symphony Snapshots.
For the remainder of this year, Loggins-Hull will shift back from soloist to composer, devoting the majority of her time to writing music.
“I definitely have to compartmentalize,” she says. “Oftentimes my flute is there in the writing process. If I’m working on a composition, I’ll spend a chunk of the day working on that, but if I know I have some flute stuff happening it means I’m practicing later — but the practice is more about maintenance than thinking deeply about the music. They definitely exercise different muscles in my brain and I feel like I’m switching, but at the same time, they all inform each other, so it ends up working out.”
She just completed a rhapsody for flute and orchestra to be performed next year by co-commissioners the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony and The Knights. The Knights, a chamber orchestra based in New York, will premiere it Dec. 8, featuring one of their flutists, Alex Sopp. “She’s one of my favorite flutists,” says Loggins-Hull. “She’s also a good friend and was the muse for the piece: It all really started with her.”
She will also settle into her new artistic leadership position at New Jersey Symphony, which was created in 2021 by Roumain to promote equity and bring fresh musical perspectives to the symphonic artform. While Roumain went by the title of Resident Artistic Catalyst during his tenure from 2021 to 2024, the position was renamed Resident Artistic Partner with Loggins-Hull’s appointment in September.
TODD ABEDRABBO
Allison Loggins-Hull will perform with The New Jersey Symphony Chamber Players in Newark, Oct. 13.
Born in Chicago, Loggins-Hull grew up listening to her father’s jazz and classical albums. She took to the flute in grade school after her family moved to Poughkeepsie and continued as a musical performance major at SUNY Purchase. Unsure about her path as an orchestral flutist, she took time off while pursuing a graduate degree and played gigs around Manhattan, which led to an improvisational style. She transitioned from performer to composer and graduated with a master’s degree in composition from NYU.
In 2016, she moved to Montclair to raise a family with her husband, trumpeter Geoffrey Hull, whom she met while playing in the New York Youth Symphony. From 2018 to 2022, she served on the flute faculty of The John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University.
She feels particularly invested with the symphony because it allows her to do what she loves, locally.
“I’m really excited for the opportunity to find ways to collaborate with other arts and community organizations,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of potential in my own community of Montclair and in other areas of New Jersey as well, and I’m really curious to see what kind of new ideas we can dream up in a collaborative way.
“There’s a lot of talented people in New Jersey — filmmakers, actors, jazz musicians, all kinds of creative people — so I can’t wait to see what we can explore together. It’s a really awesome opportunity because I get to do it at home!”
For more about Allison Loggins-Hull, visit allisonloggins.com.
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