The expectations weren’t clear for ‘Iceberg Music with Hypercube’, a name that suggested the frigid February temperatures outside New York’s Tenri Cultural Center. Hypercube, presented genre-bending chamber music by six young composers on February 15th. The Iceberg New Music collective, founded in 2016, celebrates new music with concerts and awards to pre-collegiate composers from under-represented backgrounds. Iceberg’s first album recorded with Jenny Lin from Sono Luminus records was released last year.

Many shy away from contemporary music fearful of abrasive sounds without a melody, but on Saturday night the music was meditative, compelling and had elements of rock. The chamber quartet Hypercube is comprised of a percussionist, a saxophonist, a guitarist and a pianist. The percussionist relied on a drumset and a xylophone.  During one piece the pianist left her keyboard to beat the timpani. Composer Drake Anderson appeared on stage with his laptop for his Courses. 

Featured composers:

• Reverence, Lost is Derek Cooper’s response to his mistreatment as a teaching fellow at Manhattan School of Music.  He is a doctoral student whose music has been performed in New York and Pennsylvania. The Allenstown Symphony Orchestra gave him an honorable mention for his work, Daybreak.
• Peal by Max Grafe relies on a refrain that he expanded organically. He received a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and teaches in the pre-collegiate division at Juilliard where he is working on his doctorate.  His music has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the FLUX quartet and the Tanglewood Music Center.
• HYPARTITA by Stephanie Ann Boyd is a dance suite in three movements: Slow, Last and Break.  She wrote Open House, New York, for the opening of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. The NY City Ballet has commissioned her work as she’s written 5 ballets.  Her violin sonata Amerigo has been performed in nearly all 50 states.  In April the Wyoming Symphony will perform her Suffragette Symphony which will celebrate 150 years of women’s suffrage in Wyoming.
• Poison Comes in Small Bottles by Jug Marković is a quick intense piece. For a Dublin choir festival, Serbian poetry served as the text for his composition. The European Network of Professional Chamber Choirs awarded him a Young Composers Award. He is working on a chamber opera, Eurydice in the Underworld for the Festival D’Aix Provence
• Courses by Drake Anderson allows the performers to shape the piece with “new paradigms of interaction” with “software algorithms.” He’s a sound designer for theater and dance and a doctoral student at CUNY.  His music is often electronic and improvisational.  
• Bosquejo Bop Serio translates as Serious Bop Sketch.  Victor Baez, a native of Mexico City, studied in piano and composition in Vienna.  A Fullbright Scholarship brought Victor to New York. His work as a composer is to translate “impulse into the language of sound.”

  Members of the Hypercube chamber ensemble:

• Erin Rogers, Saxophone
• Jay Sorce, Guitar
• Andrea Lodge, Piano and Accordion
• Chris Graham, percussion