For those unaware, in celebration of the courage, patience and resilience displayed by people in times of great difficulty, ETHEL, the GRAMMY®-winning, genre-defying string quartet, joins forces with Allison Loggins-Hull, composer, flutist, producer, and Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow to the Cleveland Orchestra.

Together, they have elicited new commissions from four brilliant early-career composers: Migiwa “Miggy” Miyajima, Xavier Muzik, Sam Wu, and 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Leilehua Lanzilotti. Loggins-Hull herself contributed her own masterwork to the project.

Passionate, committed, hopeful and inspiring, each piece contributes to an experience which surpasses the sum of its parts.

Taking its title from Loggins-Hull’s quintet, Persist marks the fifth iteration of HomeBaked, ETHEL’s commissioning program for early-career composers.

The initiative, begun in 2010, has commissioned and debuted 20 works by 16 early-career artists. Loggins-Hull teamed with ETHEL to solicit, select, and collaborate with composers from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Supported by two NEA grants, the program was premiered in 2022 at Brooklyn Public Library, and tours in 2024/25.

Allison Loggins-Hull
1 Persist [11:14]

Xavier Muzik
2 PillowTalk [13:27]

Migiwa “Miggy” Miyajima
3-6 The Reconciliation Suite
1. The Unknowns [2:16]
2. Never Be the Same [4:30]
3. Mr. Rubber Sole from the Digital World [2:51]
4. The Blooming Season [4:12]

Sam Wu
7 Terraria [7:25]

Leilehua Lanzilotti
8-10 we began this quilt there
i. Uluhaimalama [3:35]
ii. Ku‘u hae aloha [1:00]
iii. Paoakalani [4:02]

This exquisitely sculpted new recording opens on Allison Loggins-Hull’s titular Persist, a hauntingly ethereal, yet encouraged to elegantly flourish as the piece moves work, and that is followed by Xavier Muzik’s truly sumptuous, if not staggered throughout with engaging shafts of stern, yet cultured moments of wonderment PillowTalk, and then comes Migiwa “Miggy” Miyajima’s four-piece The Reconciliation Suite: the carefully flighty The Unknowns, the breathy stillness of Never Be the Same, the veritably cinematic Mr. Rubber Sole from the Digital World, culminating on the wistfully ornate gossamer of The Blooming Season.

Along next is Sam Wu’s atmospherically-charged masterpiece, Terraria, and which also happens to be my own favorite of the works culled together here on this quite breathtaking new recording. That is in turn then backed by Leilehua Lanzilotti’s decadent three-piece we began this quilt there, which itself begins with the defiantly enabled Uluhaimalama, the shorter, gently foreboding work Ku‘u hae aloha, coming to a close on an aching embrace that resides within a pulsing ebb and flow contained within the masterful Paoakalani.

Artist: Ethel, featuring Allison Loggins-Hull

Composers: Allison Loggins-Hull, Xavier Muzik, Migiwa Miyajima, Sam Wu, and Leilehua Lanzilotti

Official Apple Music Purchase Link