Maya Beiser x Philip Glass Concert Will Be Performed at Hudson Hall Later This Month

On Saturday, July 24 at 7pm, cellist, arranger, and producer Maya Beiser is joined with a group of all-star cellists to perform Maya Beiser x Philip Glass at Hudson Hall (327 Warren St., Hudson, NY).

Drawn from her latest album (which was recorded at Hudson Hall in the winter of 2021), the immersive performance brings together an astounding group of avant-garde cellists - Jeffrey Zeigler, Clarice Jensen, Andrew Yee, and Paul Wiancko - to create a multi-layered sound sculpture, exploring and unveiling new dimensions in some of Philip Glass's most powerful and achingly beautiful works. Maya's multi-cello arrangements include Glass's piano Etudes Nos. 2 and 5, Mad Rush, Music in Similar Motion, and selections from Naqoyqatsi, part of Glass's Qatsi Trilogy with filmmaker Godfrey Reggio. Maya's solo album, Maya Beiser x Philip Glass, will be released on her Islandia Music Records label on July 23. The first single for the album, Etude No. 5, will be released tomorrow, July 9.

Maya says, "In making this album, I searched for layers of sound that might reveal something new about Glass's ingenious creative power. I was thinking about stratum, the layering that occurs in most sedimentary rocks formed at the Earth's surface. I imagined the layers of my cello becoming porous and Glass's music flowing vociferously through each layer, like lava, endlessly creating new patterns, expanding into the landscape. For me, recording a solo album is an introverted, solipsistic process. I go inward and build the sound from within, building my cello's layers one at a time. In the live performance, I wanted to create a shared communal experience, to expand that powerful communion that enfolds between myself and the audience. I reached out to some of the most brilliant artists/cellists I know, wanting to create another communion between the five cellists performing. It's a different kind of magic. It's a dialogue that allows for multiple journeys to happen at once."

Setting up to reimagine two of her favorite Glass's piano etudes, Etude No. 5 and Etude No. 2, Maya took out her Boss RC-300 and began experimenting with live looping these scores. She was surprised to discover how natural it was to create them as solo cello loops.

Glass's 1979 work, Mad Rush, is a pianistic tour de force. But what interested Maya in creating this work as a multi-cello track was the opportunity to explore its hallucinatory quality. She wanted to create a sonic cello kaleidoscope. Mad Rush, along with the rest of the tracks on the album, are de facto cello ensemble pieces with Maya performing all the parts and experimenting with perspective, dynamics, and timber.

For her multi-cello version of the minimalist classic Music in Similar Motion, written in 1969, Maya constructed a powerful trance-inducing track. She has added percussive sounds from her cello and multiple delays to convey the way she hears and feels this music.

In 2005, Philip Glass invited Maya Beiser to perform the solo cello part in his Naqoyqatsi score on a worldwide tour of his extraordinary Qatsi Trilogy. They performed together, with the Philip Glass Ensemble, in many of the world's greatest venues, including the Sydney Opera House, the world Expo in Nagoya, an ancient Roman amphitheater in France, and a Greek amphitheater in Barcelona. The last four tracks of the album, Naqoyqatsi, Massman, New World and Old World are from the Naqoyqatsi score. These pieces are the most "classical" ones on this album, in terms of their sound and structure. Aiming for big orchestral sound, Maya's arrangement takes on the violin and piccolo, the celeste and timpani parts, with her 17th Century cello.

Maya Beiser x Philip Glass is Maya Beiser's fourteenth solo album and follows the success of her two most recent recordings on Islandia Music Records - David Bowie's Blackstar with Evan Ziporyn and the Ambient Orchestra (2020) and delugEON, an elegiac album for the natural world (2019).