PIECES OF LIGHT to Arrive on MASS MoCA Records Featuring Gabriel Cabezas
The 12-track album explores light, perception, and hallucinatory experience through solo and layered cello.
On Friday, October 2, 2026, MASS MoCA Records releases the world premiere recording of composer Alyssa Weinberg's Pieces of Light, a suite of works for solo and layered cello created in close collaboration with cellist Gabriel Cabezas.
Across 12 tracks available to stream, download, or purchase on vinyl, Pieces of Light is a meditation on the properties of light, altered perception, and hallucinatory experiences. Inspired by the work of American visual artist James Turrell and his manipulation of light as an artistic medium, this collection of miniatures explores parallel acoustic phenomena, marveling at the intangibility of both light and sound, their rejection of the concrete and the real, and the sensorial power they wield over human experience.
The first single, 'ultraviolet,' is out today on all major streaming platforms with an accompanying video.
The album's origins reach back to 2019, when Weinberg and Cabezas were developing the earliest seeds of this music at Avaloch Farm Music Institute in New Hampshire. On the way home to New York, the two stopped at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and visited Turrell's Into the Light exhibition – a brief detour that proved decisive. 'We entered that exhibit together,' Weinberg says, 'and I just remember stopping dead in my tracks. We were in the installation Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld). The room becomes so saturated with color that I remember just sticking out my hand and thinking, 'Oh, I am the color purple. I am yellow.' These colors just felt so tangible.'
A Princeton-educated composer whose music has been championed by leading institutions and artists – among them the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, yMusic, and violinist Benjamin Beilman – Weinberg has long been fascinated by the connection between light, color, and sound, and by their shared ability to manipulate perception. Her 2023 composition Illuminating Arches was drawn from a metamorphosis she witnessed at Arches National Park, as the changing light of sunrise transformed the desert. In Turrell's work, she found the ultimate expression of light and color, returning to it over several years to develop Pieces of Light. 'Some of the things I really latched onto,' she says, 'were the way that colors evolve, the way that, if you have enough patience, images reveal themselves. There are so many incredible parallels to the things that excite me most about working with sound and music – like leaning into natural acoustics and resonances, and these sorts of sounds that can almost play tricks on your ear.'
Gabriel Cabezas is in demand internationally as a soloist and collaborator, prized as much for his devotion to newly composed music as for his command of the instrument. Working track by track, the two developed Weinberg's conceptual interests and sound worlds into an idiosyncratic language on the cello; selections from the project were previously featured on Cabezas's EP Live in Isolation (Bedroom Community). 'I love working with living composers,' Cabezas says, 'especially composers who are friends. The give and take that you can have is really amazing. It's one of the things that keeps me coming back to making new work, honestly.'
Weinberg draws an unusually wide range of sound worlds from a single instrument, wielding timbre, tone, and acoustics in place of color and light, carving caverns and spinning cocoons of layered cello – from the most delicate, softly voiced playing to passages of restless, propulsive motion.
The movements are as varied in their making as in their sound. 'ultraviolet' and 'shimmer' are notated conventionally and driven forward by moto perpetuo pulses, while others were built as inseparable collaborations between composer and performer, with the recording process itself becoming part of the writing. 'dissolve,' the album's central pillar, has no score. Weinberg brought small cells of musical material to the studio, Cabezas recorded them individually, and Weinberg then assembled the takes as a puzzle in her home studio using Ableton, producing a dizzying, DNA-like helix of movement. Elsewhere, as in the abstract 'phosphenes' inspired by Turrell's Hind Sight, an installation experienced in total darkness, Weinberg removed specificity of pitch from the score, translating her ideas through graphic notation and visual representation that Cabezas read as a coded map of gesture, color, and noise.
The album follows years of collaboration between the two artists, who first worked together at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia and went on to teach together and to co-found Duende, a new-music and contemporary dance collective. That long partnership has also shaped Weinberg's own vocabulary for the strings, helping her define and codify a musical language known for challenging the finest players in classical music.
For all the dexterity the music demands, Cabezas notes that its greatest challenges are not the high harmonics or rapid arpeggios. 'Some of the most difficult music on the album,' he explains, 'is actually the most delicate and the softest, with really slight variations in how you use the bow, slight variations in intonation.' It is a fitting emblem of the whole project: Turrell's idea of focus rendered in sound, where the smallest details, closely attended to, transform a larger idea into something new.
Tracklist
Alyssa Weinberg – Pieces of Light (2020-21) for Solo and Multitracked Cello
Side A
1. ultraviolet (3:16)
2. ganzfeld 1 (2:38)
3. wedgework (2:31)
4. strobe, squall (1:10)
5. refraction (2:50)
6. guardian (4:47)
7. shimmer (3:35)
Side B
8. dissolve (8:36)
9. phosphenes (3:52)
10. deep indigo (2:40)
11. ganzfeld 2 (2:47)
12. pink mist (5:32)
Total Time: 40:22
Recording Credits
Produced by: Alyssa Weinberg and Gabriel Cabezas
Recorded by: Florent Ghys at Princeton University
Additional Production: Pascal Le Boeuf
Mixed and Mastered by: Valgeir Sigurðsson at Greenhouse Studios, Reykjavík
Mastered for Vinyl by: Emily Lazar at The Lodge, assisted by Bob DeMaa
Art Direction: Randi Malkin Steinberger
Graphic Design: Nikita Sorokin
Photography: Cody Pickens
Additional Photography: Jon Verney
Project Management: James Lemkin and Nadia Sirota for Eclipse Projects
Executive Producer: Harlan Steinberger
Created with support from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University and The Curtis Institute of Music Young Alumni Fund.
About Alyssa Weinberg
Composer Alyssa Weinberg uses color, texture, and gesture to channel big emotions. She is fascinated with perception and loves to play with form, subverting expectations to create surreal scenarios, often in dreamy, multidisciplinary productions.
Weinberg's upcoming season celebrates the release of her album Pieces of Light with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, coming out on MASS MoCA Records in October 2026, as well as her new opera Claude & Marcel, with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann and director Elkhanah Pulitzer, commissioned by West Edge Opera and premiering in August 2027.
Weinberg's poetic monodrama ISOLA, a prismatic meditation on time, mental health, and isolation written in collaboration with librettist J. Mae Barizo, was premiered by Long Beach Opera in February 2024 to critical acclaim, and she was awarded a 2022 Opera America Discovery Grant to facilitate the development of Drift, a new opera with Barizo centering themes of motherhood, migration, and climate change, commissioned by Opera Saratoga.
Weinberg's music has been performed by celebrated artists and ensembles around the world, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, as well as So Percussion, yMusic, PUBLIQuartet, and the Aizuri Quartet. She has received commissions and awards from organizations including Chamber Music America, New Music USA, FringeArts, the Pennsylvania Ballet, the Barnes Foundation, and the Curtis Institute of Music. She has been awarded residencies at the Copland House, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Avaloch Farm Music Institute, among others. Weinberg's percussion music has been celebrated for its inventive use of color and innovative performance techniques, most notably for her prepared vibraphone duo Table Talk, which has received hundreds of performances across the globe.
A dedicated educator, Weinberg currently holds the position of Visiting Assistant Professor at the Butler School of Music at UT Austin and serves on the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music, and has held positions at institutions such as the Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School, among others. She is the Founding Director of the Composers Institute at the Lake George Music Festival, a summer program that centers mentorship and community alongside the craft of composition. Alyssa Weinberg holds a PhD in composition from Princeton University, as well as degrees from Vanderbilt University, Manhattan School of Music, and the Curtis Institute of Music. Learn more at weinbergmusic.com.
About Gabriel Cabezas
Cellist Gabriel Cabezas is a prolific and sought-after soloist and collaborator. Praised for his artistry and charisma, he is as comfortable interpreting new works as he is with the pillar scores of the cello repertoire and was named one of the 'Composers and Performers to Watch' by The Washington Post. Gabriel has appeared with America's finest symphony orchestras and has inspired and premiered dozens of new works by vanguard composers of the 21st century.
Cabezas is known for his extensive creative partnership with composer Gabriella Smith, with whom he released Lost Coast, a dynamic album of original music written in response to the climate change devastating her home state of California. Released on the Icelandic label Bedroom Community, it was named one of NPR Music's 'Favorite Albums of 2021' and featured by The New York Times as a 'Classical Album to Hear Right Now.' He premiered Smith's Lost Coast – a reimagining of music from the album for solo cello and orchestra – with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, and has since performed it with orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Seattle Symphony, where he served as Artist In Focus in the 2025-26 season.
A member of the genre-leading chamber sextet yMusic, Cabezas has helped draw collaborators ranging from Paul Simon to Bill T. Jones to Ben Folds and inspired new works by composers including Caroline Shaw, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, and Andrew Norman; the ensemble's evening-length collaboration with choreographer Kyle Abraham, Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, premiered at the Park Avenue Armory in 2024.
Gabriel also co-founded the string group Owls, described as 'a dream group...' by The New York Times. The quartet weaves together new compositions with fresh arrangements of music ranging from the 1600s to the present, made distinctive by the group's unique instrumentation of violin, viola, and two cellos. Their debut album, Rare Birds, was released in 2025 on New Amsterdam Records to wide acclaim.
Gabriel has recorded extensively as a studio musician, appearing on releases by Phoebe Bridgers, John Legend, Rufus Wainwright, and Taylor Swift, among many others. In 2016, Gabriel received the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, a career grant awarded to extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians. Gabriel studied at the Curtis Institute of Music under Carter Brey. Learn more at gabrielcabezas.com.
About MASS MoCA Records
MASS MoCA is a contemporary art museum that emphasizes bold creative exploration and fosters surprising connections between people every single day. It upholds artistic freedom and is an indispensable home for artists who stretch toward what has yet to be created. Launched in October 2025, MASS MoCA Records is a new record label and a collaboration between MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and Hen House Studios that establishes a unique framework for record-making by centering artistic creativity, museum residencies, and live music-making. The label provides an alternative to the current commercial model for how independent music is heard, developed, and shared. A limited number of albums will be released each year, and many are produced at various recording studios in the Berkshires. Artists selected for the new label are an extension of the museum's curatorial ethos, and the label does not have a scheduled application process. Learn more at massmoca.org/mass-moca-records.
