August 1: Cellist Maya Beiser Releases New Album - Salt - Music by Missy Mazzoli, Meredith Monk, Clarice Jensen, Tavener, Purcell, and more
Maya Beiser: Salt
A profound musical meditation on memory, reflection, and women’s voices across time
Music by Missy Mazzoli, John Tavener, Meredith Monk, C. W. Gluck, Clarice Jensen, Claudio Monteverdi, Y. Admon, and Henry Purcell
Release Date: August 1, 2025
Islandia Music Records
Press download and CDs available upon request. Hi res photos available here.
New York, NY – On August 1, 2025, cellist and producer Maya Beiser, hailed as a “force of nature” by The Boston Globe, will release her newest solo album, Salt, on her Islandia Music Records label. This conceptually rich collection centers around the biblical figure of Lot's Wife, exploring themes of memory, witness, and the cost of remembering.
“There's a moment in the story of Lot's Wife that has haunted me for years,” says Maya Beiser. “It's not the turning to salt—it's the turning to look. That instinctual, human act of looking back at what you love, even as it's being destroyed. That moment holds everything: memory, defiance, tenderness—and the impossible cost of remembering.”
The new album emerges from Maya’s ongoing artistic engagement with the figure of Lot’s Wife, whom she first explored in her 2012 “cello opera,” Elsewhere. In it, Maya offers a powerful reinterpretation of this ancient story: “She disobeyed not out of rebellion, but out of memory. She preferred the pain of looking back to the emptiness of blind escape. She chose the past— its beauty, its ruin, its truth—over the safety of an unknown future. And for that, she was turned to salt,” she says. “I've always seen that pillar not as punishment, but as a monument.”
On her new album, Maya gives voice to this nameless biblical figure who, for her, became “a symbol of all the women who have been punished for remembering, for feeling too much, for refusing to move on. I imagined her not as a cautionary tale, but as a witness. A woman who couldn’t unsee what she had loved. A woman who dared to turn around.”
At the album's core is Missy Mazzoli's Salt, a powerful mini-opera for alto voice, amplified cello and electronics, featuring text by celebrated screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson and vocals by the extraordinary performer Helga Davis. Maya describes the work as, “a conversation across time: Lot's Wife speaking from her 'salted jail' to the future.” She adds, “Playing this piece feels like uncovering a fossilized voice—fragile, ancient, and ferociously present.”
The album weaves together works that meditate on these central themes of remembrance, resistance, and reflection, including Maya’s arrangements of Gluck’s Melody from Orfeo ed Euridice, Tavener's Lament to Phaedra and Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, which she approaches as musical explorations of mythic women condemned for their profound longing.
Clarice Jensen’s Salt Air, Salt Earth conjures a sonic landscape that seems to evoke geological time. Maya describes the piece as, “playing through sediment—layers of ancient sound and sensation, buried but not gone.” Jensen has said she was inspired both by the story of Lot’s Wife and the ancient ritual of “salting the earth” of a conquered city.
Maya’s reimagining of Meredith Monk's Hocket examines memory and fragmentation—of two voices within one instrument. Her reconstruction of Shedemati, a song from her childhood in Israel, is performed with the compelling vocal artist Odeya Nini. She says of the piece, which she has known for most of her life, “I felt the bittersweet pull of land, loss, and identity. My ancestors sang it as pioneers; I now play it as a mourner.”
The album concludes with Purcell's When I Am Laid in Earth, which Maya calls, “not just an ending—but a laying to rest.”
“In January 2025, we were deep in the making of this album as fires raged across Los Angeles, war tore through the Middle East, and political discourse in the U.S. grew ever more ominous,” Maya adds. “In this moment, Salt feels uncannily timely.”
About Maya Beiser:
Hailed by The Washington Post as “the reigning queen of avant-garde cello,” Maya Beiser is a cellist, sound artist, and musical innovator whose work has redefined the scope of contemporary classical performance. Raised on a commune in the Galilee Mountains of Israel by her Argentinean father and French mother, Beiser grew up immersed in the music and rituals of Jews, Muslims, and Christians—an early fusion of worlds that continues to shape her boundary-defying artistic vision.
A Yale graduate and United States Artists Distinguished Fellow, Beiser has performed on the world’s most iconic stages, from Carnegie Hall to the Barbican, challenging norms and reinventing the solo cello as an expansive sonic canvas. Her fifteen solo albums—many topping classical charts—span reimagined masterpieces, original works, and cinematic collaborations. She is the featured soloist on numerous film soundtracks and a sought-after collaborator across genres and continents.
As the founder of Islandia Music Records, Beiser creates projects with deep cultural, spiritual, and social resonance—pushing the art-music genre into uncharted territory.
For more information, visit www.mayabeiser.com.
Track Listing:
Maya Beiser: Salt
Islandia Music Records
Release Date: August 1, 2025
1-5 Salt [21:35]
Composed by Missy Mazzoli, text by Erin Cressida Wilson
Featuring Helga Davis, vocals
6 Lament to Phaedra [14:31]
Composed by John Tavener, arranged by Maya Beiser
7 Hocket [5:54]
Composed by Meredith Monk, reimagined by Maya Beiser
8 Melody from Orfeo ed Euridice [3:56]
Composed by C. W. Gluck, arranged by Maya Beiser
9 Salt Air, Salt Earth [15:28]
Composed by Clarice Jensen
10 Lament d’Ariana [4:54]
Composed by Claudio Monteverdi, arranged by Maya Beiser
11 Shedemati [5:06]
Composed by Y. Admon, reimagined by Maya Beiser
Featuring Odeya Nini, vocals
12 When I am Laid in Earth [7:03]
Composed by Henry Purcell, arranged by Maya Beiser
Total Length: 78:33
All tracks performed by Maya Beiser, cello/electronics
With:
Track 1-5 Helga Davis, vocals
Track 11 Odeya Nini, vocals
Produced by Maya Beiser
Engineered and mixed by Dave Cook*
Mastered by Scott Hull
*Missy Mazzoli’s Salt was engineered by Lawson White, edited and mixed by Dave Cook and generously supported by Linda and Stuart Nelson.
Album design and concept art by Denise Burt
Photos of Maya by Abigail Fenton
Recorded at The Art at Foothill Farm, Lenox, Massachusetts
Mixed at Area 52 Studios, Saugerties, NY
Mastered at Masterdisk Peekskill, NY
About Islandia Music Records:
Islandia Music Records is an independent label founded by cellist and producer Maya Beiser. A home for boundary-breakers and sonic visionaries, it brings together avant-garde musicians, visual artists, sound designers, and technologists to forge new frontiers in art and sound.
