Cellist Maya Beiser is a fascinating artist. She’s recorded close to 20 albums on her own, is a member of Bang On A Can, and has been a featured performer on a bunch of movie scores, collaborating with composers like James Newton Howard and Carter Burwell. Her work exists beyond considerations of genre; she’s interpreted pieces from classical composers ranging from Bach to Galina Ustvolskaya but also, with Evan Ziporyn, reconfigured David Bowie’s Blackstar as a cello suite.

The first album I heard of hers was 2021’s Maya Beiser x Philip Glass, on which she reworked two of his études, versions of “Mad Rush,” “Music in Similar Motion,” and four sections of the score to Naqoyqatsi for cello. It’s a swirling, hypnotic release on which she lays down multiple lines that weave together and overlap in order to recreate the stacked harmonies and cyclical patterns of Glass’s music. Since then, she’s recorded sonically radical versions of Bach’s six cello suites on 2023’s Infinite Bach, and transformed Terry Riley’s In C using loops and drones.

Her latest album, Salt, is a departure in several ways. For one thing, it features other people. The five-part title piece was composed by Missy Mazzoli, with text from Erin Cressida Wilson that’s sung by Helga Davis. It’s inspired by the story of Lot’s wife, who was transformed into a pillar of salt while fleeing the city of Sodom. (God told her not to look back, but she did. Seems like a reasonable reaction on his part, right?) Anyway, Wilson’s text imagines Lot’s wife as a prisoner, thrown out of her home without her daughters or any mementos of her life, and then punished for wanting to remember what once was. Davis’s voice, sometimes filtered through electronics to alter its pitch and timbre, conveys anguish and stoicism in equal proportion, and the words express mourning and resilience.

Other compositions on Salt include John Tavener’s Lament for Phaedra, Meredith Monk’s Hocket, Clarice Jensen’s Salt Air, Salt Earth, Claudio Monteverdi’s Lament d’Ariana, and Henry Purcell’s When I am Laid in Earth. There’s also an arrangement of a melody from Christopher Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, which mirrors the theme of looking back (Orpheus was allowed to rescue Eurydice from Hades on the condition that he not look back at her until they had reached safety; he did so, and she died). Yeah, that’s a lot of lamenting, a lot of mourning, a lot of thoughts about mortality.

The music is really beautiful, though. Lament for Phaedra runs nearly 15 minutes, and is possessed of a moody, dark-tinged grandiosity, accentuated by subtle use of electronics and reverb. The electronics are much more prominent on Salt Air, Salt Earth, which Beiser describes in the liner notes as “A sonic desert. A mineral dream.” Though these two tracks don’t arrive back to back (the Monk and Gluck pieces sit between them), taken together they remind me of Tangerine Dream, who released the album Phaedra in 1974 and whose 1972 album Zeit prominently features the Cologne Cello Quartet on its first track.

Salt is a long album — almost 79 minutes — but it flows incredibly well as a program of music. The next-to-last track, Shedemati, is initially surprising; it’s an old Israeli song that here features traditional instrumentation (lute and percussion) and wordless vocals from Odeya Nini, plus cello and electronics. At first, it seems out of place, but in a way it mirrors Hocket, which was originally a piece for two vocalists throwing a melody back and forth between them and is here played on two cellos. And then you get to the Purcell track, which closes out the disc, and everything makes sense. The album finishes with an operatic groan, like a dying character sinking down to the stage, and you are released from an extended meditation: on exile, on mourning, on solitude, but also on companionship and family and heritage, on remembering where you’re from and what that means.

This is an extraordinarily well-put-together album. Every piece fits, and they all have something to say to each other and as part of the overall theme. It’s not something you should put on in the background; it deserves your full attention, and thought afterward. I love it. It’s on streaming services, but if you want a physical CD, I recommend buying it straight from Beiser.

I sent her some questions about the album via email; her answers are below.

— Phil Freeman

How long did it take for Salt (the piece) to come together, and were you and Missy Mazzoli and Erin Cressida Wilson and Helga Davis all working on it together at the same time, or did it go in stages — music, then lyrics, then tweaking?

Salt, the song cycle, grew out of a project I created for BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) for their Next Wave Festival. Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the story of this mythical, nameless woman who was turned into a pillar of salt as she fled her burning city. She was told not to look back by a punishing god, who condemned her for her humanity — her love for her home, her city, her people. I wanted to hear her story, to feel her through the centuries-old crystallized prison she was locked in, to acknowledge her humanity.

I connected with Erin through the director Robert Woodruff. I love Erin’s writing — raw, bold, feminist, unapologetically sexual, real. I decided to commission Missy to write the music, and it was a perfect match; their work connected beautifully. Around the same time, I heard Helga sing a solo set in a Harlem theater. I was smitten by her stage presence. She isn’t a traditional singer; her voice has an insane range and a striking androgynous quality that I loved. It all came together organically, but the piece first lived in the theater world as the closing act of my CelloOpera.

It wasn’t until last year that I decided I wanted to release it as the headline piece for an album.

There are several pieces on the album that seem/feel paired to me — Salt and Orfeo ed Euridice; Lament for Phaedra and Salt Air, Salt Earth; Hocket and Shedemati. Am I interpreting these pairings correctly, and what can you say about this aspect of the record?

Yes — you’re hearing something essential. The album is built as a constellation of mythic laments, and I deliberately created pairs that echo and refract one another. Salt and Orfeo are both about looking back, about the danger of memory. Lament for Phaedra and Salt Air, Salt Earth inhabit the same sonic landscape — electronics, breath, an elemental quality. Hocket and Shedemati both play with pulse and ritual. For me, these pairings invite the listener to hear across centuries — to sense how grief, longing, and defiance repeat in human history.

When you’re putting together a program of music like this, how long does it take to think of material that will work together in this way? Do you constantly have a voice in your head that’s telling you, Oh, I should pair this with that? How much research and thought was involved? Did anyone advise or recommend pieces to you?

I often live with ideas for a long time. My mind is full of endless compartments — sediments of lived experience, layered, feeding each other, contextualizing, evolving. Then something awakens, and my imagination begins to investigate. It’s very intuitive. Very few things in my career have been planned in advance. I don’t like artificial, preconceived ideas; they bore me quickly. I prefer to let things flow through me and show me where I need to go.

For Salt, my mind guided me from the story of Lot’s wife to other mythic women who dared to break from the script — Phaedra, Arianna, Dido. Once that framework was in place, the album formed intuitively. I don’t do a lot of formal “research,” although in a sense my life is my research. And, of course, the work of great artists, writers, composers, and creators who have shaped and riveted me always echoes in what I do. But when I make artistic choices, I rely on what resonates in my body, on what haunts me.

This feels like a departure for you in general — a lot of your discs focus on the work of a single composer (Bach, Glass, Riley). What were the particular challenges of this album?

Every album is a kind of departure for me, because I usually set out to explore an idea I haven’t yet touched in my work. With single-composer albums, it’s often about uncovering my unconventional perspective through a musical language I love and that speaks to me deeply. Sometimes it’s about shining light where it was dark, or vice versa — excavating, discovering, finding worlds hidden within the music.

Salt began with a story. That made it different. The challenge was to create a unified arc out of many voices, building a narrative space where they could coexist.

Shedemati felt out of place when I first listened to the album, because the instrumentation is so different and it has an overt rhythm, but when I went back and listened again it made more sense in the context of the entire work. How and why did you decide to include it?

The ancient biblical story of Lot’s wife happened in the land where I was born. So much blood, pain, and terrible human suffering has taken place — and continues to take place — in this beautiful, tragic land. Shedemati means “my land” in Hebrew. It’s a song I first heard in my childhood, popularized by the wonderful Yemenite singer Shoshana Damari.

I wanted to connect the album’s music to the songs that emerged from this battered land. As I wrote in my album notes: My ancestors sang this song as pioneers; I now play it as a mourner.

I really like the use of electronics on Lament for Phaedra and Salt Air, Salt Earth; the two pieces reminded me of Tangerine Dream in a way (who used a cello quartet on their album Zeit). I know you’re very interested in sound generally (I have Infinite Bach); what did you do differently in terms of production and recording on this record?

With this album, I wanted to create a sense of landscape — a sonic desert, vast, elemental, infinite. I recorded Lament for Phaedra in my own version of a “straightforward” way (which is never truly straightforward for me). My recording studio is very reverberant, with lots of glass, creating natural mirroring and reflection effects. I recorded the drones first, making them as lush and reverberant as possible to create an expansive space for the melismatic melodies to exist in.

With Clarice’s Salt Air, Salt Earth, we built layered textures of cello, processed in real time. I wanted the sound to feel like air thick with salt crystals. The comparison to Tangerine Dream is beautiful — like them, I wanted to stretch time, to make sound into a place you inhabit rather than a line you follow.