Maya Beiser x Philip Glass

In "Maya Beiser x Philip Glass," cellist, arranger, and producer Maya Beiser creates a multi-layered sound sculpture with her cello, exploring and unveiling new dimensions in some of Philip Glass’s most powerful and achingly beautiful works. Thinking about stratum, the layering that occurs in most sedimentary rocks formed at the Earth’s surface, Maya imagined the layers of her cello becoming porous and Glass’s music flowing vociferously through each layer, like lava, endlessly creating new patterns, expanding into the landscape. Setting out to reimagine two of her favorite Glass piano etudes, "Etude no 5" and "Etude no 2," Maya took out her Boss RC-300 and began experimenting with live looping these scores, 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 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 except that Maya performs all the parts, 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, adding 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 to his "Naqoyqatsi" score on a worldwide tour of his extraordinary work, the 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” 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.