Press

For cellist, composer and producer Maya Beiser, the figure of Lot’s Wife – unnamed in the Bible but immortalised in myth – has long been a source of fascination. Her act of looking back, of refusing to forget even as the world burns behind her, becomes the central gesture of Salt, her latest solo album.

Salt is an emotionally charged meditation on memory, mourning and mythic womanhood. Drawing on repertoire ranging from Purcell and Monteverdi to contemporary composers Missy Mazzoli, Clarice Jensen and Meredith Monk, the album unfolds as a kind of secular oratorio – a journey across time and terrain that transforms Lot’s Wife from a cautionary figure into a witness, prophet, and symbol of all those punished for remembering.

At the album’s heart is Mazzoli’s one-act Salt, a mini-opera for alto voice, amplified cello and electronics that sets a text by the acclaimed screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. Originally conceived as a theatrical work, Salt became the catalyst for the full album. Beiser surrounds the contemporary works with her own cello reworkings of archetypal laments – by Ariadne, Eurydice and Dido – framing them as sonic monuments to voices that refuse to be silenced.

In her conversation with US correspondent Thomas May, Beiser reflects on the evolution of Salt, the power of memory in sound, and what it means to uncover a ‘fossilised voice’ at a time when the world itself feels increasingly scorched.

What first drew you to the story of Lot’s Wife, and what continues to intrigue you about her?

Maya Beiser: The album is an extension of Missy Mazzoli’s cello opera Salt, which I premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2012 as part of a triptych of one-act pieces for solo cello, in a collaboration with the director Robert Woodruff. My inspiration came from two powerful images. One was a poem my mother gave me when I was a teenager, by the French surrealist writer and painter Henri Michaux, about a woman witnessing the end of the world. That idea of bearing witness stayed with me.

The other was from a trip my mother and I took to the Dead Sea. I grew up in the Galilee Mountains in Israel, and as we were overlooking this stark, beautiful desert landscape, my mum pointed to a rock formation and said, “That’s Lot’s Wife.” According to the myth, this is where she was turned into salt. It’s a short passage in the Bible – she looks back, and she’s turned into a pillar of salt. But there’s so much in that moment. I started to conceive the idea of salt as the thematic core of an entire album.

You’ve described the act of looking back not as a failure, but as an act of remembrance, defiance and love. How did you translate that emotional complexity into sound?

Maya Beiser: For me, Salt is about the tension between survival and remembrance. There’s always this urge to move on, to forget – to obey. But Lot’s Wife couldn’t turn her back on the burning city. That image, that moment, became the emotional centre of the work.

Missy Mazzoli’s piece Salt anchors the whole album. It begins with silence – just the sound of the cello playing these high, fragile fragments of melody. It’s as if we’re hearing the instant she looks back. The electronics are all drawn from processed recordings of my cello. It’s very layered: live cello, pre-recorded electronics, live voice. Helga Davis’s voice emerges from this ancient-sounding space, but it also feels urgent, of the now. There’s beauty, fragility, ferocity – it’s a sonic landscape full of tension and release.

What was it like collaborating with Missy Mazzoli, Helga Davis and librettist Erin Cressida Wilson on such a layered, theatrical piece?

Maya Beiser: We originally conceived it as a cello opera in three acts – a very theatrical piece. Erin, a brilliant screenwriter and playwright, wrote the libretto from a singular feminist point of view. We became close friends during that process. Missy felt like the perfect composer for this project. There’s something haunted and spacious about the texture of her music. She has an ability to create sonic landscapes that hold tension and release them. They inhabit the space between fragility and power. And she has a beautiful way of using and processing the sounds of the cello to create a huge gamut.

Helga Davis is a force of nature in and of herself – an extraordinary actress and singer who brings this otherworldly power to the role.

You’ve compared playing this piece to uncovering a ‘fossilised voice’. What does that metaphor mean to you now?

Maya Beiser: It’s about giving voice to something ancient and buried. The story of Lot’s Wife forces us to look back – with her – on the follies of humanity. It’s a history of emotions, of feelings that get buried because they’re too intimate or too painful.

There’s always this idea of her as a cautionary tale, but I see her as profoundly human. She couldn’t obey an order that made no sense. She turned back because she couldn’t just turn away from her burning city. That, to me, is heroic.

While we were working on the first mix of the album in January, I got in touch with Erin, and learned she had lost her home in the Los Angeles fires. I got chills. It felt like the story was speaking to our own moment, in ways we couldn’t have predicted.

I see Lot’s Wife as profoundly human. She couldn’t obey an order that made no sense. She turned back because she couldn’t just turn away from her burning city. That, to me, is heroic

How would you like listeners to experience this album as a recorded work?

Maya Beiser: I think of recordings as a completely different medium from live performance. An album allows for a different kind of narrative structure. That’s why I built Salt as a complete journey, surrounding the opera with these other works that extend its themes.

Reading Erin’s libretto can add another layer, but the music is so visceral on its own. The rest of the album is wordless, and it takes you through these other voices – women who, like Lot’s Wife, were abandoned, silenced, or punished for feeling too much.

You’ve included your own arrangements of iconic laments. How do these mythic voices resonate with Lot’s Wife?

Maya Beiser: Each of these women embodies a moment of rupture, abandonment, longing or defiance. This is also the idea of where love collides with faith. Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna is the only surviving fragment of a lost opera. Ariadne helps Theseus escape the labyrinth, and he abandons her. I arranged the aria for multi-tracked cello – layering these different lenses of the cello in a cathedral sort of way.

In the famous melody from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, I wanted to shift the perspective – to imagine it from Eurydice’s point of view, even though the aria is sung by Orpheus. In Sir John Tavener’s Lament to Phaedra, I used two cello lines speaking to each other. She’s destroyed by forbidden love, but also by shame. And Purcell’s When I Am Laid in Earth is a piece that’s always on my playlist. I created a version with multi-track cellos, which is a canvas I often use in my work.

Clarice Jensen’s Salt Air, Salt Earth feels almost geological in its sound world. What are your thoughts on that piece?

Maya Beiser: Clarice’s piece evokes the deep time of salt – its residue, its memory. It extends some of the textures we hear in Missy’s opera and has an ancient element to it, but in a more ambient, electronic direction. It’s very textural, almost guttural at times. I love that combination – she’s drawing from something Baroque, but reimagined in a completely modern sonic language.

You also include a reimagining of Shedemati, a song from your childhood. How does that fit into this musical landscape?

Maya Beiser: Shedemati is an old Israeli song I grew up singing on a kibbutz – a farmer’s song, really. I’ve known it all my life. Given what’s happening in that part of the world now, I felt drawn to it again. I reimagined it in the context of Salt, collaborating with the amazing vocalist Odeya Nini. For me, it’s about land, loss, identity. My ancestors sang it as pioneers; I now play it as a mourner.

You’ve long been known for redefining the cello as a medium for mythic and personal storytelling. What does Salt mean to you at this moment in your artistic life?

Maya Beiser: Salt was initially imagined as a very theatrical piece, but after 7 October, with all the devastation that was happening in Israel and in Gaza, I felt I needed an outlet. My work is never directly a political commentary, but I respond to things. Suddenly that piece felt very timely in a way I hadn’t expected.

Salt itself became a symbol for me: this idea of salt as an ancient, elemental healing power, with a residue of memory – the trace that’s left behind after something disappears. And also the idea from Lot’s Wife, about this moment of defiance, of remembering, of refusing to move on. That’s what I wanted this album to hold.

Maya Beiser’s Salt was released on 1 August on Islandia Music.