Listen to the single: Salt 2 from upcoming album Salt
Salt, composed in 2012 for cellist Maya Beiser and vocalist Helga Davis with text by Erin Cressida-Wilson, imagines Lot’s Wife speaking across time to women from all eras of history. “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.” Salt premiered in 2012 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a production directed by Robert Woodruff and produced by Beth Morrison Projects.