Of the many stories she learned as a child, one haunted Maya Beiser for months, and eventually years and decades: the sorry fate of Lot's wife. The woman, unnamed in the biblical tale, is turned into a pillar of salt for eternity after disobeying orders from the heavens and looking back at the destruction of Sodom.
"I kept thinking, why was she punished, why was she not supposed to look back?" Beiser recalls. "The idea that she was turned into salt for eternity as this sort of punishment for all to see just always felt really cruel and unjust to me."
The cellist has now centered her latest album around this ancient narrative to draw an arc of female longing and defiance through the centuries.
Salt, out Friday, is a "meditation on memory and on defiance and the high cost of looking back," Beiser tells Morning Edition host Leila Fadel. All of the works by living composers were written by women, the lyrical pieces were sung by women and the album is dedicated to Beiser's daughter.
The album opens with Missy Mazzoli's 2012 mini-opera, also called Salt, with a libretto by Erin Cressida-Wilson sung by Helga Davis. The trio developed the piece, an abstract meditation on the fate of Lot's wife, with Beiser.
"It also tells the story of what it means to be a woman," she explains. "This idea of bearing witness across millennia and that we women need to support each other and need to acknowledge the fact that we're allowed to feel and we're allowed to grieve and we're allowed to love."
Other protagonists include Phaedra, the Cretan princess of Greek mythology cursed by forbidden desire for her stepson (via John Tavener's Lament for Phaedra), and Eurydice, who vanishes forever after her husband Orpheus turns back to look at her before she can leave the underworld (via Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice).
Bold and unconventional
Beiser has built a career around challenging traditional notions of how her instrument is played and thought about in a sometimes stiflingly rigid classical music industry that has traditionally imposed higher barriers on women.
"As an artist, I've always felt that I wanted to create things that have a really powerful emotional residue. It wasn't always welcomed," she says.
"It's a very interesting journey to be a classically trained cellist. You go through a sort of indoctrination, we are told that this is what we belong to, this is who we are. I've always rebelled against that, I've always wanted to find my own way through this maze."
She's equally at ease with electric and acoustic cellos across a dizzying array of musical genres, deftly weaving electronics into her practice for sweeping sonic worlds.
A founding member of the new music ensemble Bang on a Can All-Stars, she's collaborated with an eclectic group of artists including dancer/choreographer Lucinda Childs, photographer/filmmaker Shirin Neshat and electronic music pioneer Brian Eno.
The oldest piece on the new album is "Lamento d'Arianna" (Ariadne's Lament). This poignant recitative 鈥� a passage sung in speech-like fashion 鈥� is the only surviving part of Claudio Monteverdi's long-lost second opera L'Arianna (1608). Beiser accompanies herself here in an arrangement made with layers of cello loops.
Salt as sediment, and soil
Clarice Jensen's Salt Air, Salt Earth, recorded here for the first time, is the most recent work. The melody is muddied, meandering through layers of what Beiser describes as salt-like "sediment" on top of a pulsating bass line that appears and vanishes irregularly.
"As I was recording it, I literally had those images of the Dead Sea, the salt. It feels like it's a mineral dream... I think about it as sort of a sonic desert," Beiser says about the piece, which she commissioned from Jensen, a fellow cellist.
The work has both a written score with multiple improvisatory passages and a visual score. "You just go from one moment to the next and kind of move through these different loops and then improvise on top of them," Beiser says. "It's just a really wonderful, wonderful way to sort of conceive this idea of salt as something that's very elemental and very ancient."
Beiser, who was born in a kibbutz in Israel's Galilee Mountains, also relates notions of salt to how to tend for the land in Shedemati, a traditional Hebrew song.
"I thought about it as the reverse idea, which is we're not really owners of this land. The soil does not belong to us. If anything, we belong to it," she says.
Asked if she is reflecting through her art on the war currently underway in the Gaza Strip over who has claim to the land and who belongs there, Beiser says that her album is not meant to be "political."
"It's human," she says. "All we can do is take care of this land that was given to us for a brief moment. And that's kind of what I wanted to convey more than anything, I think, with this album."
The broadcast version of this story was produced by . The digital version was edited by .
Copyright 2025 NPR
