Maya Beiser
“I’m always trying to take the cello to new territory,” Maya Beiser claims. Over the course of her eclectic recording career, she has lived up to her word, dragging her cello through the Renaissance and traditional Chinese and Taiwanese song, into collaborations with visual artists and multimedia presentations, through Astor Piazolla tangos and into the 20th-century avant-garde and beyond. Her throaty, sonorous tone, wandering musical intelligence and impeccable taste in composers are often the only things uniting records as distinct as the unnerving Almost Human, which explored the cello’s eerie proximity to the human voice, and World to Come, a plaintive collection of spiritual pieces including Arvo Part’s spine-tingling “Fratres.”
Beiser got her start performing with Bang On A Can All-Stars, a veritable laboratory of stylistically restless and adventurous performers and composers. Her latest album, Provenance, functions as an exploration of her complex roots; she was raised on an Israeli kibbutz, surrounded by Arabic villages, grew up on Western classical music, and later came to Yale to discover contemporary classical and rock music. The music is achingly and unabashedly lyrical — it’s easy to close your eyes and picture the swooning melody of “Memories” sound-tracking a big-budget Hollywood swords-and-sandals epic — but digging beneath the placid surface reveals a wealth of contradictions and counterintuitive choices: a variation on a Sufi chant written by the composer of the Sex And the City theme; an arrangement of Led Zeppelin‘s “Kashmir” for 12 cellos that recasts Robert Plant’s seared-cat yowl as a muezzin’s call.
Stopping by the eMusic offices, Beiser spoke with Jayson Greene about the mutability of music and memory, not fitting into traditional classical music, and working with Brian Eno.
On the basic concept for Provenance:
The idea was for me to go back to my roots. I grew up in a kibbutz in Israel, and I wanted to go to my very first musical landscape, to take all of the sounds I had heard as a child and put them all together in a way that made sense for me, through the lens of who I am today. The point was not to reproduce a historical musical genre, but rather to create something new but inspired by those sounds.
It started with texts for me. I was reading a lot of texts about the period in the Middle East between the ninth and the 15th century, which was a remarkable period in all ways, but especially in music and literature. Just an amazing outpouring of art — Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. It mirrored my upbringing. I grew up in a Jewish village surrounded by Arabic villages. In fact, there was a Bedouin village not even a mile away from the window where I would wake up in the morning, and at 5 a.m. every morning, one of my earliest musical memories is of hearing the call the prayer from the muezzin of the mosque. It was so foreign to me; I was steeped in Western culture, playing classical music, but all that stuff merged and it all kind of became music to me. That’s where this album started, which is why I called it Provenance. Looking at all that music, when you start taking the peels off of it, you see how close all of it really is, in terms of structure and harmonics.
On working with famed Persian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor:
I had wanted him to write something for this album, not just because he’s such a phenomenal musician but because the kamancheh, the instrument he plays, is kind of like the ancient Middle Eastern cello, if you will. The way it sounds, the way you play on it. He ended up writing the first track on the album, “I Was There.” He is one of the few Iranian artists who has the luxury of traveling around the world and performing, because he is such a national treasure. I started to talk to him about Ziryab, who was this legendary figure who, legend has it, was a slave from Baghdad that some called the Black Angel. He came to the Cordoba court in the ninth century and kind of singlehandedly started to create this system of scales, which became the maqam, which became the whole classical Arabic vocabulary. This guy was amazing — people wore whatever he wore, ate the food he ate; he was a ninth-century tastemaker, basically!
Kayhan, even though he’s from Iran, is Kurd, and Ziryab is Kurd, and Kayhan said that he remembered this melody from the village where he grew up that was attributed to Ziryab. “I Was There” became kind of based on that tune. Every piece on the album sort of has its own story that way.
On the genesis of Douglas J. Cuomo’s haunting, ethereal “Only Breath”:
Doug is an American composer who became really interested in Sufi chant music from that same period. We ended up going to Spain together and spending a summer there just kind of listening different the Sufi music of different places, digging into whatever we could find for inspiration for that piece. It’s a looped piece, but it’s not looped in the way you would normally think of; nothing repeats in exactly the same way ever. When we create the piece live, I work with this phenomenal computer artist who we develop the piece with. He works at a state-of-the-art place in UCSD (University of California San Diego) where they are dedicated to developing software to interact with a live performance. The program takes what I do live and starts looping it but on a random basis, and it also creates a surround-sound, so things just start swirling in space, but they’re never the same. That piece starts with my breath, and then the cello comes out of that.
On the cerebral nature of her albums:
I always look at my albums as, like, there are veils in them. You could just sort of put it on, and have it on in the background, and it’s kinda ambient and pretty enough, in a way, that you could not pay attention to it. But if you choose to really pay attention, you can start going deeper. You can choose how deep you want to go, and you can start asking, “wow, where did she get all of this, and how does it fit together?” I don’t feel like it’s necessarily important for people to know any of those things, but I think it’s important for me as an artist to have all of that in the background.
On what she learned from working with Brian Eno on Bang On A Can’s recording of Music For Airports:
He’s one of my biggest heroes. I always admired his ideas; I think a lot about how we consume music and how we use music, in a sense, which is something he’s been dealing with a lot. Particularly when you make albums — it’s a whole other experience than when you perform live. I kind of approach it that way, which is that there are all these different levels at which you can consume it.
On the “moment” when she realized that the traditional classical repertoire wasn’t going to be enough:
In Israel, I was considered kind of a child prodigy, so I played all the big standard repertoire ever since I was 12 and basically all through my adolescence. I was mentored by Isaac Stern, and I pretty much owe him my technique, just knowing how to play the instrument. That was a great thing, but on the other hand, I could never really fit into classical music. I was too “out there” for them. I think the first experience I had as a teenager was really about fashion! It’s funny, it’s just that I didn’t wanna wear the things I was expected to wear. A cellist performing with a big orchestra was not expected to wear jeans, and certainly not pants. It started on that level. And the reason I think, for me, was that aesthetics and fashion are really important to me as an artist. What I look like is really important to me onstage, because I look at the whole thing as a performance.
I think it’s changing, but for a long time, there was this notion that classical music should sort of disappear and embody the spirit of the composer. And my mode was always to find the things that interest me and to play them. Early on, I was always told, “You have too much personality, you’ve gotta tame your personality.” It just didn’t work. When I started to explore things like rock and new music, a lot of my mentors, including Stern, were very disappointed.
On the 12-cello arrangement of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” that closes the album:
No one can tell you what to do when you do a cover; you can do it the way you wanna do it, which is what distinguishes it from the traditional classical repertoire. “Kashmir” is just a fantastic piece. It informed so much of my adolescence, and it’s one of the first pieces of rock music I heard that took Middle Eastern music and worked it in. They became really interested; they went to Morocco and studied. It’s the place where all these things meet, which is why I put it on the album.
