Maya Beiser, Provenance
Great art whose origins can be difficult to pinpoint
The Israeli-American cellist Maya Beiser first came to prominence with New York's Bang On A Can All-Stars, but in recent years, she's focused on multimedia, multicultural concert programs. Provenance is one such live program, translated onto a recording. Beiser draws inspiration from the medieval Spanish court of Alfonse the Wise, who employed Christians, Jews and Moors as musicians, poets and scribes. The idea that disparate cultures could work together, and inevitably influence one another, has resulted in great art (in Alfonse's case, the "Cantigas de Santa Maria," a collection of several hundred songs) whose provenance, or origins, can be difficult to pinpoint.
For this project, Beiser worked with a variety of composers to create works that were similarly informed by other cultures, so that again, it would be difficult to identify the provenance of a work just by listening to it. If, for example, you have spent the last 35 years on Mars, and didn't already know "Kashmir" as an Eastern-tinged, Led Zeppelin anthem, you might expect that it came from somewhere in Central Asia.
Although "Kashmir" was a pre-existing song, it certainly fits thematically with the new compositions that make up most of Provenance. Each of them looks east, beginning with "I Was There," by Iranian composer and fiddler Kayhan Kalhor, a member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. Here, a mournful cello line bears witness to the passage of time and the weight of history. A similar, timeless quality suffuses "Memories," by the Armenian composer Djivan Gasparian. Even Douglas Cuomo gets into the act; the New Yorker, best known for his sassy theme music for Sex and the City, has effectively used Indian music in his opera Arjuna's Dilemma, and adds Eastern, microtonal shadings to the cello part in "Only Breath," which is built on a delicate bed of electronics. Israeli-American composer Tamar Muskal makes the blend of cultures even more evident in her work "Mar de Leche," based on traditional Sephardic music; here the wailing vocals speak to centuries of confluence of Spanish, Arabic and Jewish music.
