Maya Beiser

For more than 30 years, Maya Beiser has not only reinvented what the cello can play and how it can sound but also how a virtuosic and challenging cellist can appear on stage. “I’m not conforming as a classical performer to the habits people expect,” she once told The Guardian. “I think of it as an art form—a total performance.” For Beiser, distinction came early: Raised in a kibbutz in Israel, she was classically trained but surrounded by Middle Eastern music, the tango her father loved, and rock ‘n’ roll, sounds and attitudes she slowly began to add to her own work. A founding member of Bang on a Can, she has premiered new cello work by Steve Reich and arranged Terry Riley’s In C for solo cello and electronics and also issued an album of covers by the likes of Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix. Her work is boundless, energetic, and surprising.

In April 2026, the composer Michael Harrison died of cancer in Manhattan. While studying composition at the University of Oregon, the pianist began singing ragas and learning about just intonation, how that tuning system had slipped so fully out of Western music. He began long relationships with La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, slowly building long-form and immersive works in just intonation, like the sprawling From Ancient Worlds. Nearly 20 years later, inspired by the beauty and vim of Beiser’s playing, Harrison composed Just Ancient Loops, three pieces that allowed Beiser to express joy in just intonation, as her pizzicato plucks and gliding bowed passages seemed to dance in thin air. “I’m demonstrating the simpler and more harmonious aspects of just intonation,” he explained in 2012. Beiser revisits her tremendous, life-affirming work with the late Harrison at Big Ears 2027.