Submitted by Joanne De Pue
on
How do our physical instruments connect us to the musicians who have come before us? Often this question points to instruments with older histories, but violist/composer Melia Watras’s album String Masks (Planet M Records) taps into histories both old and new. These ties have a specificity, often communicated through sound, that pay homage both to W atras’ s pedagogical lineage as a violist and the composers who fundamentally shifted the traditional string repertoire. In many ways, the album is a beautiful collage of transformational figures in W atras’ s musical practice.