Submitted by Joanne De Pue on September 21, 2022 - 11:12am
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.