On Brouhaha: Shaped by Fire (Sono Luminus, 2026), violinist Maiani da Silva suggests that listeners might renew their connection to nature by attuning to different rhythms and cycles in music. The recording and performance project features six new works for solo violin, with each composer considering a unique idea about humanity’s place in the Earth’s ecosystem.
An unusual choice with this project is the intention to integrate anthropology and science. da Silva seems to be trying to express the processes of learning, reconnecting, and intellectual growth through her commissioned pieces. She and the composers worked with scientists and anthropologists to explore their chosen themes, acknowledging in the liner notes that “[t]he drive to express and understand are both deeply human.”
The shortest and most enigmatic piece of this project is da Silva’s own Suspended in a Sunbeam: a 31-second field recording of water rushing through a landscape over stones; her violin is nowhere to be heard. At first, including a field recording in a project about our relationship to nature seems like a given. But the more I listen, the more questions I have about what it means to present a field recording as a piece of art. Ethnomusicologists have debated the ethics of this for decades, especially when considering recordings of Indigenous musics.
Listening to the full album raises questions about what it means to evoke nature in music, and how that is different from recording it directly. Shaped by Fire by Ian Gottlieb, begins with dramatic descending arpeggios and decaying trills. Like the fire of its title, this musical spark gradually catches and builds momentum; the initial descending gesture becomes more expansive and ornamented as it repeats and grows, then retracts back to its original simplicity.
This leads into the luscious, ascending long tone gestures of Zachary Good’s In Memory of A Spoon. Good builds momentum in the middle with quick, twirling repeated figures inspired by the French Baroque style brisé, yet their post-minimalist aesthetic frees them from any pressure to become formal counterpoint. They might feel chaotic if they weren’t so clearly executed, but da Silva slots every note perfectly in its place while keeping the improvised Baroque feel.
Good writes that the piece imagines how an extraterrestrial being might encounter a human artifact (such as a spoon) hundreds of years after use, and hypothesize its form, function, and meaning. He wants a sense of foreignness, of unearthing something — possible for listeners who don’t listen to much Baroque music. Later, Viet Cuong’s Traveler favors similar rhythms that coalesce into something between a tune and a motive — distinctive, like bird song, but neither improvised nor composed.
Works by Fjóla Evans and Jascha Narveson respectively explore the ritual usage of flowers and the passage of time. Harmonics are the central technique of Evans’ meditative work Bloom, which forgoes the rhythmic propulsion of earlier tracks to instead consider how blocks of sound interact. I was surprised, based on its sound, that the piece was meant to depict flowers — specifically posited ritual offerings made by Neanderthals to their dead. Harmonics traditionally imitate the wind with their whistling timbre, and from the first note, this effect comes through much more strongly.
Narveson’s A Little Time begins with gusts of wind that usher in a line of single pizzicato violin tones. He adds long sung and hummed tones to the texture that follow performers’ natural breathing rhythms, using the voice to extend the violin plucks. The two techniques sound almost like completely separate pieces. The lines may play simultaneously but they never interact, never breathe together or feed off of each other’s pulses — which most effectively underscores da Silva’s theme of disconnection from nature.
Even further removed from nature is the final work in the project: Kelley Polar’s Sonata for Violin and Electronic Sounds “X/O.” The electronics allow for the acoustic violin to shine through and lend a certain science fiction quality to the first movement especially. They also emulate more piano-like textures, with percussive attacks and quick decays. After so many pieces of solo violin, evoking even a classic combo like violin and piano sounds fresh.
To take inspiration from these fields is one thing — composers and performers have done this for ages — but Brouhaha claims much deeper scientific and anthropological inquiry. Without following along in the credits or liner notes, the intended “synthesis of newly commissioned artistic works with scholarly research” is hard to discern on this audio-only recording. The notes make for interesting reading, but don’t necessarily fulfill the promise of synthesis. Still, this doesn’t detract from da Silva’s thoughtful exploration of facets of the natural world through her album. The compositions are expressive and point to her theme — even if not always in the ways she intended.
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