Cellist Gabriel Cabezas performs Alyssa Weinberg’s ‘Pieces of Light’

Alyssa Weinberg’s suite for solo and layered cello Pieces of Light will be released as a recording on 2 October. The work was created in close collaboration with cellist, Gabriel Cabezas.

Across twelve tracks, Pieces of Light is a meditation on the properties of light, altered perception, and hallucinatory experiences. Inspired by the work of American visual artist James Turrell and his manipulation of light as an artistic medium, this collection of miniatures explores parallel acoustic phenomena, marveling at the intangibility of both light and sound, their rejection of the concrete and the real, and the sensorial power they wield over our human experience. 

The album’s origins reach back to 2019, when Weinberg and Cabezas attended Turrell’s Into the Light exhibition. ’We entered that exhibit together,’ Weinberg says, ’and I just remember stopping dead in my tracks.

’We were in the installation Perfectly Clear (Ganzfeld). The room becomes so saturated with colour that I remember just sticking out my hand and thinking, ”Oh, I am the colour purple. I am yellow.” These colours just felt so tangible.’

Working track by track, the two developed Weinberg’s conceptual interests and sound worlds into an idiosyncratic language on the cello. ’I love working with living composers,’ Cabezas says, ’especially composers who are friends. The give and take that you can have is really amazing. It’s one of the things that keeps me coming back to making new work, honestly.’

For all the dexterity the music demands, Cabezas comments that its greatest challenges are not the high harmonics or rapid arpeggios. ’Some of the most difficult music on the album is actually the most delicate and the softest, with really slight variations in how you use the bow, slight variations in intonation.’

Pieces of Light is released on MASS MoCA Records on 2 October 2026.