SHIFTING GROUND | WNYC NEW SOUNDS - FEATURE

Three Violinists

by: John Schaefer | October, 2025

Hear music from three violinists: Alexi Kenney in a work that deals with climate change in Alaska; Rachel Lee Priday from her project with an oceanographer; and Olivia De Prato in pieces that probe questions of dislocation and return from her album Panorama.

Listen to violinist Alexi Kenney and his recording of Matthew Burtner’s “Elegy (from Muir Glacier, 1889-2009)”. The piece “sonifies Muir Glacier’s transformation from a tidewater to a terrestrial glacier", using recorded sounds from glaciers in various states of retreat (composer’s notes.) The work is from Kenney’s recent album, Shifting Ground both a reference to the heart of all Baroque music—the ground bass—upon which variations are built, and perhaps the loss of the glacier, which has now completely disappeared.