Maiani da Silva: 'Brouhaha: Shaped by Fire' (Album Release Party)

Join Yale faculty member Maiani da Silva, violinist, chamber musician, member of the four- time Grammy-winning sextet Eighth Blackbird, and founder of solo project Brouhaha, for a celebration to launch her debut solo album, Brouhaha: Shaped by Fire. Blending music and anthropology, the project explores what it means to be human—from ancient fireside gatherings to the digital present—through six new works for solo violin inspired by our evolving relationship with our origins and environment. Composers featured on the album—produced by six-time GRAMMY winner Elaine Martone—include Fjóla Evans (Yale School of Music, Class of ’18), Zachary Good, and Ian Gottlieb (Yale School of Music, Class of ’15). The party will feature performance, reflection, and conversation with a collaborating composer and a surprise Yale anthropologist whose creativity and insights are woven into the project. Plus a Yale Schwarzman Center commission of projected art by new media artist Xuan. 

About the Album: 

Brouhaha: Shaped by Fire is a recording and performance project, combining music with anthropology to highlight our connections to our nature and origins. From noisy social gatherings around fires 800,000 years ago to virtual meetings over Zoom today, we humans have created and solved an amazing array of problems. Even as we shape the world in unprecedented ways, we remain an integral part of nature, intertwined with its rhythms and cycles. Project founder and violinist Maiani da Silva has commissioned six stylistically eclectic composers to write for solo violin based on what intrigues them about our human nature and our place in the ecosystem. In addition, Maiani and the composers have collaborated with world-renowned scientists to gain insights on their chosen theme. What results is an imaginative collection of works that both transcends stylistic labels and embraces intellectual inquiry, while highlighting an important duality: “our ability to work with or against our environment, [which] has been with us from the beginning” (Ian Gottlieb, composer of Shaped by Fire). The drive to express and understand are both deeply human. Brouhaha combines two cultural pillars—art and science—to further ask: What separates and also connects us to the delicate web of nature, our environment, other species, and one another?