SARAH GENEVIEVE BURGHART RICE, Yet

When a composer builds an entire musical world around the idea that “most times in trauma, there is no exit,” you don’t settle in expecting passive listening. You prepare—consciously or not—to be pulled into something adventurous, curiously searching, pointedly unstable, and ultimately more revealing. On Yet, Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice – a contemporary composer and educator known for her evocative and surreal musical expressions - delivers exactly that kind of experience: a boldly imagined, stylistically fluid journey where tension and release are never simple opposites, but forces constantly circling each other in unpredictable ways.

While the album unfolds across three distinct works—each performed by different ensembles and operating in its own sonic space—it plays less like a collection of separate pieces and more like a single, evolving meditation on voice, identity and the fragile notion of escape. Burghart Rice, whose work often bridges composition, technology and questions of perception, isn’t interested in guiding the listener gently. She creates environments—sometimes intimate, sometimes chaotic, sometimes darkly playful—where meaning emerges through contrast, collision and transformation.

The opening 3 Songs, performed by Duo Cortona (mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway and violinist Ari Streisfeld), draw us into the most immediate and human dimension of the project. These are not songs in any traditional sense—they feel more like living dialogues, shaped in real time by the push and pull between voice and violin. In “Unfolded,” Calloway’s vocal line shifts between conversational phrasing and more sustained, expressive arcs, while Streisfeld answers with sharp plucks, stretched tones and restless gestures that create a subtle but persistent tension beneath the surface.

“like her” sharpens that interplay, with quick, fragmented vocal bursts ricocheting against jagged violin strokes, the two lines interacting almost percussively. By the time “Form and Contour” unfolds, the relationship has deepened into something more elastic—long, winding violin phrases wrap around the voice before breaking apart into more angular figures, as if the music itself is negotiating between control and release. It’s an intimate, unsettled and quietly defiant opening statement.

That sense of instability expands outward in The Hardscrabble, where Burghart Rice trades intimacy for scale and satire. Performed by Nittany Winds under Tonya Mitchell-Spradlin, the piece plays like a kind of warped orchestral narrative—part historical send-up, part commentary on the absurdities of artistic hierarchy. From the opening surge of “Wernicke’s Handel,” with its booming percussion and rising brass, there’s a feeling of something grand being constructed… only to be twisted, exaggerated or subtly undermined as the music moves forward.

“Capriccio” shifts between contrasting moods with cinematic flair—darker passages give way to bursts of kinetic energy, then dissolve into something more lyrical before pivoting again. “Plummeting” and “Mobile (for Osanna)” introduce moments of lift and reflection, with swirling textures and more spacious writing offering contrast to the denser sections. By the time we reach “Non sequitur,” the piece fully embraces unpredictability—ideas collide, veer off course, regroup and surge forward again in a way that feels both playful and meticulously shaped.

Before the album reaches its most expansive statement, it’s worth stepping back to understand the creative force shaping this experience. Burghart Rice is not only a composer but a researcher and educator whose work exists at the intersection of music, identity and emerging technology. As an Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Technology at Penn State, she directs the Gender and Voice Inquiry Lab, where her work explores topics ranging from gender-affirming vocal practices to how sound is perceived and processed—both by humans and evolving AI systems.

Earlier in her career, she spent years as an audio technician at the Eastman Computer Music Center, immersed in experimental and electronic music production, an influence that continues to inform her expansive sonic language. Her compositions have earned significant recognition, including an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and her large-scale works—among them The Hardscrabble—have generated both critical acclaim and thoughtful debate. Drawing inspiration from sources as wide-ranging as medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut to the literary complexity of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, she creates music that feels both deeply informed and entirely her own.

All of this converges most fully in Murmurs from Limbo, the album’s closing and most immersive work. Featuring mezzo-soprano Thea Lobo, countertenor Jordan Rutter-Covatto and a chamber ensemble, the piece unfolds as a kind of dreamlike passage through states of consciousness, drawing on Middle English texts that grapple with mortality in stark and poetic terms. From its opening moments—where scattered instrumental textures feel almost like a gathering storm—the work gradually centers around the interplay between Lobo and Rutter-Covatto. Their voices intertwine, echo and at times shadow one another, creating a shifting focal point that carries the piece forward.

Around them, the ensemble moves through darker, more fragmented terrain: percussive eruptions, unexpected textures and passages that feel intentionally ungrounded. At times, it suggests a contemporary chamber opera; at others, something more abstract and free-form. What holds it together is the constant movement between tension and release, uncertainty and fleeting clarity.

What makes Yet especially compelling is how naturally these different worlds connect. Burghart Rice draws on a wide spectrum of influences—literary, historical and musical—but nothing feels imposed or overly conceptual. Instead, everything feeds into a larger expressive language that is as concerned with instinct as it is with design. Her background as both composer and researcher is evident in the precision of the writing, yet the music never feels clinical; it breathes, shifts and occasionally unsettles in ways that keep the listener fully engaged.

The performers across the album play a crucial role in realizing that vision. Duo Cortona capture the immediacy and nuance of the opening songs with remarkable sensitivity, while Nittany Winds and Mitchell-Spradlin navigate the shifting demands of The Hardscrabble with both clarity and a strong sense of character. In Murmurs from Limbo, Lobo and Rutter-Covatto anchor the work with commanding vocal presence, supported by an ensemble that embraces the piece’s wide expressive and sonic range.

In the end, Yet doesn’t resolve so much as it opens outward. Its title suggests possibility rather than conclusion—and that’s exactly where Burghart Rice leaves us. Even in its most unsettled moments, there’s a sense that something is shifting, that new space is being created. You may not always know exactly where you are within this music—but that’s part of its power. It invites you to stay with the uncertainty, and in doing so, discover something unexpected on the other side.