Myra Melford's Consuming Fire

A conversation about, and inside, the restless art of Cy Twombly.

Myra Melford with Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire that Consumes All before It. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Feb. 24, 2024. (Nate Chinen)

Hear the Light Singing, an intoxicating new album by pianist-composer Myra Melford, comes out of two different sets of affinities. First and foremost is the intuitive bond she’s forged with the other members of her Fire and Water Quintet: saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, guitarist Mary Halvorson, cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Lesley Mok. But close on its heels is Melford’s fascination with the artist who gave her group its name: the American abstract painter and calligraphic scrawler Cy Twombly.

Thirty years ago, Melford saw Cy Twombly: A Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She didn’t have much prior exposure to Twombly, but the exhibition — 50 paintings, three dozen works on paper, a few sculptures and prints — left her gobsmacked. “I just remember thinking, Wow, this feels like how I want to play the piano,” she told me recently, explaining an attraction that has only deepened since.

Melford was speaking in the Twombly gallery of another major institution, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was her first time visiting this gallery, which houses Fifty Days at Iliam, a series of 10 giant canvases inspired by Alexander Pope’s 18th-century translation of The Iliad. Iconic, kinetic and graphic — and duly heroic, but with a shiver of remorseful unease — the work is an immersive text that both invites and resists interpretation. It formed the ideal setting for an interview.

Music and visual art have been interlinked for Melford since long before she formed the Fire and Water Quintet, whose debut album landed two years ago. I vividly recall a MoMA Summergarden concert in 2005, featuring a suite she wrote in response to the Joan Miró sculpture Moonbird. Melford, who grew up outside Chicago in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, has always made these sorts of connections.

The intensity of her interest in Twombly is on another level, though. So it was fantastic to contemplate the profane sublimity of his paintings together as we talked — about the primacy of the gesture, and how it aligns Cy Twombly with his alliterative musical double, Cecil Taylor; about the guts and the glory of this post-Vietnam Homeric hallucination; and about how she set about adapting Twombly’s style into two books of living compositions for her all-star band.

Melford was in town with Lux Quartet, which she co-leads with drummer Allison Miller; they’d just played a smashing set the night before at Solar Myth. So we talked a bit about that, too. If you support The Gig as a paid subscriber, audio of our half-hour interview is below, with an edited transcript. This conversation was a real privilege for me, and I feel doubly privileged to share it now with you.