Katy Jarzebowski’s FEATHERS — A Sonic Poetics of Flight and Memory

With FEATHERS, composer Katy Jarzebowski delivers a work of singular grace and emotional acuity—an album that, while born from ballet, transcends its origins to become a meditation on memory, resilience, and the ineffable language of play. Reimagined from her 2021 ballet The Thing with Feathers (co-created with choreographer Emily Adams and premiered by Ballet West), this recording eschews theatrical referents in favor of a purely sonic narrative, one that is at once meticulously constructed and startlingly free.

In many ways, FEATHERS represents the culmination of Jarzebowski’s deeply interdisciplinary training: a Yale-educated composer mentored by Pulitzer Prize-winner Julia Wolfe, and a veteran of the Sundance Music and Sound Design Lab at Skywalker Sound. Her musical instincts—tempered by years of scoring for film and shaped by an ethos that embraces both glitch and gravitas—find their fullest expression here. Without the scaffolding of cinematic timecodes or choreographic cues, she returns to what she describes as the "primal joy of sound-making," drawing on the imaginative landscapes of her childhood.

The result is a 35-minute tapestry that fuses the rigor of contemporary classical composition with the spontaneity of sound design. The album opens with the titular “FEATHERS,” establishing a sonic grammar of lightness and breath: flutes pulse like heartbeats, and violin harmonics flicker on the edge of audibility. In “FLOCKS,” textures proliferate—an orchestral murmuration, suggestive of collective motion and interior transformation. “BEAKS” delivers a contrapuntal tension between low-brass articulations and plaintive melodic fragments, evoking a faceless authoritarian force. And in the album’s coda, “STORIES,” a quiet lyricism emerges, fragile yet resolute, as if the narrative has come to rest, not with resolution, but with reverence.

The instrumentation is as adventurous as it is evocative: contrabass clarinet snarls beside glass taps; field recordings of birdsong and thunderclap intermingle with chamber ensemble timbres. Even an accordion’s exhale—recorded at close range—becomes the spectral breath of an unseen character. Each sonic gesture is recorded with extraordinary fidelity at 96kHz, and mixed by Skywalker Sound’s Brendan Byrnes and Pete Horner with masterful spatial sensitivity. The result is an aural experience that is simultaneously intimate and expansive, immediate and mythic.

Jarzebowski’s collaborators include two-time Grammy-nominated mastering engineer Judith Kirschner and visual artist Brian Kinkley, whose dreamlike cover art offers a visual analogue to the album’s airborne poetics. And though FEATHERS exists in album form, its performative potential remains fluid: future stagings are rumored to incorporate immersive projections, extending the work’s boundary-blurring ethos into the realms of installation and hybrid performance.

This release arrives at a moment when the classical tradition finds itself in fruitful conversation with adjacent disciplines. Jarzebowski stands at the vanguard of this movement. Her recent scores—for The Fire That Took Her, Bubjan, In the Dark of the Valley, and the forthcoming All Illusions Must Be Broken—have already marked her as a composer of unusual depth and agility. But FEATHERS is something else: a self-contained cosmology, a kind of musical cartography of the inner child, unafraid of wonder and unbound by genre.

To listen to FEATHERS is to encounter the full range of what music, unshackled from expectation, can still do. It reminds us—gently, insistently—that in the hands of a fearless composer, glass can indeed sing, and a flock of strings might yet take flight.