Miya Masaoka

Photograph: Lori Eanes

White Box; Thu 10

Before relocating to New York a few years ago, composer Miya Masaoka lived in San Diego, where she took to early-morning walks through the nearby countryside. Listening to the sounds of the waking world—birdsong giving way to air traffic—eventually led to her scoring a concerto of sorts for cello and field recordings. The 2005 album For Birds, Planes & Cello, with cello parts performed by former Kronos Quartet member Joan Jeanrenaud, is a gorgeous interplay of natural, industrial and musical worlds.The piece follows Masaoka’s long fascination with what could be described as building music in midair. She has scored pieces for live musicians working with bees and Ping-Pong balls, and has outfitted her koto, a traditional Japanese string instrument, to be played with lasers. Ephemera and happenstance stand alongside musicianship in her inventive work.

For Birds, Planes & Cello will be performed by cellist Alex Waterman—who has worked with such new-music luminaries as Keith Rowe, Anthony Coleman and Ned Rothenberg—at the White Box gallery, accompanied by the original, unedited field recording (which lasts just under an hour). A doctoral candidate in musicology at NYU, Waterman also cocurated the excellent “Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music” exhibit at the Kitchen last fall. Marking its tenth anniversary this year, and with a recent program that included Phill Niblock, Lee Ranaldo and a performance of John Cage music, White Box is becoming a home for new-music orphans in Manhattan. (Miya Masaoka also appears at Greenwich House Music School with Pauline Oliveros Fri 11.)

—Kurt Gottschalk