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Press Releases
Aug. 7: Mary Kouyoumdjian's Sonic Documentary, Paper Pianos, Released on Cantaloupe Music
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Salomon | Primo Artists | VP, Public Relations
katy@primoartists.com | 646.801.9406
Saratoga Schaefer | Primo Artists | Publicist
saratoga@primoartists.com | 646.470.4456
Composer Mary Kouyoumdjian
Releases the World Premiere
Recording of Paper Pianos,
Performed by Alarm Will Sound and
Directed/Written by Nigel Maister
A Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music,
Paper Pianos is an Evening-Length Music-Theatre
and Sonic-Documentary that Combines Live Music,
Recorded Testimony, and Documentary
Storytelling to Trace the Displacement and
Resilience of Refugees
Out Digitally August 7, 2026 on Cantaloupe Music
Single Out Today, “III. All Good Things"
Watch Kouyoumdjian and Nigel Maister of Alarm Will Sound Discuss Paper Pianos
“A socially urgent multi-media work that boldly melds music and audio documentary with first-person stories of refugees, exploring how music serves as solace and inspiration under conditions of displacement.” – 2024 Pulitzer Prize Committee
“Deeply-felt… powerful... dives beneath surface musicality to find humanity.”
– I Care if You Listen
New York, NY (June 5, 2026) – Paper Pianos, the Pulitzer Prize finalist, evening-length work co-created by GRAMMY®-nominated Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian and South African-American director and writer Nigel Maister, will receive its world premiere recording, to be released digitally by Cantaloupe Music on Friday, August 7, 2026. Performed by the GRAMMY® Award-winning ensemble Alarm Will Sound, the music-theatre and sonic-documentary work speaks eloquently and evocatively to this moment, hauntingly exploring the journeys and obstacles refugees confront as they uproot lives and livelihoods, families and friendships, in search of safer harbors. The work examines dislocation, longing, and optimism, both from the perspective of refugees themselves and from those who provide services to them. Artist proceeds from the album will be donated to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a nonprofit humanitarian organization that provides support to refugees.
Paper Pianos’ third movement, All Good Things, is out today as a single.
Drawing on interviews conducted by Maister and Kouyoumdjian with refugees and refugee resettlement workers, Paper Pianos resists abstraction in favor of deeply personal testimony. The work is anchored in four distinct voices of refugees and resettlement workers who have immigrated to New York: Afghan pianist Milad Yousufi and refugee resettlement workers Getachew “Gee-Gee” Bashir (Ethiopia), Hani Ali (Somalia), and Akil Aljaysh (Iraq), themselves refugees. Milad Yousufi fled to New York from Kabul, where he lived under the Taliban’s threat for pursuing music. His experiences of drawing piano keys on paper to teach himself to play in silence, thus avoiding life-threatening censure from the authorities, give the piece its name. Getachew Bashir, a high-ranking judge in Ethiopia, left his country when the judiciary, and his independence within it, came under threat from the regime. Hani Ali was a child of the refugee experience, born on the run and coming of age as a young girl negotiating the terrors of being stateless in a displacement camp. Akil Aljaysh, from a prominent family, fled Iraq after being tortured and worked his way through Syria and Lebanon to the United States.
Their interwoven stories of turmoil, displacement, flight, and hope – and of the inevitable compromises imposed by starting anew in an unfamiliar country – provide a deeply universal and humanistic foundation upon which Kouyoumdjian and Maister build this singular multimedia work. Paper Pianos aims to engage audiences viscerally in one of the pressing problems of today’s world, focusing on the heartfelt immediacy of real-life experience.
“What piqued my interest when we began this project, were the stories of those we seldom, if ever, hear from or about: the people who aid, resettle, comfort, greet on arrival, and provide orientation and guidance for newly arriving refugees, many who arrive on these shores with little more than their memories of home and the clothes on their backs,” Maister states. “Interviewing the four extraordinarily generous individuals whose stories make up Paper Pianos gave us insight into all these journeys. Though each story is unique, all share one element: that the gratitude they have for being given a second chance in this country is tempered by real and painful sacrifice: of family, friends, comfort, the familiar, dreams, aspirations, and more.”
“Activism can take many different forms, and I believe the arts have a unique ability to speak difficult truths in the hope of a more promising reality,” Kouyoumdjian says. “For my own work, my humble approach is to create projects that center on empathy: work that allows listeners to hear directly from real voices – individuals who have endured and persisted through humanitarian conflict – so seemingly distant experiences may resonate more closely through our shared desires for home, love, and freedom. It is my hope that this recognition can foster a more compassionate community – one more inclined to act. Paper Pianos is one realization of this hope, and it began from a simple gesture of kindness from Alarm Will Sound.”
Alarm Will Sound gave the world premiere of Paper Pianos at EMPAC in Troy, New York on February 25, 2023, followed by a performance at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on May 10, 2025. Featuring projections by Kevork Mourad, the work brings together music, recorded testimony, animation, and documentary storytelling in a multimedia performance event conceived by Mary Kouyoumdjian, Nigel Maister, and Mourad, with scenic design by Afsoon Pajoufar and lighting design by Seth Reiser.
Visit paperpianos.com for more information on Paper Pianos and how to support refugees.
Paper Pianos Tracklist*
Paper Pianos (2023)
Mary Kouyoumdjian: Co-Creator, Composer, Documentarian
Nigel Maister: Co-Creator, Writer, Staging Director
Alan Pierson: Music Director
-
I. Overture: This is Not a Choice (Gee-Gee’s Primer) [10:58]
-
II. Child of War [17:50]
-
III. All Good Things [18:16]
-
IV. Bad to Worse [24:23]
-
V. Flight [05:47]
-
VI. An Open Fist [09:59]
Total Time - 01:27:13
Produced by Mary Kouyoumdjian and Gavin Chuck
Recording and Mixing Engineer: Daniel Neumann
Recorded interviews and electronics: Mary Kouyoumdjian
Mastering: Bernd Klug
Cover Art: Nigel Maister, Mary Kouyoumdjian
Recorded: World Premiere performance recorded live on February 25, 2023 at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York.
Alarm Will Sound:
Domenica Fossati, flute
Christa Robinson, oboe and voice
Bill Kalinkos, clarinet
Elisabeth Stimpert, bass clarinet
Michael Harley, bassoon and voice
Adedeji Ogunfolu, horn
Tim Leopold, trumpet
Michael Clayville, bass trombone
Chris P. Thompson, percussion
Matt Smallcomb, percussion
John Orfe, piano
Courtney Orlando, violin and voice
Andie Tanning, violin and voice
Gillian Gallagher, viola
Norbert Lewandowski, cello and voice
Miles Brown, bass
Daniel Neumann, audio engineer
Interviewees:
Milad Yousufi
Getachew Bashir
Hani Ali
Akil Aljaysh
*Advisory: This work includes pre-recorded sounds and interviews on topics of conflict and violence that some listeners may find disturbing and may not be suitable for children.
About Mary Kouyoumdjian
MARY KOUYOUMDJIAN is a GRAMMY®-nominated composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. As a first-generation Armenian-American and having come from a family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, her compositional work often integrates recorded testimonies with resilient individuals and field recordings of place to invite empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict. A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her music-documentary Paper Pianos, Kouyoumdjian has received commissions for the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Morrison Projects, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Roomful of Teeth, among others. Her work has been featured internationally at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, LA Opera, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Barbican Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Millennium Park, Benaroya Hall, Prototype Festival, Cabrillo Festival, Big Ears Festival, Cal Performances, Tribeca Film Festival, and PBS. Her debut portrait album, WITNESS with the Kronos Quartet, was released in 2025, and the world premiere recording of her opera, Adoration, was nominated for a 2025 GRAMMY® Award for Best Opera Recording. Kouyoumdjian is on faculty at The New School and is based in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more at marykouyoumdjian.com
About Nigel Maister
NIGEL MAISTER is a director, writer, designer, visual artist, and performer, and a founding member of Alarm Will Sound. Nigel has staged, developed, and/or designed concerts at venues throughout the country and internationally, including Columbia’s Miller Theatre, The Kitchen, Zankel Hall, Cal Performances, the Holland and River to River festivals, and in Korea. He wrote the libretto for and directed I Was Here I Was I, a site-specific music-theatre work created for the Temple of Dendur (music by Kate Soper) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, co-developed/directed AWS’s acclaimed 1969, Conceived, designed, and directed John Cage’s Song Books for the Holland Festival, and performed his own text, Paper Trails (music by Stefan Freund), at the John Adams-curated In Your Ear Festival at Zankel Hall. Nigel wrote and is developing A Young Person’s Guide to New Music and its accompanying piece, Anindi, Wilson, and the Super Super for Alarm Will Sound. Nigel is a MacDowell fellow and currently serves as the Artistic Director of the International Theatre Program at the University of Rochester.
About Alarm Will Sound
ALARM WILL SOUND is “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene” (The New York Times). A GRAMMY®-winning, 22-member band committed to innovative performances and recordings of today’s music, they have established a reputation for performing demanding music with energetic virtuosity.
With classical skill and unlimited curiosity, Alarm Will Sound takes on music from a wide variety of styles. “Stylistically omnivorous and physically versatile” (The Log Journal), their repertoire comes from around the world and ranges from the arch-modernist to the pop-influenced. Since its inception, Alarm Will Sound has been associated with composers at the forefront of contemporary music. The group itself includes many composer-performers, which allows for an unusual degree of insight into the creation and performance of new work.
Alarm Will Sound is the resident ensemble at the Mizzou International Composers Festival. Held each July at the University of Missouri in Columbia, the festival features eight world premieres by early-career composers. In 2013-14, Alarm Will Sound served as artists-in-residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alarm Will Sound may be heard on twenty recordings, including Land of Winter, featuring music by Donnacha Dennehy for which they won the 2026 GRAMMY® for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and the premiere recording of Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite. Acoustica, their genre-bending, critically-acclaimed album, features live-performance arrangements of music by electronica guru Aphex Twin. Learn more at alarmwillsound.com.
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