Music is, and has always been, a mirror of humanity—reflecting our joys and grief, our rituals and resilience, our longing to understand ourselves and one another. In Anthropology, I set out to explore that mirror, to trace the roots of music across time and culture, and to ask what connects a Bach sonata to a centuries-old ballad or a Romanian folk melody to a contemporary song by Joni Mitchell. The deeper I went, the more I felt how profoundly all music—folk or classical, sacred or secular—is bound together by the human experience.

This album brings together works from both classical and folk traditions. Some, like the third movement of Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello and Edgar Meyer’s 1B, directly engage with folk idioms in their rhythms, textures, and phrasing—rooted in vernacular music, yet rendered through the language of classical form. Others, like Thomas Tallis’s 16th-century choral writing or the contemplative, improvisatory Adagio from Bach’s G Minor Sonata, may seem more distant from folk expression, yet speak with the same elemental emotion that lives in the humblest of songs.

Alongside these are traditional and modern folk songs—Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair, Careless Love, Be My Husband, and Very Day I’m Gone, songs that have lived many lives through many voices, reshaped with each retelling. I also included Rustem, a lively Romanian instrumental rooted in the Roma tradition of Clejani and passed down through oral transmission, and Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell’s modern classic that continues the folk tradition of personal storytelling with universal resonance.

This project was deeply inspired by the writings of Oliver Sacks, particularly Musicophilia, where he explores how music is entwined with memory, identity, and the very structure of the human brain. Music has always been essential to human life. Across every known culture, it has been used to carry stories, preserve knowledge, mark time, mourn loss, celebrate love, and process all the intangible things we feel. As I followed the threads of music that moved me most, I found they all led back to something larger: our shared humanity.

In curating and performing this collection, I returned to what first drew me to music—not technique or tradition alone, but the raw, emotional urgency of sound. The music on this album lives in that space: between structure and instinct, between past and present, between the individual voice and the collective spirit.

There is so much that divides us in the world. But there is also so much that connects us. Music is one of those threads—ancient, invisible, and always alive.

— Lucia Micarelli