Rhythm, Ritual, Ecology
The Music of Susie Ibarra

Thomas May


For Susie Ibarra, rhythm is more than pulse or meter. It can be ecological: a way of understanding relationships among bodies, landscapes, memory, and sound. Born in California to Filipino parents, the composer, percussionist, and sound artist works across composition and performance, sound mapping, installation, recording, and documentary, with a long-standing engagement in environmental research and traditional musical cultures.

A dialogue between environment and music runs through much of Ibarra’s recent work. Her 2024 book Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm grew from studies of rhythm in birdsong, glacial freshwater, oceans, deserts, forests, and insects. CHAN: Sonnets and Devotions in the Wilderness, commissioned by the Berliner Festspiele’s MaerzMusik, comprises six contemporary kundimans: love songs addressed to landscapes ranging from German forests to Lake Tsongmo in the Himalayas and the Pasig River in Luzon. Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change, developed with glaciologist Michele Koppes, draws on field recordings from five global watersheds. Across these projects, environmental observation enters Ibarra’s compositional process through listening, field recording, rhythmic analysis, and responses to particular places.

Tonight’s concert marks Ibarra’s Pierre Boulez Saal debut—an especially personal occasion now that Berlin is her home—as well as the first German performance by the Talking Gong Trio and the German premiere of Sky Islands. In 2025, Ibarra received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for Sky Islands, cited as “a work about ecosystems and biodiversity, that challenges the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisational skills of a soloist as a creative tool.”


Birds, Gongs, and Musical Lineages

Flutist Claire Chase has been one of Ibarra’s most important collaborators. Chase, Ibarra, and pianist Alex Peh form the Talking Gong Trio, whose close musical rapport provided the nucleus for Sky Islands. Ibarra has also written directly for Chase as a soloist, so that her distinctive sound world and improvisational imagination recur throughout the program.

Birdsong offers one meeting point between Ibarra’s environmental and musical interests. “I feel that birds are some of our oldest drummers on the planet,” she remarks. “I think we’ve been singing and playing their songs and their rhythms for a long time.” Birdsong does not necessarily enter her music as literal transcription: it may provide a rhythm or musical idea, or prompt a freer response to movement and character. Berlin itself has supplied another inspiration: Ibarra is fascinated by the city’s nightingales, whose long process of learning and practicing songs reminds her of the work musicians undertake themselves.

This evening’s program opens with two compact examples of the composer’s interest in birdsong. Sunbird, originally written for Chase, takes its cue from the purple Philippine sunbird. Ibarra translates avian color and sound into a flute language that moves among piccolo, flute, and bass flute, with percussive breath and vocalization folded into the texture. Kolubrí, for solo percussion, takes inspiration from the hummingbird, transferring its delicate vibrations into the lower-frequency world of drums and cymbals.

Between these bird-inspired works, Paniniwala, Belief turns the focus to Alex Peh alone at the piano. Ibarra has identified it among compositions “largely influenced by Philippine traditional gong music aesthetic,” showing how that influence extends beyond the gong instruments themselves.

Pulsation, written for the Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future project—a free repertoire of 50 new works for young and emerging string quartets—builds a continuous pulse into changing rhythmic pathways. Some patterns draw on signaling practices associated with Philippine kulintang traditions; cross-rhythms shift the listener’s sense of where a pattern begins and ends. Performers may also reorder sections and improvise within certain rhythmic cycles.


From Talking Gong to Sky Islands

The first half culminates in Talking Gong, the trio’s title work. Ibarra has described the ensemble as “a magical group” with a “beautiful rapport.” She also thinks of Talking Gong as an evolving composer-performer ensemble, one whose musical vocabulary continues to grow through the different situations and collaborators it encounters.

These shorter works thus gradually assemble the musical forces that come together after intermission: individual voices give way to quartet and trio before Sky Islands expands Talking Gong into an eight-player environment. As Ibarra describes it, “Sky Islands really is a Talking Gong piece, but it is extended.”

For this work, which premiered at Asia Society in New York in 2024, Ibarra added percussionist Levy Lorenzo and a string quartet, producing what she now describes as an “acoustic double quartet.” Sky Islands retains a clear identity while leaving spaces for performers to bring their own interpretation and musical personality. In Berlin, Chase, Peh, Lorenzo, and Ibarra are joined by the Exira Quartet, founded last year by students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie. Ibarra is particularly curious about what happens when musicians from different backgrounds enter the score’s improvisational spaces: connections emerge that, she says, “only can happen in the moment.”

The title Sky Islands refers to isolated high-altitude rainforests, including those found in Luzon in the Philippines. Geographically separated from surrounding habitats, such “sky islands” are biodiversity hot spots rich in rare and endemic species; their isolation can accelerate evolutionary differentiation.

Ibarra was drawn not only to this phenomenon but also to the different experience of time and rhythm associated with these environments. She describes places where “the rhythm is different, the ritual of that is different, even the species are different.” More recently she returned to the notion of “slow time.” In high-altitude forests less extensively organized around human use, she observes, patterns of growth, energy, frequency, and rhythm are experienced differently. Ecological structure thus feeds into musical structure rather than merely supplying the work with a subject.

The percussion language of Sky Islands is based on interlocking rhythms and sonorities associated with bamboo, gong, and flute traditions from the northern Philippines, including the Kalinga and Cordilleras region of Luzon. Alongside kulintang, sarunay, and agong, Ibarra and Lorenzo will play percussion, gongs, and live plants fitted with contact microphones. For this performance, Ibarra has adapted the work’s larger “floating garden” concept to the Pierre Boulez Saal, omitting sound sculptures used in some previous realizations.


Listening to Your Neighbor

Space itself becomes compositional material. At the opening, the two percussionists begin apart, playing long bamboo sticks and, as the score instructs, “introduce the sounds of the bamboo to the audience” before gradually converging. The interlocking rhythms reflect a listening practice Ibarra associates with traditional Philippine percussion music. Rather than orienting themselves around a fixed metric “one,” players listen laterally, locating the neighbor whose rhythm must be joined, until, as Ibarra says, “multiple people become one instrument.”

Movement alters the experience further. Ibarra is drawn to processional music because changing the musicians’ physical relationship also changes the sound heard by the audience. In earlier configurations, she conceived the two percussion stations as mirrors of one another, creating acoustic spatialization through performers and instruments rather than loudspeakers. For the Pierre Boulez Saal, she and Lorenzo will adapt that spatial conception to the hall’s oval architecture.

Improvisation opens additional spaces. Extended exchanges for kulintang and sarunay, and for drum set and agong, foreground the percussionists’ individual voices. Elsewhere, the string quartet improvises around Chase’s embellished flute line, while the piano adds what the score calls “small sounds within strings and flute.” Near the end, Chase improvises on bass flute before being joined by bells and “small forest sounds.”

Such freedoms do not erase the identity of the composition. Ibarra emphasizes that listeners still hear the essence of Sky Islands, while certain spaces invite performers to bring in what they do most distinctively. This balance between composed framework and individual agency recalls the Pulitzer citation’s reference to challenging conventional assumptions about “the compositional voice.”

Ritual enters the work just as concretely. Ibarra is interested not only in large ceremonial actions but also in small repeated practices that structure ordinary life. “Everybody has rituals,” she points out. She is also fascinated by music associated with different times and hours of the day—another way of hearing an ecosystem as a multitude of activities unfolding according to their own rhythms. In Sky Islands, repetition, listening, movement, and ensemble coordination take on this ritual dimension. The final procession makes it visible: the musicians form a line, each picking up a small percussion instrument as they move through the space.

The ecological concern is unmistakable, but Ibarra does not regard music as a substitute for scientific argument. Her artistic research often runs parallel to her creative practice: field recordings and other environmental research may enter a sound installation literally, while in music for live performers their influence can be indirect—a rhythm, a response, a way of attending to a place.

She works closely with climate scientists and notes that high-altitude cloud forests will become increasingly important as the climate changes. What art can do differently, she suggests, is reach memory and imagination through sound. A listener who has never entered a Philippine rainforest may nevertheless carry memories of trees, birds, or water. For Ibarra, music works on both an individual and a communal level: the same sound may awaken different memories in each listener, even as the act of listening together creates a collective experience.

Most listeners will never visit the remote ecosystems at the center of Sky Islands. Music, Ibarra suggests, can “bring a little bit of it” into another place and connect distant ecosystems to life where we are. This interplay between individual perception and collective listening is built into Sky Islands at every level. Species develop within a habitat; musicians bring their own languages into a score; interlocking rhythms depend on listening to one’s neighbor. The “floating garden” becomes an environment made audible through interdependence: eight musicians remaining themselves while learning, moment by moment, how to become one instrument.


Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Gramophone, Opera Now, Musical America, Strings, and other publications. The English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival, he is also U.S. correspondent for The Strad and program annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Ojai Festival.