My friend and long-time Mannes colleague, Eleanor Cory, has been a force in the New York New Music scene for decades. A composer of great sensitivity, she matches a fluid, elegant imagination with assured technical command of an unusually broad musical palette. This month's clip comes from a fantastic work, her Mirrors, written in 2005 for the New York New Music Ensemble (who perform it here, joined by guest clarinetist JoAnn Sternberg). The work explores all sorts of ways in which mirrors work, from simple reflections, to distortions, to revelations. (Incidentally, I explored some similar ideas in my own work, Die Selbstdarstellung #1, notably in the Interlude: AoS *p!* (second) movement.) In the clip (from the middle of the second movement), notice how smoothly and seemingly effortlessly she manages to balance the parts, changing the forces–and the number of them–in a beautiful cascade of sounds bouncing off each other, melding, coming to the forefront, taking over, and giving way. The result is, in a word, captivating.