Tailor-made for music festivals in coastal cities, which is a lot of them, 's is a work for women's voices, the especially appropriately named here, and electronics, in this case rendered by the composer. The title is no mere poetic conceit but refers to the Beaufort scale, a measure of wind speed as related to observed conditions. It ranges from zero (calm) to 12 (hurricane-force winds), and provides movements for each level, entertainingly taking 's official technical description for its text ("Ripples with scales, no foam crests"). Interspersed between these are freer movements with texts from , , and the biblical New Testament. 's language here is stripped down, with a restricted tonal inventory, but the music gathers force along with the wind speed, and there is an attractive contract between his clipped musical phrases and the immensity of nature that is being represented. The eight voices of the deliver the requisite precision, and the label's recording from Dimension Sound in Boston is clean and focused. The whole package works, and it is not a surprise that pulled off the rare trick of placing brand new music on classical best-seller charts (in the spring of 2024). ~ James Manheim