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Music, magic, and more collide in The Book of Spells, The Merian Ensemble’s anticipated debut album. Premiering nine commissioned works by eight living female composers, The Book of Spells is a refined medley of the Merian Ensemble’s unwavering dedication to lifting the voices of women in composition. Clarice Assad’s titular composition, The Book of Spells, opens the recording with three movements inspired by a spell book. Fluttering butterfly melodies marked with the occasional strike of lightning marks a spell of love and relationships; the unsettling sound of a coin in a pan is a spell of wealth and prosperity; flocking, fluffy passages insulate the listener in a spell of health and well-being. And that’s only the beginning; magic, folklore, poetry, and story-telling weave their way into the music of Nicole Chamberlain in Atalanta, Lynne Plowman in Small World, Jennifer Higdon in Sound of Light, and in Mary Kouyoumdjian’s A Boy and a Makeshift Toy. Tales of heroism, science, and faith are elegantly performed in Kimberly Osberg’s Just Another Climb, Soon Hee Newbold’s Alis Volat Propriis (She Flies With Her Own Wings), and Clarice Assad’s Solais. These stories are performed through an unwavering lens of womanhood. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti and The Merian Ensemble remind us of the woman behind the ensemble’s namesake in meridian. Maria Sibyllla Merian, botanical and natural history illustrator, was disappointingly overlooked in her time, but has now been lifted as a paragon of a woman’s tenacity in willing herself to be. A phenomenal recording, The Book of Spells captures the core message of The Merian Ensemble: a sisterhood seeking to pull one another out of the shadows.