Sept. 4-24: La Ballonniste – Opera-in-Progress by Composer Lisa Bielawa with Libretto by Claire Solomon – Workshop Performance Presented by University Opera at the Mead Witter School of Music

Opera-in-Progress La Ballonniste to be Workshopped at University of Wisconsin–Madison from September 4-24

Lisa Bielawa, Composer & Claire Solomon, Librettist
Cori Ellison, Dramaturg
with University Opera at the Mead Witter School of Music

Workshop Performance: Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 7:30 pm
Hamel Music Center, Collins Recital Hall | University of Wisconsin-Madison
740 University Avenue | Madison, WI

Free and open to the public, no tickets required
More Information

“Bielawa’s music is thoughtful and approachable. She’s a voice in what you might call the new accessible avant-garde.” – Gramophone Magazine

Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net

Madison, WI – Guggenheim and Rome Prize-winning composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa – described as “a dynamic and innovative composer” by The Boston Globe – will workshop her opera-in-progress, La Ballonniste, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from September 4-24, 2024, collaborating with University Opera at the Mead Witter School of Music, and joined by the opera’s librettist Claire Solomon and dramaturg Cori Ellison.

The development period will culminate with a workshop performance of La Ballonniste on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 7:30pm in Collins Recital Hall at the Hamel Music Center (740 University Avenue) featuring University vocalists May Kohler, Ben Johnson, Brendin Larson, Alex Cook, and others to be announced. The work-in-progress performance is open to the public to attend, free of charge (no registration required).

Lisa Bielawa’s music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times, and “fluid and arresting ... at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the recipient of the Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and an OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. Recently she completed a Loghaven Artist Residency and was part of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps. She received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser. For her Guggenheim Fellowship period, Bielawa is writing and developing this new opera as well as a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings.

La Ballonniste is a heartfelt comedy centering on 18th century French opera singer Élisabeth Tible: the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon. The opera opens in 1784, Lyon, on the cusp of the French Revolution, as balloon madness sweeps France.

The opera takes its themes from beloved entertainments of the ancien régime (the “old regime” of kings that was about to be overthrown in the French Revolution), satirizing the blurry line between power and magic and the hubris of Europe’s ruling class, in an era of vast inequality, much like our own. Élisabeth is fashioned on the heroines of opéra comique, her métier; its tropes and techniques inform every aspect of the opera, with buffoonery, animated wax statues of royalty, a revolutionary chorus and demonic orchestra, a neoclassical deus ex machina, and multiple musical styles in unholy alliance. We follow Élisabeth as she breaks free of a controlling husband, who – as a “waxworker” or creator of lifelike wax effigies – prefers inanimate women; finds an ally in artist-balloon pilot (aeronaut) Fleurant; and finally defies both gravity and the rigid social class structure of her day to fly free and sing her prophetic vision from the air.

The “globe aérostatique,” as the first gas balloons were called, was an instant craze and the ultimate autocratic status symbol: expensive, dangerous, drifting uncontrollably through the skies to the amazement of crowds up to 400,000 people, the ballon symbolizes absolute power and its fragility. La Ballonniste is a romp, but it is also an allegory for the end of absolutism with resonance in our own time. It stages the lush excesses of the ancient régime as freedom soars as a descant, above the skies, in a rapture of aesthetic pleasure.

“The discovery of this forgotten woman’s story, brought to life with such humor and humanity in Claire’s superb libretto, has taken me to totally new musical places,” Bielawa says. “Inspirations range from Shostakovich and Gogol’s The Nose, Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and the Barbie movie. These characters are full of lovable foibles and I frequently catch myself laughing while I work, but there is also tenderness underneath the sonic playfulness. It is a supreme luxury to be able to develop these characters and ideas with members of the University Opera community. Their sense of adventure and discovery is unlike any other opera department I have encountered. It’s going to be a very fun ride!”

More about Lisa Bielawa: Composer Lisa Bielawa consistently incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the pandemic, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her work Broadcast from Home, now archived by the Library of Congress.

Bielawa’s music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. www.lisabielawa.net

For Calendar Editors:

Concert details:

What: Workshop Performance of Opera-in-Progress La Ballonniste
Lisa Bielawa, Composer & Claire Solomon, Librettist
Who: University Opera at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
When: Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 7:30pm
Where: Hamel Music Center’s Collins Recital Hall, 740 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706
More information: www.music.wisc.edu/events/la-ballonniste

Description: University Opera at the Mead Witter School of Music presents a special workshop performance of La Ballonniste – a new forthcoming opera by composer Lisa Bielawa, with a libretto by Claire Solomon. The opera, which spans three short acts, highlights the rise of Elisabeth Tible – abandoned wife of a maker of wax effigies and aspiring soprano to iconic status as the first female balloonist in late 18th-century France.

May 4: The National Arts Centre Presents The Trojan Women by Lisa Bielawa – Featuring Members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra as part of WolfGANG Sessions

Photo by Desmond White available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/artist-profiles/lisa-bielawa

The National Arts Centre Presents The Trojan Women by Lisa Bielawa
Featuring Members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra as part of WolfGANG Sessions

Saturday, May 4, 2024 at 9pm
CLUB SAW | 67 Nicholas Street | Ottawa, ON
Tickets and More Information

Livestream Available (Free)

“Bielawa’s music is thoughtful and approachable. She’s a voice in what you might call the new accessible avant-garde.” – Gramophone Magazine

Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net

Ottawa, ON – Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa –– described as “a dynamic and innovative composer” by The Boston Globe –– will have her work for string quartet, The Trojan Women, performed by members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra at Ottawa’s Club SAW on Saturday, May 4, 2024 at 9pm as part of NAC’s WolfGANG Sessions. The concert will also include Dinuk Wijeratne’s The Disappearance Of Lisa Gherardini and David Bruce’s Gumboots. The performance will be broadcast live, available free of charge and on-demand at www.nac-cna.ca/en/event/36177.

Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. In 1997, Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival. In 1997, Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival. 

In 1999, Bielawa composed a continuous score for Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women for a production directed by JoAnn Akalaitis. The following year, a string quartet based on some of the musical material from that score, which was premiered in 2000 by the Miami String Quartet at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. She also composed a version of the work for string orchestra, which was commissioned and premiered by the String Orchestra of New York City (SONYC). The string quartet version of The Trojan Women premiered nearly 21 years ago to date, on May 10, 2003 at the MATA Festival, in New York City.

Bielawa says of the work:

“The special musical challenge of this project was to identify and convey, in three movements, three variegated forms of grief, each one a consequence of one woman's particular sufferings: ‘Hecuba,’ ‘Cassandra,’ and ‘Andromache.’ These women lost husbands and sons in the notorious brutality of the Trojan War. Each time I revisited the piece as it evolved from music for the theatre, to string quartet, and finally to string orchestra, I was informed by a slightly different understanding of the nature of public and private grieving. Euripides’ eulogy to the fallen Troy takes its place alongside the picture of Jerusalem in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, W.G. Sebald’s searching inquiries into the rubble of Dresden, or the jarring pictures we see daily in the media.”

More about Lisa Bielawa: During her 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship period, Lisa Bielawa is working primarily on two projects – a new opera, La Ballonniste, and a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings. La Ballonniste is an opera in three acts inspired by the life of Elisabeth Thible, an opera singer who was the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon, with libretto by Claire Solomon, dramaturgy by Cori Ellison. Bielawa’s book will share remembrances and observations gathered from her decades of wandering, offering cultural moments in the global continuum frozen in time.

Bielawa consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin in San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the coronavirus lockdown, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents, through her project, Broadcast from Home.  In 2022, Bielawa was selected for a residency with the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps, during which she wrote new orchestral and community-based works to engage the Louisville community.

Bielawa’s music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO in Houston, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. 

She received a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser, created with librettist Erik Ehn and director Charles Otte. Vireo was filmed in twelve parts in locations across the country and features over 350 musicians. Vireo was released on CD/DVD in 2019 (Orange Mountain Music). Bielawa is also recorded on the Tzadik and BMOP/ sound labels, among others.

For more information about Lisa Bielawa visit www.lisabielawa.net.

For information about The National Arts Centre Orchestra visit: www.nac-cna.ca/orchestra

Britt Festival presents West Coast Premiere of Guggenheim Fellow Lisa Bielawa’s Send the Carriage Through

Photo by Desmond White available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/lisa-bielawa

Britt Festival presents West Coast Premiere of Guggenheim Fellow Lisa Bielawa’s Send the Carriage Through

Britt Festival Orchestra
Conducted by Music Director Teddy Abrams

Saturday, June 24, 2023 8pm
Britt Pavilion | 350 First St. | Jacksonville, OR

Tickets: www.brittfest.org/performance/beethoven-5-alexi-kenney-23/

Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net

Jacksonville, OR – 2023 Guggenheim Fellow Lisa Bielawa’s latest orchestral work, Send the Carriage Through, will have its West Coast premiere on Saturday, June 24, 2023 at 8pm, presented by the Britt Music and Arts Festival and performed by the Britt Festival Orchestra led by Music Director Teddy Abrams. The program also includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Barber’s Violin Concerto, featuring violin soloist Alexi Kenney.

Lisa Bielawa wrote Send the Carriage Through for the Louisville Orchestra, where Teddy Abrams also serves as Music Director, as part of her Creators Corps residency with that orchestra. Bielawa is one of three composers who temporarily relocated to Louisville, Kentucky, to make new orchestral and community-based work as an active, engaged member of the community, as part of the orchestra’s new Creators Corps program.

Inspired in part by Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral processional, Bielawa describes Send the Carriage Through as, “a gift of gratitude to the players of the Louisville Orchestra and a celebration of Teddy Abrams’ own open-hearted vision of leadership as a connection and invitation.”

The Queen’s meticulously choreographed funeral initially inspired her work on the piece. Bielawa says, “[Queen Elizabeth II] had in fact ‘composed’ the whole pageant herself, down to every detail – and there she was, at the center of it all, yet absent from it. As I watched the astounding choreography of the procession, I ruminated: ‘What does the way we enshrine people who are gone, especially great leaders, say about us?’ … What began as a rumination on greatness and mortality took on more and more playfulness and joy as the weeks and months went by, and my relationship with Louisville – the city, its Orchestra, its audience and community – became more and more colorful and engaged. I began to celebrate the exhilaration of music-making as a team sport, a kind of relay race in which one could literally ‘pass the baton,’ sometimes leading, sometimes following.”

Lisa Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. In 1997 Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival. 

During her Guggenheim Fellowship period this year, Bielawa is primarily working on two projects – a new opera, La Ballonniste, and a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings. La Ballonniste is an opera in three acts inspired by the life of Elisabeth Thible, an opera singer who was the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon, with libretto by Claire Solomon, dramaturgy by Cori Ellison. Bielawa’s book will share remembrances and observations gathered from her decades of wandering, offering cultural moments in the global continuum frozen in time.

In addition to Send the Carriage Through, Lisa Bielawa’s recent premieres all celebrate the musical relationships and community that have become a hallmark of her work:

• On April 15, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), led by Artistic Director Gil Rose, gave the New York premiere of her piece In medias res at Carnegie Hall, as part of the orchestra’s 25th anniversary celebration. Bielawa was the BMOP Music Alive Composer-in-Residence from 2006-2009, and wrote this work inspired by the bonds she forged with her fellow musicians. The San Francisco Chronicle praised the work’s “superb combination of rhythmic exuberance, melodic grace and textural inventiveness.”

• On April 23, the Louisville Orchestra presented the world premiere of Louisville Broadcast, an iteration of Bielawa’s ongoing Broadcast series focused on the city of Louisville. Over 500 professional, student, and amateur musicians from throughout the area joined together to perform Bielawa’s 45-minute piece, turning two historic locations – Shelby Park and Big Four Bridge – into vast musical canvases, with listeners walking freely among the performers.

• From May 17-19, the Louisville Orchestra gave the premiere performances of Bielawa’s new piece Home, co-composed with Lindsey Branson, on tour to three Kentucky cities – Harlan, Prestonburg, and Pikesville. Bielawa met Branson, a singer/songwriter and graduate of the Kentucky School of Bluegrass and Traditional Musicon a recent trip to Hazard, KY, in the Appalachian mountains. They created the piece in an organic and intuitive process over the next weeks, resulting in a joyful shared musical performance work for full orchestra and unlimited musicians from the rich traditions of the region.

For more information about Lisa Bielawa, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.
For information about Teddy Abrams, please visit www.teddyabrams.com
For information about the Britt Music and Arts Festival, please visit www.brittfest.org/about-britt

Composer Lisa Bielawa Named 2023 Guggenheim Fellow

Photo by Desmond White available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/lisa-bielawa

Composer Lisa Bielawa Named 2023 Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Upcoming Premieres:

April 15: New York Premiere of In medias res
Boston Modern Orchestra Project at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
Information: www.bmop.org/season-tickets/play-it-again-carnegie-hall

April 23: World Premiere of Louisville Broadcast
Spatialized Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians, Louisville, KY
Information: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

May 17-19: World Premiere Performances of Home
Co-composed with Lindsey Branson
Louisville Orchestra in Prestonsburg, Pikeville, Harlan, KY
Information: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/inharmonytour

June 24: West Coast Premiere of Send the Carriage Through
Britt Music & Arts Festival in Jacksonville, OR
Information: www.brittfest.org/performance/beethoven-5-alexi-kenney-23

Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net

New York, NY – Composer, vocalist, and producer Lisa Bielawa has been named a 2023 Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, joining a diverse group of 171 exceptional individuals. Chosen from a rigorous application and peer review process out of almost 2,500 applicants, the Fellows were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.

Lisa Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. In 1997 Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival. 

Upon learning of her selection as a 2023 Fellow, Bielawa said, “I’m so deeply honored to be among this year’s Guggenheim Fellows. Sincere thanks to the many members of my musical family for our work together. This honor is for all of us.”

During her Guggenheim Fellowship period, Bielawa will primarily work on two projects – a new opera, La Ballonniste, and a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings. La Ballonniste is an opera in three acts inspired by the life of Elisabeth Thible, an opera singer who was the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon, with libretto by Claire Solomon, directed by Mary Birnbaum, dramaturgy by Cori Ellison, and production/design consulting by Charles Otte. Bielawa’s book will share remembrances and observations gathered from her decades of wandering, offering cultural moments in the global continuum frozen in time – including music theater in bombed-out buildings in Milosevic’s Serbia in 2000; watching Yassir Arafat get thrown out of the New York Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations in 1995, from the only place from which the episode was visible (the stage); spending a seven-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur in 2014, at the very moment that a Malaysian Air flight left the airport and disappeared; and celebrating an anxiously catered Thanksgiving Dinner in 2003 as the only American guests at an iconic hotel in Moscow that was bombed by the Black Widows six days later – to name but a few.

Lisa Bielawa’s premieres in the upcoming months all celebrate the musical relationships and community that have become a hallmark of her work:

• On April 15, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), led by Artistic Director Gil Rose, will give the New York premiere of her piece In medias res at Carnegie Hall, as part of the orchestra’s 25th anniversary celebration. Bielawa was the BMOP Music Alive Composer-in-Residence from 2006-2009, and wrote this work inspired by the bonds she forged with her fellow musicians. The San Francisco Chronicle praised the work’s “superb combination of rhythmic exuberance, melodic grace and textural inventiveness.”

• In 2022, Bielawa was selected for a residency with the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps and temporarily relocated to Louisville to make new orchestral and community-based work as an active, engaged member of the community. On April 23, the Louisville Orchestra will present the world premiere of Louisville Broadcast, an iteration of Bielawa’s ongoing Broadcast series focused on the city of Louisville. Over 500 professional, student, and amateur musicians from throughout the area will join together to perform Bielawa’s 45-minute piece, turning two historic locations – Shelby Park and Big Four Bridge – into vast musical canvases, allowing listeners to walk freely among the performers.

• From May 17-19, the Louisville Orchestra will give the premiere performances of Bielawa’s new piece Home, co-composed with Lindsey Branson, on tour to three Kentucky cities – Harlan, Prestonburg, and Pikesville. Bielawa met Branson, a singer/songwriter and graduate of the Bluegrass School, on a recent trip to Hazard, KY, in the Appalachian mountains. They created the piece in an organic and intuitive process over the next weeks, resulting in a joyful shared musical performance work for full orchestra and unlimited musicians from the rich traditions of the region.

• On June 24 at the Britt Music & Arts Festival in Jacksonville, OR, conductor Teddy Abrams will lead the West Coast premiere of Bielawa’s Send the Carriage Through, written as part of Bielawa’s residency with the Louisville Orchestra and premiered by the LO and Abrams in January. Inspired in part by Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral processional, Bielawa describes the piece as, “a celebration of Teddy’s open-hearted vision of leadership as connection and invitation.”

More About Lisa Bielawa:

Lisa Bielawa received a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser, created with librettist Erik Ehn and director Charles Otte. Vireo was filmed in twelve parts at locations across the country and features over 350 musicians. Vireo was produced as part of Bielawa’s artist residency at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California and in partnership with KCETLink and Single Cel. In February 2019, Vireo was released as a two CD + DVD box set on Orange Mountain Music.

In spring 2022, Bielawa’s violin concerto Sanctuary had its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall by Jennifer Koh and the American Composers Orchestra (ACO), conducted by Marin Alsop. Sanctuary was co-commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic (which premiered the piece), Carnegie Hall, ACO, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). Other recent highlights include the world premiere of Voters’ Litany, a commission from the Cathedral Choral Society, which was premiered at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC; Missa Primavera, commissioned and recorded by cellist Matt Haimovitz, on his label Oxingale Records; and Brickyard Broadcast –– a virtual reality collaboration commissioned by North Carolina State University. 

Bielawa consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin in San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the coronavirus lockdown, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her project, Broadcast from Home. In 2021, Broadcast from Home was inducted into the Library of Congress as part of its Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection.

Bielawa’s music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO in Houston, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. 

Born in San Francisco, Lisa Bielawa played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. She moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University.

For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.

Louisville Broadcast by Lisa Bielawa presented by the Louisville Orchestra

Announcing Louisville Broadcast by Lisa Bielawa

A Spatial Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians

Presented by the Louisville Orchestra as Part of its Creators Corps Program

Two FREE outdoor performances featuring performers from throughout the Louisville area

Sunday, April 23, 2023:
11:30 am-12:15 pm – Shelby Park (600 E. Oak St., Louisville, KY)
7:00-7:45 pm – Big Four Bridge (1101 River Rd., Louisville, KY)

Participants include members of the Louisville Orchestra, Louisville Academy of Music, Louisville Civic Orchestra, University of Louisville Orchestra, VOICES of Kentuckiana, Louisville Leopards & ensembles from Jefferson County Public Schools

Members of the public can join the Louisville Broadcast Town Criers or contribute text to be considered for inclusion in the piece.

Information: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net

Louisville, Kentucky – The Louisville Orchestra (LO) presents LO Creators Corps composer Lisa Bielawa’s Louisville Broadcast, a new 45-minute musical piece for an unlimited number of participants that celebrates two historic sites and the vitality of Louisville’s many musical communities. Two free performances will take place in the open air on April 23, 2023, in Shelby Park (600 E. Oak St.) from 11:30 am-12:15 pm and at Waterfront Park-Big Four Bridge (1101 River Rd.) from 7:00-7:45 pm, turning these sites into vast musical canvases. Bielawa will create the piece specifically for Shelby Park and Waterfront Park-Big Four Bridge, and listeners can walk freely among and between the performers.

Louisville Broadcast will feature hundreds of musicians, celebrating the diversity of Louisville's musical life. A varied roster of over 500 professional, student, and amateur musicians from throughout Jefferson County will join together for the performances, including members of the LO, students and parents from the Louisville Academy of Music, the Louisville Civic Orchestra, the University of Louisville Orchestra, VOICES of Kentuckiana choir, the Louisville Leopards, the Louisville Drumline Academy and ensembles from several JCPS schools: Male High School, Moore High School, Noe Middle School, Johnson Middle School, Farmer Elementary, and Tully Elementary, as well as the Louisville Classical Academy.

In addition, all are invited to join The Town Criers, a community choir that anyone can join regardless of musical background. Bielawa will create music for the Town Criers that is easy to learn without any music-reading skills or training – anyone who wishes to raise their voice can join the performances. To learn more about participating and sign up for more information about joining Louisville Broadcast, visit: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

The texts Bielawa will be setting in Louisville Broadcast are now being collected from any Louisville residents who want to contribute via the Louisville Orchestra’s website. Answers submitted will be considered for inclusion in the performance and shared online. To contribute, visit: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

Bielawa has chosen Shelby Park and the Big Four Bridge as performance sites for their historical significance to Louisville. Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm designed Shelby Park in 1907, the only park in Louisville designed explicitly with a Carnegie Library (now the Shelby Park Community Center). It is the geographic anchor of the Shelby Park neighborhood, where the LO has established residences for the Creators Corps (including Bielawa). From 1895 to its decommission in 1969, the Big Four Bridge served as a railroad bridge for freight and passengers connecting Louisville and Southern Indiana. It was converted into a pedestrian bridge in 2013 and has since become an iconic landmark in the city, with 1.5 million pedestrians and cyclists crossing its span each year.

“The goal of Louisville Broadcast is to interpret and celebrate these important public spaces in Louisville, allowing listeners to draw their own meaning and experience from them,” said composer Lisa Bielawa. “I would like to see this event bring about new partnerships, new vitality, and new relationships between different generations, musical traditions and identities, and between arts or music lovers and totally non-arts-identified park-goers enjoying a surprise encounter with music as a ‘happening’ in the middle of their familiar and beloved city. By inviting anyone in the city to contribute their words to be sung by the participating choirs, I can multiply the diversity of Louisvillian voices that speak through the piece. It is the sound of a whole city – its history, people, neighborhoods, and communities.”

“Louisville Broadcast epitomizes the Creators Corps’ mission of creating new work for and with the city of Louisville on a huge scale,” says Jacob Gotlib, Manager of the Creators Corps program at the Louisville Orchestra. “Louisville is renowned for its rich and deep musical culture, but we often work in disparate stylistic, educational, and geographic pockets. The Louisville Orchestra is thrilled to help bring together our diverse musical communities in this historic way.”

The nature of Bielawa’s work is in keeping with the definition of the word broadcast, “cast or scattered in all directions.” Musicians will begin in the center of the sites and disperse outwards according to instructions in Bielawa’s musical score, coordinated only by absolute time and long-distance musical cues. Players will spread out in long chains, flanking the walkways and bridge. Audience members can choose how to hear the pieces, deciding where to move as the musicians disperse. They will be able to take in several different points of view from throughout the site during the performances.

“Louisville is a very musical city, filled with singers, writers, instrumentalists and performers. It is therefore the perfect backdrop for Lisa’s participatory Louisville Broadcast,” said Graham Parker, Chief Executive to the Louisville Orchestra. “We are so excited to see the enthusiasm to be involved as evidenced by the numbers who have signed up, and to partner with Shelby Park, and Waterfront Park to make use of the Big Four Bridge.”

Louisville Broadcast is the result of a collaboration between the Louisville Orchestra and several community organizations, including the Louisville Academy of Music, Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Metro Parks, and Waterfront Park.

“The Louisville Academy of Music is honored to work with Lisa Bielawa and the Louisville Orchestra on this ambitious and unprecedented composition,” said Sara Louise Callaway, Louisville Academy of Music’s Executive Director. “We are excited to bring together our students, families, and teachers to join in this incredible opportunity for our city. This is a new and unique experience for our school and community, and I have loved seeing the joy, creativity, and new relationships sparked through this project.”

“We are excited to partner with the Louisville Orchestra to present Louisville Broadcast on the Big Four Bridge,” said Deborah Bilitski, executive director of Waterfront Park. “As Waterfront Park celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Big Four Bridge throughout the year, this partnership is evidence of the power public spaces hold in bringing our community together. As we continue our work to make our waterfront accessible to everyone, we are excited to support Louisville Orchestra in its mission to make the arts more accessible in our community.”

About Lisa Bielawa’s Broadcast Projects

Composer Lisa Bielawa’s Louisville Broadcast is the latest in a series of broadly inclusive Broadcast works, starting with her large-scale piece Airfield Broadcasts, a massive 60-minute work for hundreds of musicians that premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin (Tempelhof Broadcast, May 2013) and Crissy Field in San Francisco (Crissy Broadcast, October 2013). Bielawa turned these former airfields into vast musical canvases as professional, amateur, and student musicians executed a spatial symphony. The series continued with Mauer Broadcast at the site of the former Berlin Wall, commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by Kulturprojekte Berlin in 2019; Broadcast from Home, developed remotely during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, which included the testimonies and home-recorded voices of over 500 people from six continents worldwide; and Brickyard Broadcast, developed with the city and university in Raleigh, North Carolina, partnering with their libraries to create a performance site entirely in virtual reality.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote after the Broadcast performances at Crissy Field in San Francisco, “All the boundaries we take for granted in musical life - including those marking the beginning and end of a performance, or separating performers from an audience - are casually obliterated in Crissy Broadcast, composer Lisa Bielawa's magical and heartbreakingly beautiful exercise in public art. What's left is a heightened aesthetic sense of the world around us.”

Now in its inaugural year, the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps transcends traditional commissioning and composer-in-residence paradigms with a radically new model for collaborating with symphony orchestras in the 21st century. Each year, the orchestra will invite three creators to move to Louisville and live in the Shelby Park neighborhood for at least 30 weeks, serving as staff members with an annual salary of $40,000, health insurance, provided housing, and studio equipment. Throughout their residencies, they will compose new works to be performed by the orchestra, participate in educational and community engagement activities, and be engaged citizens of their neighborhood. Funding for the program comes from a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and individual donors to the LO.

Join Louisville Broadcast

For more information about participating in The Town Criers or to submit text to be sung in the event, please visit: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast