Lisa Bielawa: Broadcast USA
Photos by Jon Cherry, O’Neil Arnold, Christina Jensen
LINKS & ASSETS
Lisa Bielawa: Broadcasts Brochure
BOOKING INQUIRIES
Christina Jensen, christina@jensenartists.com
Gina Meola, gina@jensenartists.com
646.536.7864
“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.”
Guggenheim and Rome Prize-winning composer Lisa Bielawa’s Broadcast series of works are large-scale spatialized symphonies that interpret public space and activate diverse communities through deeply collaborative music-making. Since 2013, these works have brought together hundreds of professional, amateur and student music-makers in Berlin, San Francisco, and most recently, Louisville, KY.
Lisa Bielawa is currently seeking partners for performances that would be aligned with an iteration planned for 2026 in recognition of the 250th birthday of the United States, with a working title of Broadcast, U.S.A.
This initiative seeks to bring Broadcasts to locations around the country, highlighting the profound natural beauty within our borders while also honoring the many musical traditions that have accompanied and, in some cases, predated the history of the United States.
Broadcast U.S.A. invites community members to come together to be visible in an innovative expression of shared vitality and joyful reinterpretation of public space. Cities and towns are often comprised of musical groups and communities, many of which operate separately from one another, often unaware of possible synergies and shared goals. This musical moment can set the stage for their connection, expression, and amplification. The performance would be a 45-minute musical work created expressly to showcase diverse musical ensembles. It would be mounted in a park site that features distance expanses, a combination of grass and concrete (which provides resonance),and free-flowing pathways and open space for audience to move through and among performers. At the beginning of the piece, all musical groups play in one large gathering. Gradually, musicians migrate outwards, creating ever-wider distances, culminating finally by reconvening into three large groups of musicians at the outer reaches of the performance area, jamming with their neighbors but no longer audible to one another.