Broadcasts
Louisville Broadcast
A Spatial Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians by Lisa Bielawa
Presented by the Louisville Orchestra as Part of its Creators Corps Program in April 2023
Lisa Bielawa’s Louisville Broadcast is a 45-minute musical piece for an unlimited number of participants that celebrates two historic sites and the vitality of Louisville’s many musical communities. Lisa Bielawa says, “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.”
Louisville Broadcast featured 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 joined together for the performances, including members of the Louisville Orchestra, 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, Johnson Middle School, Farmer Elementary, and Tully Elementary, as well as the Louisville Classical Academy.
BFH Radio: Broadcast from Here
24/7 crowdsourced soundscape by composer Lisa Bielawa
Now playing:
BFH Radio - Broadcast from Here - was a continuous and evolving soundscape composed by Lisa Bielawa, incorporating words, voices and found audio from participants all over the world, launched one year after many of our communities went into pandemic lockdown. It addressed itself to the questions: What are the sounds of our world today? What thoughts preoccupy and guide us through this time?
This work, like Broadcast from Home, took its process from the exigencies of its time. BFH Radio morphed as contributions were made by the public, integrated and combined – spoken voices, sung phrases composed from testimonies, instrumental phrases, and field recordings. BFH Radio gathers the sounds of people’s first-hand experiences with daily life, wherever they are in the world, and weaves these together with musical materials. From the sounds of people in their own homes navigating their peculiar reality to the comfortingly timeless sounds of the natural world around us, people are sharing where they are at, and where they are going from here.
Broadcast at the Crossroads
A participatory, community-based work by Lisa Bielawa created in collaboration with the DePauw University School of Music (Greencastle, IN)
Broadcast at the Crossroads is the culmination of Lisa Bielawa’s Composer-in-Residence appointment at DePauw University’s annual Music of the 21st Century festival, organized by School of Music professor Dr. Eliza Brown. Though the residency was originally scheduled pre-pandemic to be in-person, Bielawa and Brown pivoted their work together as a way to build community in the challenging lockdown conditions.
Building on the methods and techniques Bielawa has developed during the pandemic to create broadly participatory works such as Broadcast from Home, Voters’ Broadcast, and Brickyard Broadcast, in a highly collaborative, asynchronous process, Broadcast at the Crossroads weaves together musical materials recorded independently and soloistically by all of the individual members of the orchestra, band, choir and opera programs at DePauw University.
Voters’ Broadcast
A transformative Election Year musical work for online and/or socially distanced ensembles
Lisa Bielawa, composer and producer
Text: Excerpts from Sheryl Oring’s I Wish to Say, Postcards to the President, 2004-2020
Lisa Bielawa’s mission with Voters’ Broadcast was to stimulate voter engagement, political awareness, and community participation in challenging lockdown conditions, through the act of giving voice to the concerns of fellow citizens, during the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election.
Voters’ Broadcast is a broadly participatory musical performance for an unlimited number of voices and instruments made up of choral and instrumental ensembles, and Sing Leaders. The work was directed, conceived and composed by Rome Prize and American Academy of Arts & Letters Award-winning composer Lisa Bielawa, with text taken from celebrated artist Sheryl Oring’s I Wish to Say.
Broadcast from Home
A work in response to the coronavirus crisis featuring contributions from the public
Begun on April 9, 2020, Broadcast from Home is a large-scale work that was open to contributions from people around the world, which evolved and premiered in sections here on this page. A concert version incorporating both live performers and archival audio is in planning. The entire project archive is now part of the Performing Arts Covid-19 Response collection at the Library of Congress.
Brickyard Broadcast
A spatialized work for hundreds of musicians that had its world premiere in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment
Commissioned and presented by North Carolina State University Department of Music, with additional support from the Raleigh Civic Symphony Association and the Concert Singers of Cary
Brickyard Broadcast uses technology and interactivity to reinterpret the NC State Brickyard, the university’s beloved and iconic gathering area outside of D.H. Hill Jr. Library, as a virtual space in which the musical performance unfolds. Hundreds of audio recordings were integrated, created over the course of the fall 2020 semester by individual student and community musicians playing and singing in isolation under the guidance of Lisa Bielawa; Dr. Peter Askim, Director of Orchestral Studies, NC State Department of Music; Askim and Dr. Nathan Leaf, Director of Choral Activities, NC State Department of Music.
Mauer Broadcast
Mauer Broadcast is a 16-minute composition in which the public came together to sing memories of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The premiere, part of the MauerFall30 festival organized by Kulturprojekte Berlin, took place at three historic sites - Brandenburg Gate, Alexanderplatz, Humboldtforum / Marx-Engels-Forum - with hundreds of singers from all over Berlin, several times over the course of the festival week, November 4-10, 2019.
The texts for Mauer Broadcast were selected from Sheryl Oring’s Maueramt project from autumn 2014, produced in conjunction with the 25th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall. At this series of public performances, Oring set up typewriter locations along the former Wall and asked questions such as: “What do you think about when you think about the Berlin Wall,” or “What would you like the world to remember about the Berlin Wall?” Answers were typed on a manual typewriter onto small sheets of paper and collected for an exhibition at the Museum THE KENNEDYS in Berlin.
Airfield Broadcasts
Airfield Broadcasts is a massive 60-minute work for hundreds of musicians that premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin (May 2013) and at Crissy Field in San Francisco (October 2013). Lisa Bielawa turns these former airfields into vast musical canvases, as professional, amateur and student musicians execute a spatial symphony.
Tempelhof Broadcast brought together hundreds of musicians in a large-scale spatial acoustic musical celebration in and about Tempelhofer Park in Berlin, Germany. Crissy Broadcast was a massive, spatialized symphony involving more than 800 professional, student and amateur musicians, including orchestras, bands, and experimental new music groups. These musicians performed on the grounds of Crissy Field for thousands of music lovers and unwitting park goers.