About Lisa Bielawa

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Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968) is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock.” Her 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. For her Guggenheim Fellowship period, Bielawa is writing a new opera, La Ballonniste, and a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings.

Lisa Bielawa has established herself as one of today’s leading composers and performers, consistently incorporating community-making as part of her artistic vision. In an article which branded Bielawa a “fire starter,” New Music Box reported, “It’s difficult to stand anywhere near composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa and not feel energized by proximity. . . An extrovert to the core, Bielawa acknowledges that her highly social nature has taken her in some specific directions both as a composer and as a musical citizen. Community building and close collaboration with performing artists is often central to her compositional process.”

Bielawa 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; she has composed and produced a twelve-episode, made-for-TV opera that features over 350 musicians and was filmed in locations across the country; she was a co-founder in 1997 of the MATA Festival which continues to support young composers; and for five years she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, bringing the chorus to the NY PHIL BIENNIAL and introducing the young performers to the music of today through numerous premieres and commissions of leading composers. From 2019-2022, Bielawa was the founding Composer-in-Residence and Chief Curator of the Philip Glass Institute (PGI) at The New School’s College of the Performing Arts.

In 2022, Lisa Bielawa was selected for the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps. She temporarily relocated to Louisville for the 2022-23 season to make new orchestral and community-based work as an active, engaged member of the community. Her residency included the world premiere of Louisville Broadcast, the latest iteration of her Broadcast series of spatialized symphonies. The 45-minute musical piece for an unlimited number of participants celebrated two historic sites and the vitality of Louisville’s many musical communities. Her time with the Louisville Orchestra also included the world premiere of Send the Carriage Through, composed as an ode to Louisville Orchestra Music Director Teddy Abrams’ “open-hearted vision of leadership as connection and invitation,” the world premiere of Spacelord and Queen for narrator and orchestra, a climate-focused story by librettist Claire Solomon, performed for thousands of public school students, and the world premiere of Home, co-composed with singer/songwriter Lindsey Branson and developed in collaboration with traditional musicians from the Appalachian mountain region of Kentucky.

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. The groundbreaking opera was filmed in twelve parts at locations across the country – Alcatraz Island, a monastery on the Hudson River, a studio in Downtown LA, an abandoned train station in Oakland, and the California Redwoods – and features leading soloists and ensembles in support of its core cast, including soprano Deborah Voigt, Kronos Quartet, violinist Jennifer Koh, San Francisco Girls Chorus, cellist Joshua Roman, Alarm Will Sound, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), and many others. All twelve episodes were broadcast on KCETLink’s Emmy Award-winning arts and culture series Artbound, as well as online for free, on-demand streaming. The Los Angeles Times called Vireo an opera, “unlike any you have seen before, in content and in form,” and San Francisco Classical Voice described it as, “poetic and fantastical, visually stunning and relentlessly abstract.” 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, featuring all of the music and episodes.

Recent concert highlights for Bielawa include the New York premiere of her violin concerto Sanctuary 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). The piece is inspired by the layered meanings of the word “sanctuary” within American consciousness, and is the culmination of a large-scale research project Bielawa undertook during her fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. BMOP, led by Artistic Director Gil Rose, also gave the New York premiere of Bielawa’s In medias res at Carnegie Hall as part of the orchestra’s 25th anniversary celebration. Teddy Abrams gave the West Coast premiere of Bielawa’s piece Send the Carriage Through at the Britt Music & Arts Festival. Other highlights include the world premiere of Voters’ Litany, a commission from the Cathedral Choral Society that marked the centennial of the 19th Amendment, 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 Land Sea Sky, a commission from the Radcliffe Choral Society (RCS) premiered by RCS with members of BMOP.

Bielawa’s other recent large-scale participatory works in addition to Louisville Broadcast include Broadcast from Home, Voters’ Broadcast, and Brickyard Broadcast. Described by The Washington Post as “spellbinding,” Broadcast from Home was realized online throughout the period of the coronavirus lockdown, and featured over 500 submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents.  In 2021, Broadcast from Home was inducted into the Library of Congress as part of its Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection. Voters’ Broadcast’s mission 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. It was commissioned as part of the Democracy & Debate theme-semester by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with support from its School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and developed in partnership with Kaufman Music Center in New York. Brickyard Broadcast was a spatialized work for hundreds of musicians commissioned by North Carolina State University that had its world premiere in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment designed by the digital media teams at the NC State University Libraries in November 2020.

Earlier broadcast projects have included 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 at 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. Her work Mauer Broadcast was a series of pop-up choral performances at locations including the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 2019. Bielawa’s Chance Encounter is a piece comprising songs and arias constructed of speech overheard in transient public spaces, which was premiered by soprano Susan Narucki and The Knights in Lower Manhattan's Seward Park. A project of Creative Capital, the 35-minute work for roving soprano and chamber ensemble has since been performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in Vancouver, Venice, and in Rome on the banks of the Tiber River in partnership with urban placemaker Robert Hammond, a founder of The High Line in New York.

Lisa Bielawa’s music is frequently performed throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her work has recently been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Town Hall Seattle, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts Summer Series in New York’s Central Park, National Sawdust, Le Poisson Rouge, Rouen Opera, Helsinki Music Center, Arsenal de Metz, and MAXXI Museum in Rome, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include the Louisville Orchestra, The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Composers Orchestra, and the Orlando Philharmonic; she has also written for the combined forces of The Knights, San Francisco Girls Chorus, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by leading ensembles and organizations including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Miami String Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, American Guild of Organists, American Pianists Association, California Music Center, Akademiska Sångföreningen (Helsinki), Paul Dresher Ensemble, SOLI Chamber Ensemble, the Washington and PRISM Saxophone Quartets, Ensemble Variances (commissioned by Radio France), and more.

In addition to performing as the vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble, Bielawa performs in many of her own works as well as the music of John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Michael Gordon, and others. She had her third residency as a performer/composer at Zorn’s venue The Stone in November 2022. She recently made her orchestral conducting debut leading the Mannes String Orchestra in a special presentation by the Philip Glass Institute featuring her music, music by Jon Gibson and David T. Little, and Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3.

Bielawa’s latest album is Blueprints I, which features music that would have premiered at her residency at John Zorn’s The Stone, scheduled for the week in March 2020 that New York City went into lockdown, recorded by the performers at home. In addition to the complete opera Vireo (Orange Mountain Music), Bielawa’s My Outstretched Hand for the San Francisco Girls Chorus and The Knights was also released in 2019 (Supertrain Records), as well as Sanctuary Songs, which she recorded with violinist Jennifer Koh on the album Limitless (Cedille Records).  Her discography includes The Lay of the Love (Innova), “Opening: Forest” from Vireo on the album Final Answer performed by the San Francisco Girls Chorus and Kronos Quartet (Orange Mountain Music); A Handful of World (Tzadik); The Trojan Women on a disc entitled First Takes (TROY); Hildegurls: Electric Ordo Virtutum, (Innova); The Trojan Women in a version for string quartet performed by the Miami String Quartet on The NYFA Collection (Innova); In medias res (BMOP/sound), a double-disc set of Bielawa’s solo and orchestral works; the world premiere recording of Chance Encounter (Orange Mountain Music); and Elegy-Portrait on pianist Bruce Levingston’s album, Heart Shadow (Sono Luminus). 

Born in San Francisco into a musical family, 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, and became an active participant in New York musical life.