Lisa Bielawa: Broadcasts
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.”
For almost a decade, Guggenheim Fellow, Rome Prize and American Academy of Arts & Letters Award-winning composer Lisa Bielawa has been creating a series of Broadcasts - works for performance by hundreds of musicians in public spaces, celebrating the musical diversity of communities.
Her series of broadly inclusive Broadcast works began with the 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.
Most recently, Lisa Bielawa’s Louisville Broadcast, a 45-minute musical piece for an unlimited number of participants, was presented by the Louisville Orchestra as part of its Creators Corps composer residency program. Louisville Broadcast celebrated two historic sites and the vitality of Louisville’s many musical communities. Two free performances were presented in Shelby Park and at Waterfront Park-Big Four Bridge. 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.
Lisa Bielawa is available for residencies and commissions to compose new Broadcast pieces, working deeply with communities and orchestra to create unforgettable, unifying musical experiences.