Composer Lisa Bielawa Named Howard Hanson Visiting Professor with the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester – Performance with Musica Nova on Dec. 4
Photo by Shawn Poynter available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/lisa-bielawa
Composer, Producer, and Vocalist Lisa Bielawa Named
Howard Hanson Visiting Professor for 2025-2026
with the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester
Lisa Bielawa’s Inacessabili Voce
Performed by Bielawa & Musica Nova Ensemble
Conducted by Music Director Brad Lubman
Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 7:30pm
Kilbourn Hall | 26 Gibbs Street | Rochester, NY
Tickets, Livestream, and More Information
“the formal sophistication and lyrical richness of Bielawa’s music go deep" – The New Yorker
Rochester, NY – Composer, producer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968) has been named the Howard Hanson Visiting Professor at Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester for the 2025-2026 academic year. Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim fellow and Rome Prize winner, who 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, and “fluid and arresting ... at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Throughout the year, Lisa Bielawa will work with Eastman students, and several of her pieces will be performed by Eastman ensembles. The first performance of her visiting professorship will be on Thursday, December 4, 2025 at 7:30pm in Kilbourn Hall (26 Gibbs Street), featuring the Musica Nova Ensemble conducted by Music Director Brad Lubman. Musica Nova and Bielawa will perform her vocal chamber work, Incessabili Voce (2013). The program also includes Overcast Skies by Matthew Lam (2023) and Phlegra by Iannis Xenakis (1975).
In her program notes for Incessabili Voce, Bielawa writes:
“In designing material for the voice, I thought about singing in church, the ecstatic singing of angels, the roar of soldiers, the mannerisms of Greek storytelling in the great oral tradition, the traditions of Gregorian and Anglican chant. The vocal part coaxes cries of various sorts out of the instruments. The texture of the ensemble writing bears witness to my preoccupation, still as lively as when I was six years old, with the sloppy joyfulness of a multitude crying ceaselessly all together – whether angels or soldiers. I let all of these images, texts, traditions and energies enter the piece and mingle together, without strict dramatic intent. It is more of a dreamscape than a story, more cry than word.”
Bielawa is established 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.” 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; 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. Bielawa’s 2025-26 season also includes the world premiere of Knoxville Broadcast, the latest iteration of her Broadcast series of large-scale, spatialized symphonies for performance in public spaces.
Of her current work as the Howard Hanson Visiting Professor and this first performance of the season, Bielawa says:
“I can think of no more fulfilling way to enter into the Eastman community than to jump onstage with the students to perform a work created expressly to maximize collaboration and spontaneity between the performers, alongside my longtime and cherished colleague, Brad Lubman. This is the first adventure in what I know will be a joyful and broad-ranging immersion in Eastman musical life.”
More about Lisa Bielawa: Bielawa is the recipient of the Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, an OPERA America Grant for Female Composers, a 2025 commission from The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, and is a 2025 New Music USA Amplifying Voices composer. 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. During the 2022-23 season, she was a member of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps.
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, Japan Society, 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, Cincinnati Symphony 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, Big Ears, 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.
The 2025-2026 concert season features the world premiere of Bielawa’s Violin Concerto No. 2: PULSE, written for violinist Tessa Lark and commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Santa Fe Pro Musica.
Actively composing for the stage as well, Bielawa is currently at work on her Guggenheim Fellowship project, a hybrid film and live action opera called La Ballonniste or Balloon (A Hot Air Opera) – a heartfelt comedy centering on 18th century French opera singer Élisabeth Tible, the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon. Previously, 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.
In addition to being a leading composer, Bielawa has performed as the vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992. A dedicated musical citizen, she was a co-founder in 1997 of the MATA Festival which continues to support young composers. For five years, she served as 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, she 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. She is currently the Howard Hanson Visiting Professor at the Eastman School of Music
Bielawa’s music has been recorded on the Tzadik, Orange Mountain, Supertrain, Cedille, TROY, Innova, BMOP/sound, and Sono Luminus labels. 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. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.