April 18: Lisa Bielawa's Rochester Broadcast – A Spatial Symphony Presented by Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester
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Rochester Broadcast by Lisa Bielawa
A Spatial Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians at Parcel 5
Presented by Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester
Two Performances on Saturday, April 18, 2026 at 12pm and 2:00pm
Parcel 5 | 285 East Main Street | Rochester, NY
Free and Open to the Public, No Registration Required
More Information: esm.rochester.edu/esm-event/rochester-broadcast
Rochester, NY –– This spring, award-winning composer Lisa Bielawa, currently the Howard Hanson Visiting Professor at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, partners with the Eastman School of Music to bring together Eastman students and members of the Rochester community for Rochester Broadcast, a large-scale, site-specific “spatial symphony,” celebrating the diversity of artistic life in Rochester. There will be two outdoor performances, free and open to the public, on Saturday, April 18, 2026 (rain date April 19) from 12-12:30pm and 2-2:30pm at Parcel 5 (285 East Main Street, Rochester).
Featured groups will include Eastman School of Music (Eastman); Eastman Community Music School (ECMS); University of Rochester (URochester): All-In Brass Band (Tom Allen, director), URochesterMarching Pep Band (Anika Tripathi, student leader), URochester Chorus (Lee Wright, director), EastmanBrass Guild (Mark Kellogg, director), Eastman Saxology (Charles Pillow, director), ECMS Klezmer Ensemble (Jonathan Allentoff, director), Eastman Tuba Mirum (Justin Benavidez, director), Rochester Mandolin Orchestra (Ken Luk, director), ECMSGamelan Ensemble (Ken Luk, director), Eastman Chorale (Bill Weinert, director), ECMSChorus (Karen Templeton, director), Rochester Medical Orchestra (Evan Meccarello, director), Rochester School of the Arts Orchestra (John Fetter, , director), and Rochester School of the Arts Band (Kerry Venanzi, director).
Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, whose music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times. She 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 are 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.
The San Francisco Chronicle described Bielawa’s work Crissy Broadcast, which took place on Crissy Field in San Francisco, as “one of the most moving performances of the year…where all the boundaries we take for granted in musical life…are casually obliterated.” The Knoxville News Sentinel described the preparation of Knoxville Broadcast as being “like observing the creation of a Rube Goldberg machine, in which each piece is carefully placed and prepped with precision before the first event sets off a chain of activity.”
“I’m so happy that Rochester will join the list of Broadcast cities!” says Bielawa. “I create these radically inclusive spatial symphonies for people to fill public urban space with sound, joyfully bringing people together through a celebration of the multiple musical communities in their hometown. Eastman is a perfect partner for this next adventure, in this famously musical city.”
“Education and performance are two sides of the same coin,” states Eastman’s Joan and Martin Messinger Dean Kate Sheeran. “By inviting Lisa to helm a Broadcast specifically composed for Rochester, we are finding new ways to bring music to members of our local community by inviting them to be a part of it.”
About the Composer
Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize winner who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She has received awards and fellowships from the Koussevitzky Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Letters, OPERA America, and American Antiquarian Society, Loghaven Artist Residency, and was part of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps. She received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser. Her music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. Bielawa consistently incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. 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 munity using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her work Broadcast from Home, now archived by the Library of Congress. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net. .
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About Bielawa’s Broadcasts
Composer Lisa Bielawa’s Rochester Broadcast is the latest in a series of broadly inclusive Broadcast works, starting with her 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; Brickyard Broadcast, developed in 2020 with the city and university in Raleigh, North Carolina, partnering with their libraries to create a performance site entirely in virtual reality; Voters’ Broadcast, commissioned in 2020 as part of the Democracy and Debate Theme Semester by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with support from its School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and developed in partnership with Kaufman Music Center in New York; Louisville Broadcast presented in 2023 by the Louisville Orchestra in two historic locations, Shelby Park and the Big Four Bridge; and Knoxville Broadcast, presented by Big Ears in October 2025 at World’s Fair Park.
About Eastman School of Music
The Eastman School of Music was founded in 1921 by industrialist and philanthropist George Eastman (1854-1932), founder of Eastman Kodak Company. It was the first professional school of the University of Rochester. Mr. Eastman’s dream was that his school would provide a broad education in the liberal arts as well as superb musical training.
More than 900 students are enrolled in the Collegiate Division of the Eastman School of Music—about 500 undergraduates and 400 graduate students. They come from almost every state, and approximately 23 percent are from other countries. They are taught by a faculty comprising more than 170 highly regarded performers, composers, conductors, scholars and educators. They are Pulitzer Prize winners, GRAMMY winners, Emmy winners, Guggenheim fellows, ASCAP Award recipients, published authors, recording artists and acclaimed musicians who have performed in the world’s greatest concert halls. Each year, Eastman’s students, faculty members and guest artists present more than 1,000 concerts to the Rochester community. Additionally, over 1,700 members of the Rochester community, from young children through senior citizens, are enrolled in the Eastman Community Music School.
About the University of Rochester
The University of Rochester is one of the nation’s leading private research universities, one of only 62-member institutions in the Association of American Universities. Located in Rochester, N.Y., the University gives undergraduates exceptional opportunities for interdisciplinary study and close collaboration with faculty through its unique cluster-based curriculum. Its College, School of Arts and Sciences, and Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are complemented by the Eastman School of Music, Simon School of Business, Warner School of Education, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, School of Medicine and Dentistry, School of Nursing, Eastman Institute for Oral Health, and the Memorial Art Gallery.