Pianist Sarah Cahill's The Future is Female, "At Play," - Final of Three Volumes Out on First Hand Records - Music by 30 Women Composers from Around the Globe

Pianist Sarah Cahill's New Album Out Today
The Future is Female, Vol. 3, At Play

Third of a Three-Volume Series Featuring 30 Solo Piano Works by Women Composers from Around the Globe

Available Today via First Hand Records

“Here, then, is an alternative history of solo piano music – and one that's delivered with real conviction by pianist Sarah Cahill.” – BBC Music Magazine

“This disc is a revelation, and is wholeheartedly recommended.”
RECOMMENDED, ‘Recording of the Month’ – MusicWeb International

www.sarahcahill.com

Today, April 28, 2023, pianist Sarah Cahill, described as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, releases her new album, The Future is Female, Vol. 3, At Play, on First Hand Records. The Future is Female is a three-volume series, which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These albums encompass 30 compositions by women from around the globe and include many new commissioned works and world premiere recordings.

The Future is Female, Vol. 3, At Play features works by Hélène de Montgeroult, Cecile Chaminade, Grażyna Bacewicz, Frangiz Ali-Zadeh, Chen Yi, Pauline Oliveros, Hannah Kendall, Aida Shirazi, and Regina Harris Baiocchi. This album, centered around the theme of play, concludes the three volume collection. On Wednesday, March 8, 2023 –– in honor of International Women’s Day –– Cahill will give a four-hour performance of The Future is Female, presented by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

In March of 2022, coinciding with the release of the first volume –– The Future is Female, Vol. 1, In Nature –– and in celebration of International Women’s Day, Cahill gave a marathon performance of The Future is Female presented by the Barbican Centre at the Barbican Conservatory. Vol. 1 In Nature features music by Anna Bon, Fanny Mendelssohn, Teresa Carreño, Leokadiya Kashperova, Fannie Charles Dillon, Vítězslava Kaprálová, Agi Jambor, Eve Beglarian, Deirdre Gribbin, Mary D. Watkins. The second album in the series, The Future is Female Vol. 2, The Dance, features works by Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Clara Schumann, Germaine Tailleferre, Zenobia Powell Perry, Madeleine Dring, Betsy Jolas, Elena Kats-Chernin, Meredith Monk, Gabriela Ortiz, and Theresa Wong.

Since the first album in The Future is Female trilogy, “In Nature” –– an album Classical-Notes describes as presenting “exemplary performances” –– listeners have wholeheartedly embraced Cahill’s celebration of historical and living women composers. BBC Music Magazine writes: “As with the fine first instalment, the American pianist [Sarah Cahill] takes us on a chronological journey that zips around the world, stitching together contrasting styles into an enjoyable musical patchwork.” Musicweb International calls Vol. 2, The Dance “a revelation,” while New Music Buff notes the “impressive command of baroque, classical, romantic, and modern idioms” that Cahill brings to both “In Nature” and “The Dance.”

Cahill started working on her project, The Future is Female, which now encompasses more than 70 compositions, in 2018. “For decades I had been working with many living American composers, including Pauline Oliveros, Tania León, Eve Beglarian, Mary D. Watkins, Julia Wolfe, Ursula Mamlok, Meredith Monk, Annea Lockwood, and many more, but felt an urgent need to explore neglected composers from the past, and from around the globe,” she explains. “Like most pianists, I grew up with the classical canon, which has always excluded women composers as well as composers of color. It is still standard practice to perform recitals consisting entirely of music written by men. The Future is Female, then, aims to be a corrective towards rebalancing the repertoire. It does not attempt to be exhaustive, in any way, and the three albums in this series represent only a small fraction of the music by women which is waiting to be performed and heard. Since recording these three albums in August 2021, I’ve performed extraordinary music by Louise Farrenc, Maria Szymanowska, Helen Hopekirk, Dora Pejačević and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Reena Esmail, Arlene Sierra, Viola Kinney, Marion Bauer, and many other composers who should rightfully be included in this series. The possibilities are, in fact, limitless. I am delighted to be working with First Hand Records on this three-album project, concluding with this third and final album, loosely based on the theme of ‘play’”.

Cahill has developed and performed The Future is Female as a flexible concert program, which she has been performing since the project’s inception. It has been presented as an evening-length recital performance and as a marathon performance and is ideal for concert halls, museums, and gallery spaces. The marathon performance duration is typically between four to seven hours, allowing audience members to sit and listen for any length of time, with the ability to come and go, as well as the ability to walk around the space. Recent and upcoming performances of The Future is Female include concerts presented by The Barbican, the National Gallery of Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Carolina Performing Arts, Carlsbad Music Festival, Detroit Institute of Arts, University of Iowa, Bowling Green New Music Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, North Dakota Museum of Art, Mayville State University, the EXTENSITY Concert Series’ Women Now Festival in New York, and the Newport Classical Festival.

The Future is Female, Vol. 3, At Play | Sarah Cahill, piano | First Hand Records | Available April 28, 2023

Recorded at St. Stephen’s Church, Belvedere, California, August 15–28, 2021 | Produced and recorded by Matt Carr

Hélène de Montgeroult (1764–1836)
Sonata No. 9, op. 5 no. 3 (1811) [19:52]
1. I. Allegro spiritoso [8:10]
2. II. Adagio non troppo [4:38]
3. III. Presto [6:57]

Cecile Chaminade (1857–1944)
4. Thème varié (1898) [5:01]

Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–1969)
5. Scherzo (1934) [7:08]

Chen Yi (b. 1953)
6. Guessing (1989)† [5:15]

Frangiz Ali-Zadeh (b. 1947)
7. Music for Piano (1989-1997) [9:32]

Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016)
8. Quintuplets Play Pen (2001)* [4:15]

Hannah Kendall (b. 1984)
On the Chequer'd Field Array'd (2013) [10:40]
9. I. Middlegame [2:35]
10. II. Mindplay [5:19]
11. III. Coda [2:40]

Aida Shirazi (b. 1987)
12. Albumblatt (2017)† [6:58]

Regina Harris Baiocchi (b. 1956)
Piano Poems (2020) * [13:25]
13. I. common things surprise [2:54]
14. II. cockleburs in wooly hair/tiny pond [3:54]
15. III. beatitudes [2:17]
16. IV. a candle burns time [4:12]

Total Time: [79:50]

Première recording *
Première commercial recordings †

About Sarah Cahill: Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. Keyboard Magazine writes, “Through her inspired interpretation of works across the 20th and 21st centuries, Cahill has been instrumental in bringing to life the music of many of our greatest living composers.” She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).

Cahill enjoys working closely with composers, musicologists, and scholars to prepare scores for each performance. She researched and recorded music by prominent early 20th-century American modernists Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford and commissioned a number of new pieces in tribute to their enduring influence. She has also premiered and recorded music by Leo Ornstein, Marc Blitzstein, and other 20th century mavericks.

Cahill has worked closely with composer Terry Riley since 1997, when she commissioned his four-hand piece Cinco de Mayo for a festival at Cal Performances celebrating Henry Cowell’s 100th birthday – the first of six works she has commissioned from him. For Riley’s 80th birthday, Cahill commissioned nine new works for solo piano in his honor and performed them with several of Riley’s own compositions at (Le) Poisson Rouge and Roulette in New York, MIT, the North Dakota Museum of Art, and other venues across the country. Sarah Cahill commissioned the late Frederic Rzewski to compose a substantial solo piano work in honor of Terry Riley’s 85th birthday.

Sarah Cahill also worked closely with Lou Harrison and has championed many of his works for piano. In 1997, Cahill was chosen to premiere his Festival Dance for two pianos with Aki Takahashi at the Cooper Union and worked with Harrison in rehearsals. She was also chosen to perform his Dance for Lisa Karon, discovered only a few years ago and not heard since its premiere in 1938, and she performed his Varied Trio, both piano concertos, and a number of solo and chamber works on her 2017 Lou Harrison tour celebrating his centennial year, with concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Orlando, Miami, Hawaii, Tokyo and Fukuoka in Japan, and more. In Fall 2019, Sarah performed Lou Harrison's exuberant Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan in two Berkeley performances and at the ICA Boston. She also performed and recorded the work with Gamelan Galak Tika at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Cahill has performed classical and contemporary chamber music with artists and ensembles such as Jessica Lang Dance; pianists Joseph Kubera, Adam Tendler, and Regina Myers; violinist Stuart Canin; the Alexander String Quartet; New Century Chamber Orchestra; Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and many more. She also performs as a duo with violinist Kate Stenberg.

Sarah Cahill’s discography includes more than twenty albums on the New Albion, CRI, New World, Tzadik, Albany, Innova, Cold Blue, Other Minds, Irritable Hedgehog, and Pinna labels. Cahill's latest album, The Future is Female, Vol. 2, The Dance, was released in October 2022 on First Hand Records. The Future is Female is a three-volume series, which celebrates and highlights women composers from the 17th century to the present day. These albums encompass 30 compositions by women from around the globe and include many new commissioned works and world premiere recordings. Cahill’s 2013 release A Sweeter Music (Other Minds) featured musical reflections on war by eighteen eloquent and provocative composer/activists. In 2015, Pinna Records released her two-CD set of Mamoru Fujieda’s Patterns of Plants, an extraordinary fusion of nature and technology created by identifying the musical patterns in the electrical impulses of plants. In September 2017, she released Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley, a box set tribute to Terry Riley, on Irritable Hedgehog Records. The four-CD set includes solo works by Riley, four-hand works with pianist Regina Myers, and world premiere recordings of commissioned works composed in honor of Riley’s 80th birthday.

Sarah Cahill’s radio show, Revolutions Per Minute, can be heard every Sunday evening from 6 to 8 pm on KALW, 91.7 FM in San Francisco. The program focuses on the relationships between classical music and new music, encompassing interviews with musicians and composers, historical performances, and recordings outside the mainstream. Cahill is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and is a regular pre-concert speaker with the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

For more information, visit www.sarahcahill.com.

The Future is Female Vol. 1 In Nature 
“….delivered with real conviction by pianist Sarah Cahill”
(BBC Music Magazine)    

The Future is Female Vol. 2 The Dance
“This disc is a revelation, and is wholeheartedly recommended.”
(MusicWeb International)

Composer Lisa Bielawa Named 2023 Guggenheim Fellow

Photo by Desmond White available in hi-resolution at www.jensenartists.com/lisa-bielawa

Composer Lisa Bielawa Named 2023 Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

Upcoming Premieres:

April 15: New York Premiere of In medias res
Boston Modern Orchestra Project at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
Information: www.bmop.org/season-tickets/play-it-again-carnegie-hall

April 23: World Premiere of Louisville Broadcast
Spatialized Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians, Louisville, KY
Information: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

May 17-19: World Premiere Performances of Home
Co-composed with Lindsey Branson
Louisville Orchestra in Prestonsburg, Pikeville, Harlan, KY
Information: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/inharmonytour

June 24: West Coast Premiere of Send the Carriage Through
Britt Music & Arts Festival in Jacksonville, OR
Information: www.brittfest.org/performance/beethoven-5-alexi-kenney-23

Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net

New York, NY – Composer, vocalist, and producer Lisa Bielawa has been named a 2023 Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, joining a diverse group of 171 exceptional individuals. Chosen from a rigorous application and peer review process out of almost 2,500 applicants, the Fellows were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.

Lisa Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She 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. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 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. In 1997 Bielawa co-founded the MATA Festival. 

Upon learning of her selection as a 2023 Fellow, Bielawa said, “I’m so deeply honored to be among this year’s Guggenheim Fellows. Sincere thanks to the many members of my musical family for our work together. This honor is for all of us.”

During her Guggenheim Fellowship period, Bielawa will primarily work on two projects – a new opera, La Ballonniste, and a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings. La Ballonniste is an opera in three acts inspired by the life of Elisabeth Thible, an opera singer who was the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon, with libretto by Claire Solomon, directed by Mary Birnbaum, dramaturgy by Cori Ellison, and production/design consulting by Charles Otte. Bielawa’s book will share remembrances and observations gathered from her decades of wandering, offering cultural moments in the global continuum frozen in time – including music theater in bombed-out buildings in Milosevic’s Serbia in 2000; watching Yassir Arafat get thrown out of the New York Philharmonic performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations in 1995, from the only place from which the episode was visible (the stage); spending a seven-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur in 2014, at the very moment that a Malaysian Air flight left the airport and disappeared; and celebrating an anxiously catered Thanksgiving Dinner in 2003 as the only American guests at an iconic hotel in Moscow that was bombed by the Black Widows six days later – to name but a few.

Lisa Bielawa’s premieres in the upcoming months all celebrate the musical relationships and community that have become a hallmark of her work:

• On April 15, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), led by Artistic Director Gil Rose, will give the New York premiere of her piece In medias res at Carnegie Hall, as part of the orchestra’s 25th anniversary celebration. Bielawa was the BMOP Music Alive Composer-in-Residence from 2006-2009, and wrote this work inspired by the bonds she forged with her fellow musicians. The San Francisco Chronicle praised the work’s “superb combination of rhythmic exuberance, melodic grace and textural inventiveness.”

• In 2022, Bielawa was selected for a residency with the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps and temporarily relocated to Louisville to make new orchestral and community-based work as an active, engaged member of the community. On April 23, the Louisville Orchestra will present the world premiere of Louisville Broadcast, an iteration of Bielawa’s ongoing Broadcast series focused on the city of Louisville. Over 500 professional, student, and amateur musicians from throughout the area will join together to perform Bielawa’s 45-minute piece, turning two historic locations – Shelby Park and Big Four Bridge – into vast musical canvases, allowing listeners to walk freely among the performers.

• From May 17-19, the Louisville Orchestra will give the premiere performances of Bielawa’s new piece Home, co-composed with Lindsey Branson, on tour to three Kentucky cities – Harlan, Prestonburg, and Pikesville. Bielawa met Branson, a singer/songwriter and graduate of the Bluegrass School, on a recent trip to Hazard, KY, in the Appalachian mountains. They created the piece in an organic and intuitive process over the next weeks, resulting in a joyful shared musical performance work for full orchestra and unlimited musicians from the rich traditions of the region.

• On June 24 at the Britt Music & Arts Festival in Jacksonville, OR, conductor Teddy Abrams will lead the West Coast premiere of Bielawa’s Send the Carriage Through, written as part of Bielawa’s residency with the Louisville Orchestra and premiered by the LO and Abrams in January. Inspired in part by Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral processional, Bielawa describes the piece as, “a celebration of Teddy’s open-hearted vision of leadership as connection and invitation.”

More About Lisa Bielawa:

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. Vireo was filmed in twelve parts at locations across the country and features over 350 musicians. 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.

In spring 2022, Bielawa’s violin concerto Sanctuary had its New York premiere 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). Other recent highlights include the world premiere of Voters’ Litany, a commission from the Cathedral Choral Society, 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 Brickyard Broadcast –– a virtual reality collaboration commissioned by North Carolina State University. 

Bielawa consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin in San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the coronavirus lockdown, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her project, Broadcast from Home. In 2021, Broadcast from Home was inducted into the Library of Congress as part of its Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection.

Bielawa’s music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, 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 in Houston, 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. 

Born in San Francisco, 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.

For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.

Louisville Broadcast by Lisa Bielawa presented by the Louisville Orchestra

Announcing Louisville Broadcast by Lisa Bielawa

A Spatial Symphony for Hundreds of Musicians

Presented by the Louisville Orchestra as Part of its Creators Corps Program

Two FREE outdoor performances featuring performers from throughout the Louisville area

Sunday, April 23, 2023:
11:30 am-12:15 pm – Shelby Park (600 E. Oak St., Louisville, KY)
7:00-7:45 pm – Big Four Bridge (1101 River Rd., Louisville, KY)

Participants include members of the Louisville Orchestra, Louisville Academy of Music, Louisville Civic Orchestra, University of Louisville Orchestra, VOICES of Kentuckiana, Louisville Leopards & ensembles from Jefferson County Public Schools

Members of the public can join the Louisville Broadcast Town Criers or contribute text to be considered for inclusion in the piece.

Information: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

Lisa Bielawa: www.lisabielawa.net

Louisville, Kentucky – The Louisville Orchestra (LO) presents LO Creators Corps composer Lisa Bielawa’s Louisville Broadcast, a new 45-minute musical piece for an unlimited number of participants that celebrates two historic sites and the vitality of Louisville’s many musical communities. Two free performances will take place in the open air on April 23, 2023, in Shelby Park (600 E. Oak St.) from 11:30 am-12:15 pm and at Waterfront Park-Big Four Bridge (1101 River Rd.) from 7:00-7:45 pm, turning these sites into vast musical canvases. Bielawa will create the piece specifically for Shelby Park and Waterfront Park-Big Four Bridge, and listeners can walk freely among and between the performers.

Louisville Broadcast will feature 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 will join together for the performances, including members of the LO, 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, Noe Middle School, Johnson Middle School, Farmer Elementary, and Tully Elementary, as well as the Louisville Classical Academy.

In addition, all are invited to join The Town Criers, a community choir that anyone can join regardless of musical background. Bielawa will create music for the Town Criers that is easy to learn without any music-reading skills or training – anyone who wishes to raise their voice can join the performances. To learn more about participating and sign up for more information about joining Louisville Broadcast, visit: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

The texts Bielawa will be setting in Louisville Broadcast are now being collected from any Louisville residents who want to contribute via the Louisville Orchestra’s website. Answers submitted will be considered for inclusion in the performance and shared online. To contribute, visit: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast

Bielawa has chosen Shelby Park and the Big Four Bridge as performance sites for their historical significance to Louisville. Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm designed Shelby Park in 1907, the only park in Louisville designed explicitly with a Carnegie Library (now the Shelby Park Community Center). It is the geographic anchor of the Shelby Park neighborhood, where the LO has established residences for the Creators Corps (including Bielawa). From 1895 to its decommission in 1969, the Big Four Bridge served as a railroad bridge for freight and passengers connecting Louisville and Southern Indiana. It was converted into a pedestrian bridge in 2013 and has since become an iconic landmark in the city, with 1.5 million pedestrians and cyclists crossing its span each year.

“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,” said composer Lisa Bielawa. “I would like to see this event bring about new partnerships, new vitality, and new relationships between different generations, musical traditions and identities, and between arts or music lovers and totally non-arts-identified park-goers enjoying a surprise encounter with music as a ‘happening’ in the middle of their familiar and beloved city. By inviting anyone in the city to contribute their words to be sung by the participating choirs, I can multiply the diversity of Louisvillian voices that speak through the piece. It is the sound of a whole city – its history, people, neighborhoods, and communities.”

“Louisville Broadcast epitomizes the Creators Corps’ mission of creating new work for and with the city of Louisville on a huge scale,” says Jacob Gotlib, Manager of the Creators Corps program at the Louisville Orchestra. “Louisville is renowned for its rich and deep musical culture, but we often work in disparate stylistic, educational, and geographic pockets. The Louisville Orchestra is thrilled to help bring together our diverse musical communities in this historic way.”

The nature of Bielawa’s work is in keeping with the definition of the word broadcast, “cast or scattered in all directions.” Musicians will begin in the center of the sites and disperse outwards according to instructions in Bielawa’s musical score, coordinated only by absolute time and long-distance musical cues. Players will spread out in long chains, flanking the walkways and bridge. Audience members can choose how to hear the pieces, deciding where to move as the musicians disperse. They will be able to take in several different points of view from throughout the site during the performances.

“Louisville is a very musical city, filled with singers, writers, instrumentalists and performers. It is therefore the perfect backdrop for Lisa’s participatory Louisville Broadcast,” said Graham Parker, Chief Executive to the Louisville Orchestra. “We are so excited to see the enthusiasm to be involved as evidenced by the numbers who have signed up, and to partner with Shelby Park, and Waterfront Park to make use of the Big Four Bridge.”

Louisville Broadcast is the result of a collaboration between the Louisville Orchestra and several community organizations, including the Louisville Academy of Music, Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Metro Parks, and Waterfront Park.

“The Louisville Academy of Music is honored to work with Lisa Bielawa and the Louisville Orchestra on this ambitious and unprecedented composition,” said Sara Louise Callaway, Louisville Academy of Music’s Executive Director. “We are excited to bring together our students, families, and teachers to join in this incredible opportunity for our city. This is a new and unique experience for our school and community, and I have loved seeing the joy, creativity, and new relationships sparked through this project.”

“We are excited to partner with the Louisville Orchestra to present Louisville Broadcast on the Big Four Bridge,” said Deborah Bilitski, executive director of Waterfront Park. “As Waterfront Park celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Big Four Bridge throughout the year, this partnership is evidence of the power public spaces hold in bringing our community together. As we continue our work to make our waterfront accessible to everyone, we are excited to support Louisville Orchestra in its mission to make the arts more accessible in our community.”

About Lisa Bielawa’s Broadcast Projects

Composer Lisa Bielawa’s Louisville 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; 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.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote after the Broadcast performances at Crissy Field in San Francisco, “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.”

Now in its inaugural year, the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps transcends traditional commissioning and composer-in-residence paradigms with a radically new model for collaborating with symphony orchestras in the 21st century. Each year, the orchestra will invite three creators to move to Louisville and live in the Shelby Park neighborhood for at least 30 weeks, serving as staff members with an annual salary of $40,000, health insurance, provided housing, and studio equipment. Throughout their residencies, they will compose new works to be performed by the orchestra, participate in educational and community engagement activities, and be engaged citizens of their neighborhood. Funding for the program comes from a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and individual donors to the LO.

Join Louisville Broadcast

For more information about participating in The Town Criers or to submit text to be sung in the event, please visit: www.louisvilleorchestra.org/louisville-broadcast