Ep. 123: Lisa Bielawa, composer and vocalist.

Ep. 123: Lisa Bielawa, composer and vocalist.

Let's Talk Off The Podium with Tigran Arakelyan.

In this podcast Bielawa talks about a recent project called Broadcast from Home, work with Philip Glass, time at Yale, various major projects and much more.

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and 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 was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018. 

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. Her music has recently been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, and Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, among others. She will have her second residency as a performer/composer at John Zorn’s venue The Stone in March 2020. Orchestras that have championed her music include the The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Composers Orchestra, 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, American Guild of Organists, and more. 

Bielawa began touring as the vocalist with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992 and in 2019 she became the inaugural Composer-in-Residence and Chief Curator of the Philip Glass Institute at The New School. In 1997 Bielawa cofounded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers, and for five years she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus. 

She 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. Vireowas filmed in twelve parts in locations across the country and features over 350 musicians. Vireo was released on CD/DVD in 2019 (Orange Mountain Music) and she is also recorded on the Tzadik, TROY, Innova, BMOP/sound, Supertrain Records, Sono Luminus, and Cedille labels.

For more information about Lisa Bielawa please visit: www.lisabielawa.net

© Let's Talk Off The Podium, 2020