Composer Lisa Bielawa Curates Residency at The Stone

Composer, vocalist, and producer Lisa Bielawa returns to The Stone at The ew School from Wednesday, November 2, 2022 to Saturday, November 5, 2022, for her third curated residency, a performance initiative founded by John Zorn,with concerts held each night at 8:30pm.

Bielawa, long-time vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble, will sing in several of the concerts. Additional performers include: The Parhelion Trio (pianist Andrea Christie, flustist Sarah Carrier, clarinetist Ashleé Miller) on November 2; soprano Ariadne Greif, baritone Peter Stewart, and pianist Andrea Christie, with Bielawa on November 3; mezzo-soprano Leandra Ramm, pianist Michael Delfin, and violist Oriana Hawley with Bielawa on voice and piano on November 4; and violinist and vocalist Rebecca Fischer, Anthony Hawley doing recitation, violist Oriana Hawley, and flutist Ilaria Hawley, with Bielawa on November 5.

Though Bielawa is no stranger to curating residencies at The Stone, this year's series takes audiences on a unique journey across time and gives insight into Bielawa's process. These performances will showcase work that highlights Bielawa's deep appreciation for intriguing moments in the histories of lesser known people, places, and events. In addition, the various programs will revisit work arising out of pandemic-induced collaborative innovations, as well as present evolving work looking to the future.

Bielawa reflects on the span of time and diverse swath of projects which this residency will feature: "This series starts with a concert that was supposed to take place the very day New York shut down. And then the rest of the week is dedicated to projects and relationships that have managed to flourish and deepen in spite of our challenges,"

"[La] Ballonniste is a brand-new adventure that is launching with great hope, as my first large-scale live project in over two years," Bielawa says. "Centuries in the Hours received the Opera America grant on March 12, 2020, also just as the world was locking down. But [the performers premiering the song cycle] recorded it during the Omicron surge and the film version was a direct response to lockdown conditions. In fact, librettist Claire [Solomon] and I realized that the very subject matter was reflective of lockdown conditions, (i.e. American history seen through the eyes of women mostly restricted to the domestic sphere). And finally, the last evening is a celebration of my personal Pandemic Bubble, the gift of having an entire family of musician-artists near me who helped sustain me artistically through the whole 2-1/2 years."

Composer, producer, and vocalist 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. 

In 2022, Bielawa was selected for a residency with the Louisville Orchestra's Creators Corps. For this new endeavor Bielawa temporarily relocated to Louisville to make new orchestral and community-based work as an active, engaged member of the community.

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.

Lisa Bielawa's Residency at The Stone - Programs and Performers:
All music composed by Lisa Bielawa

The Parhelion Trio: November 2, 2022 at 8:30pm
Featuring a new arrangement of Fictional Migrations (from 2020), plus various solo and ensemble works
Andrea Christie (piano), Sarah Carrier (flute), Ashleé Miller (clarinet)

This program was originally slated for March 14, 2020, the very moment when NYC locked down in pandemic crisis. The entire original program, which was fashioned around the world premiere of a new arrangement of Fictional Migrations, will finally have its evening at the Stone on the opening day of the residency. The trio will also perform Rondolette (2011, arranged for Parhelion in 2020), Wait (2002), and several solo works created while Composer-in-Residence of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in 2006-09.

The Parhelion Trio brings joyful rigorous contemporary chamber music virtuosity to a whole new level. Their precision and joyful buoyancy are peerless.

Scenes from An Opera in Progress -- La Ballonniste: November 3, 2022 at 8:30pm
Ariadne Greif (voice), Peter Stewart (voice), and Lisa Bielawa (voice), Andrea Christie (piano)

The first public showing of arias and scenes from Bielawa's new opera-in-progress, La Ballonniste, inspired by the life of Mme Elisabeth Thible -- the first woman to ascend in a hot air balloon in 1784 in Lyon, France. Soprano Ariadne Greif introduces us to Mme Thible. Bielawa, along with baritone Peter Stewart fill out the rest of the cast, with Peter singing the role of King Gustave III of Sweden, the balloon's commissioner and namesake. Andrea Christie of Parhelion Trio returns on piano, and librettist Claire Solomon and dramaturg Cori Ellison will be on hand to give context and lead some discussion.

Centuries in the Hours and Other Songs: November 4, 2022 at 8:30pm
Featuring the piano-vocal version of Centuries in the Hours - World Premiere
Lisa Bielawa (voice, piano), Leandra Ramm (voice), Michael Delfin (piano), Oriana Hawley (viola)

This evening includes the world premiere of the piano-vocal version of the song cycle Centuries in the Hours, co-commissioned by the ASCAP Foundation Charles Kingsford Fund and ROCO, with mezzo-soprano Leandra Ramm and pianist Michael Delfin. Ramm and Delfin have just recorded the cycle for 2023 release on the Ablaze Records label. The interwoven stories, taken from American women's diaries spanning over two centuries, are being developed into an opera with librettist Claire Solomon and funding from the Opera America Grants for Women Composers program. Other music on the evening includes excerpts from the film workshop of the opera produced through Kaufman Music Center, with violist Oriana Hawley and Bielawa on piano and voice.

Broadcast from Home and Other Works for Voices, Violin, and Piano: November 5, 2022 at 8:30pm

Rebecca Fischer (violin, voice), Lisa Bielawa (voice, piano), Oriana Hawley (viola, voice), Ilaria Hawley (flute), Anthony Hawley (recitation)

An evening with violinist Rebecca Fischer, with performances by her whole family: violist/vocalist Oriana Hawley (18 years old), flutist Ilaria Hawley (13 years old), and artist (and husband) Anthony Hawley, who will participate with spoken text-derived group improv. This family of four, close neighbors as well as dear friends and musical colleagues of Bielawa, were the people in her primary pandemic bubble during lockdown. Their collaborations during a variety of lockdown conditions resulted in an enormous body of playful and meaningful works. It is exciting to bring some of this vitality, nurtured during some of the most challenging conditions, to a live audience at last.