Composer-Vocalist Lisa Bielawa Announces Residency at The Stone at The New School

Composer, vocalist, and producer Lisa Bielawa will curate a residency at The Stone at The New School (a performance initiative founded by John Zorn) from Tuesday, March 10, 2020 through Saturday, March 14, 2020, with performances each night at 8:30pm.

The series, Bielawa: Blueprints, places a magnifying glass on Bielawa's acclaimed large-scale projects, with performances of the intimate chamber-setting pieces she used to develop material for her larger works including her 12-episode made-for-TV opera Vireo and her Broadcast series of works designed for performance in vast public spaces, and works for large orchestral and choral forces.

Lisa Bielawa, a celebrated singer and long-time vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble, will sing in most of the concerts during this series. The performers include Gregory Purnhagen, voice, with Bielawa on March 10; violinist Jennifer Koh and Bielawa with pianist Molly Morkoski on March 11; flutist Alex Sopp, hornist Mike Atkinson, with pianist Molly Morkoski and Bielawa on March 12; Bielawa with the Fischer family - violinist Rebecca Fischer and Anthony Hawley, found percussion, with their daughters violist and vocalist Oriana Hawley and flutist Ilaria Hawley, on March 13; and the Parhelion Trio (pianist Andrea Christie, flutist Sarah Carrier, clarinetist Ashleé Miller) on March 14.

Lisa Bielawa has established herself as one of today's leading composers and performers, who 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; 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; she was a co-founder in 1997 of the MATA Festival which continues to support young composers; and for five years she was 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.

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."

Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, "Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock." 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. 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 became the inaugural Composer-in-Residence and Chief Curator at the Philip Glass Institute (PGI) at The New School's College of the Performing Arts in 2019. The PGI is a landmark partnership between The New School, the Philip Glass Ensemble (PGE), and Bielawa, who has been the vocalist with the Ensemble since 1992. She recently made her orchestral conducting debut leading the Mannes String Orchestra in a special presentation by the PGI. In addition to performing as the vocalist in the PGE, Bielawa performs in many of her own works as well as the music of John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Michael Gordon, and others.