Lisa Bielawa’s 'Centuries in the Hours' Sets World Premiere Recording

The world premiere recording of composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa’s song cycle Centuries in the Hours, which illuminates the lives of American women by setting selections from women’s diaries spanning three centuries, will be released on a new album from mezzo-soprano Leandra Ramm titled Watching glass, I hear you (Ablaze Records).

The recording will be released on February 28, 2025, shortly before International Women’s Day on March 8. The album also includes song cycles by composers Cyril Deaconoff, Daron Hagen, Douglas Knehans, and David T. Little. All of the works except for Deaconoff’s songs are premiere recordings.

Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. 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, she co-founded the MATA Festival.

Of the origin of Centuries in the Hours, Bielawa says, “While at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, I uncovered an entire alternative American history, woven together through the experiences of women from all socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, of all ages, from all corners of the US and its nascent territories, and from all chapters of our history. I eventually read 72 diaries, representing staggering diversity . . These women showed me an America that was completely unknown to me, invisible yet fully lived, behind the doors and in the corners, for centuries.”

Each song in Bielawa’s Centuries in the Hours reflects the experiences of a different American woman whose life circumstances rendered her historically invisible. The stories of the women represented include Emily French, a divorced and impoverished house cleaner in the 1890s; Betsey Stockton, a formerly enslaved woman en route to Hawai’i in the 1820s; Angeles Monrayo Raymundo, a Filipina teenager in the 1920s with great ambition; Sallie McNeill, a plantation owner’s daughter in Civil War-era Texas; and Sarah Wister, a Revolutionary War-era girl whose family fled Philadelphia. The project meditates on the theme of invisibility: How do we, through performance, make visible the invisible, make things vivid in unexpected ways? To that end, it brings to light written words of women who were “invisible” in their social milieu.

The premiere performance of the Centuries in the Hours song cycle (orchestral version) was performed by mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin with ROCO in September 2019 in Houston, TX. It was co-commissioned by the ASCAP Foundation, Charles Kingsford Fund, and ROCO. Bielawa has also created a chamber opera version of Centuries in the Hours with librettist Claire Solomon, which was premiered online during the pandemic by Kaufman Music Center's Special Music School High School in May 2021. The online chamber opera was commissioned in part by Kaufman Music Center, underwritten by Cathy White O’Rourke. Development of Centuries in the Hours was funded in part by OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Female Composers program, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

Photo credit: Desmond White