Lisa Bielawa's Election Year Musical Work VOTERS' BROADCAST Premieres Live Outdoors At Brooklyn Public Library

Voters' Broadcast is a broadly participatory musical performance for an unlimited number of voices and instruments made up of choral and instrumental ensembles.

The work is produced, conceived and composed by Rome Prize and American Academy of Arts & Letters Award-winning composer Lisa Bielawa, with text excerpted from celebrated artist Sheryl Oring's I Wish to Say.

Voters' Broadcast will be premiered live in one day of three socially distanced, outdoor performances presented by Kaufman Music Center and Brooklyn Public Library at the main entrance to BPL's Central Library on Grand Army Plaza on Saturday, October 24 at 11am, 12:30pm, and 2pm ET, as part of the Library's crowd-sourced 28th Amendment Project. In addition, the complete work will be premiered virtually on Wednesday, October 28 at 3pm ET, co-presented online by University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Kaufman Music Center. All events are free and open to the public.

Lisa Bielawa's mission with Voters' Broadcast is to stimulate voter engagement, political awareness, and community participation in challenging lockdown conditions, through the act of giving voice to the concerns of fellow citizens, during the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election.

The October 24 live presentations at BPL's Central Library will feature vocalists and instrumentalists from Kaufman Music Center's Special Music School High School performing in socially distanced groups. Special Music School is a unique public/private partnership between Kaufman Music Center and the New York City Department of Education and is New York City's only K-12 public school that teaches music as a core subject during the regular school day.

Multiple University of Michigan, Kaufman Music Center, and Wayne State University ensembles - including the University Musical Society Choral Union - are participating in the virtual premiere of the 20-minute musical composition. The October 28 online event will be hosted by University Musical Society President Matthew VanBesien, and will include Lisa Bielawa and Sheryl Oring in conversation with project participants.

Bielawa's objectives for Voters' Broadcast are:

• To "broadcast" the thoughts, hopes, fears, passions, petitions, and questions of a wide spectrum of Americans, raising awareness of the diversity of voices - both figuratively and literally - that make up our society.
• To bring a transformative artistic experience to online audiences, opening a space for heightened awareness, sensitivity and compassion at a vulnerable time in our country.
• To stimulate voter engagement leading up to the 2020 elections.
• To serve as an example for ways to bring music-making communities into civic life in ways that have great social and artistic impact.

She says, "Voters' Broadcast is poised to energize and inspire people in a unique way, inciting them to think, to vote, to consider their relationships to their political leaders and to each other. It is designed to deliver equal parts beauty and mobilization. In German when one votes, one 'gives one's voice' ('I voted' = 'Ich habe gestimmt' [I gave my voice]). Voters' Broadcast is dedicated to all of those who give their voices, through singing and by voting."

Bielawa's music for Voters' Broadcast is composed and constructed in ways that makes it perfect for broad participation by musicians who are isolated and not able to gather together to make music. The piece will unfold in sections based on the nature of the postcards that Bielawa selects to include in the work: Salutations; Petitions (statements starting with the word "Please"); Exhortations (requests and demands without the word "Please"); Questions; and others. It does not focus on the qualities or identities of the Presidents and candidates addressed, but on the feelings and views of American people addressing their elected leaders.

The text for Voters' Broadcast is excerpted from Sheryl Oring's ongoing project I Wish to Say, in collaboration with University of Michigan's Stamps Gallery, which uses vintage typewriters for social change. I Wish to Say consists of performances in which Oring and a pool of typists work on vintage manual typewriters and invite the public to dictate postcards to the U.S. President. In the current circumstances, Oring and the typists are holding Zoom sessions, during which participants dictate their messages to the next President. Launched in 2004, the project has garnered nearly 4,000 postcards to President Bush, President Obama, and President Trump, all of which have been mailed to the White House on behalf of the participant as part of the performance.

Voters' Broadcast is commissioned as part of the Democracy & Debate Theme Semester by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with support from its School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and developed in partnership with Kaufman Music Center in New York, where Bielawa is a 2020 Artist in Residence. Voters' Broadcast is providing voting information via HeadCount, a non-partisan organization that uses the power of music to register voters and promote participation in democracy.

Lisa Bielawa's Broadcast Projects: Voters' Broadcast follows Bielawa's other large-scale participatory works, Brickyard Broadcast and Broadcast from Home. Brickyard Broadcast uses technology and interactivity to reinterpret the North Carolina State University Brickyard, the university's beloved and iconic gathering area, as a virtual space in which the musical performance will unfold in November 2020. Described by the Washington Post as "spellbinding," Broadcast from Home has been realized online throughout the period of the coronavirus lockdown, featuring submitted written and recorded vocal testimonies from over 250 participants from five continents. Lisa Bielawa's earlier works for performance in public spaces include Airfield Broadcasts (spatialized works for hundreds of musicians on the field of former airfields), and Mauer Broadcast (a participatory work for public performance, for the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 2019).

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