Works & Process At The Guggenheim Presents A Virtual Program Featuring The Premiere Of Lisa Bielawa's BROADCAST FROM HOME

On Thursday, July 16, 2020 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim will present a virtual program featuring premieres of two new works related to composer Lisa Bielawa's ongoing project, Broadcast from Home, a significant new musical work launched by Bielawa in April 2020, which creates community during the isolation of the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis by featuring contributions from the public. Works & Process has commissioned Bielawa to compose Chapter 15 of Broadcast from Home, as part of their Works & Process Artists (WPA) Virtual Commissions series, a response to the pandemic to provide financial and creative support for artists during these challenging times. Anthony Hawley has created a film response to Chapter 4 of Broadcast from Home. Both new works will be premiered during this free online event. The program also includes a discussion with Bielawa, Hawley, and Broadcast from Home participants violist Oriana Hawley and baritone Gregory Purnhagen, moderated by project archivist Claire Solomon.

The piece requires community participation through testimonies and voices.

TESTIMONIES
How is our world changing? What happens next? What does your heart say? How do you mark time? Everyone is invited to reflect on present experiences, and to submit responses to these questions here. Testimonies will form the libretto for Broadcast from Home.

VOICES
Using testimonies, Lisa Bielawa will write original melodies. Through July 14, everyone is invited to record themselves singing melodies and encouraged to upload the recordings. Submitted voices will become the musical material for "Chapter 15" of Broadcast from Home.

Learn more about the melodies and how to share voices here.

Supported by the Works & Process Artists (WPA) Virtual Commissions fund, this program will take place virtually through Zoom, a free video conferencing software. Audience members should have access to a computer with Wi-Fi.

Suggested donation: $20. All donations will be devoted to Works & Process Artists (WPA) Virtual Commissions, with every dollar directly supporting an artist.

For more information, email info@worksandprocess.org.

Broadcast from Home

Launched on April 9, 2020 with Chapter 1, Broadcast from Home features written and recorded vocal contributions from the public. Bielawa collects new written testimonies each week and sets the testimonies to music. The melodic lines are posted on her website for people to learn, sing, record, and submit, after which she weaves them together into a new Chapter. With a new Chapter published every week, Broadcast from Home has grown to fifteen Chapters, featuring testimonies and recorded vocal lines from over 300 people across five continents.

Describing Bielawa's composition process for this work, The Washington Post reports, "The collected lines ('I want to sit across from you,' 'I don't want to meet you for happy hour online') are then layered and formed by Bielawa into spellbinding, sparsely accompanied socially distanced choral pieces that play with absence and presence, isolation and community, fear and solace - and sound an awful lot like the voices in your head."

Bielawa says, "Broadcast from Home arose organically out of an unprecedented moment: worldwide stay-at-home orders in response to a global pandemic, and the universal feelings of shock, grief, disorientation, hope and fear that overtook us as we navigated our strange new isolation, and then the surge of calls for justice in the midst of it all. I am so grateful to the hundreds of people, sheltering in place from NYC to Nairobi to Melbourne to Rio de Janiero, who shared their personal experiences and raised their singing voices from their own homes to build this work with me. It stands as a document of the crisis through the lens of people's most private experiences. Ironically, I have never felt more connected to people through my work than I did through this period of utter isolation. I've learned how transformative radical listening can be. The grain of individual voices (old and young, with so many regional inflections and varieties), the kinetic energy of bodies playing instruments in solitude, the moving accounts of people's private experiences - all of these things gave solace and built community between and around us."

NPR has featured Broadcast from Home, which aired on Morning Edition, and was included in the Washington Post's list of four timely musical projects. The San Francisco Classical Voice interviewed Lisa for its Artist Spotlight series and the Houston Chronicle and CSO Sounds and Stories featured the project, as well. You can hear Lisa speak about the project in interviews on BBC's New Music Show (38:17 in), WPR's To The Best of Our Knowledge, ABC Sydney, Classical Classroom, and WWFM's On a Positive Note.

The weekly installments of Broadcast from Home will be put on hiatus after Chapter 15 is released, as Bielawa begins work on Voters' Broadcast, a new project created to stimulate voter registration and engagement around the Presidential Election. Bielawa explains, "The organic moment of a monolithic, shared reality has begun to transform and fragment, as different parts of the world grapple and react. Testimony submissions are slowing as people begin to take up the challenging work of reengaging with the world. It feels like the right moment for me to step back and observe, and rest. But I will continue to communicate with this community as we move into this new phase."

Broadcast from Home is made possible through the collaboration of lead partner Kaufman Music Center and the Mannes School of Music, with support from Joe and Nancy Walker, James Rosenfield, and an anonymous donor. Chapter 15 is created in partnership with the musicians of zFestival. To be a part of Chapter 15, you can upload yourself singing the melodies composed by Bielawa at http://lisabielawa.net/broadcast-from-home from July 9-14.

Broadcast from Home is a follow-up to Lisa Bielawa's earlier works for performance in public performances - 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 last year).