Lisa Bielawa (born 1968)
Lisa Bielawa was born in San Francisco, the daughter of composer and music professor Herbert Bielawa. She studied piano, voice, and violin beginning in childhood, and majored in English literature at Yale. She is currently based in New York City.
Lisa Bielawa has composed music for orchestras, choruses, chamber ensembles, digital audio, and solo instruments. Reflecting her interest in English literature, many of her works are inspired by literary sources, even those that don’t involve sung texts. She often incorporates community-making in her work. She has created music for public spaces and large-scale participatory works.
Her 2019 work Centuries in the Hours for mezzo-soprano and orchestra reveals much about Lisa Bielawa’s sensibility and approach to music. It consists of five songs, and is described in this program note (which also includes the texts) :
Each song is a setting of a diary excerpt by an American woman whose life circumstances rendered her historically invisible. 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, while it celebrates heightened non-visual communication and shared leadership in performance.
Lisa Bielawa wrote Centuries in the Hours for blind mezzo-soprano Laurie Rubin, who in this performance is reading from a Braille score:
The Trojan Women was originally composed in 1999 for a performance of the play by Euripedes, and then revised in 2001 for string quartet and 2003 for string orchestra, which is the version performed here: