Lisa Bielawa

Forging a path

Bielawa grew up in a household alive with music.

Her father, Herbert, taught on the composition faculty at San Francisco State University. “He was part of the radical upheaval around the Vietnam War. Our house was often full of stoned hippie students.” A pioneer in electronic music, he contributed to Bell Labs’ groundbreaking work in computer music.

Her mother, Sandra Soderlund, is an early music performance practice scholar and organist. Soderlund was Bielawa’s piano teacher and Suzuki violin accompanist from an early age, and Bielawa started singing in her church choir at age five.

These formative musical experiences skipped the classical and romantic eras completely. Bielawa grew up with her own unique musical canon. “It was quite a polarized musical environment: it was new music and then Bach and before.”

Bielawa’s artistic journey was full of musical byways. She took ballet and tap lessons, and became heavily involved in musical theater productions. She wrote cabaret songs, sat in with jazz combos in North Beach, and was a singing cocktail waitress during the summers. As a teenager she sang Brahms for the first time. “I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’”

Musical composition was an ever-present companion. “I was always writing music, but I was doing it under the radar.” Bielawa knew that the style of her youthful compositions was not acceptable to the Academy of the time. As a result, she didn’t label herself as a composer.

Bielawa majored in literature at Yale with a focus on French and literary criticism. “I wanted to feel like I was cutting my teeth on some of the most challenging things that Yale could provide. But I was cagey about my creative work. I didn't want to be categorized.”

When Bielawa moved to New York in her early 20s, her calendar filled up fast with work as a singer. “It wasn't until my early 30s that I had any important performances of my music.”

By then she had already been in the Philip Glass Ensemble for almost a decade, and was singing operas by Michael Gordon and Anthony Braxton. She also developed a strong reputation in early music, performing and recording Baroque and Renaissance music with ensembles such as Pomerium.

Magnetism

Bielawa loves to collaborate. “Composing music is a way to deepen my connection with other musical beings. That's why I like to write concertos. There's this brilliant musical being that I'm handling like gunpowder.”

Her music emerges from the qualities of the musicians themselves. “One of the reasons people may find my music hard to categorize is that I'm so fascinated by the collaborators I'm working with—their magnetism pulls me in a lot of different directions.”

For Bielawa, chamber music is about the individuals: their style, character, energy. “There are these human beings up there, and there is this sinewy, interactive, engaged person-ness in everybody on the stage.”

In Graffiti dell’amante, she worked with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider. “They've got these phenomenal, diamond-cutting rhythmic brains.” She responded with a work that presents huge rhythmic complexity, and these challenges “became a way to bond with them.”

In Incessabili Voce, she worked with a French group, Ensemble Variances. “They were drawn to my music because I was also a performer and could work with them in a freer, more ‘open-score’ way.” Uniquely, this score has few moments where all performers play in a way that is conventionally “together.”

For the new work on this Miller Portrait, Balloon Variations, Bielawa celebrates the first stage of a new and deep relationship with the always-game Contemporaneous and David Bloom. “This group, they are willing to try anything.” So she is experimenting, including toy piano, auxiliary instruments, guitar, and singing in the score. “I’m wondering how I can mess things up.”

A musical jolt

When Bielawa first moved to New York, her singing voice had a particular quality: floaty, soaring, androgynous, very high. It was appealing to musicians at the time. “This kind of voice was all the rage in the 90s—everyone was writing for it.”

The two works of vocal chamber music on this Miller Portrait came at a particular time in her career. “At a certain point I was performing so much that I didn’t get any adrenaline anymore. I wanted to get a little bit more energy between the audience and myself. I wanted more connection to listeners.”

So she wrote near-impossible feats for herself to sing. “These two pieces are technically demanding because I was trying to shock myself into a vulnerable place, to give a more immediate experience to the listener.” But they are no easy feat.

Bielawa hasn’t sung the two pieces for several years, and has found that they now have quite a different quality. “I went through menopause, and there is new power and dramatic range I can access in my voice.”

Reclamation

Early on, Bielawa resisted being pigeonholed as a composer/performer. “If I were a pianist or a conductor, and a man, then I would have been comfortable being seen as a composer/performer.” But as a female singer in the new music climate of the early ‘90s? “I wanted to prove myself as a composer first.”

The two works for voice and ensemble, Incessabili Voce and Graffiti dell’amante, came at an important moment in her career: they were commissioned for Bielawa as a uniquely skilled composer and performer; they placed these twin functions on equal footing.

For Bielawa, this Miller Portrait is a reclamation of her status as a multihyphenate creator. “Times have changed since the ‘90s. I think it's a great time to join these two parts of my musical life and share that with the Miller audience.”

Incessabili Voce

A simple voice, bent in quiet praise. Echoes and harmonies join from afar. As others join onstage, the cry gains in power and strength, finally roaring: “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The Sea! The Sea!”)

For Incessabili Voce, Bielawa returned to a childhood musical experience. She recalled singing a translation of the Te Deum text in her mother’s choir, and was particularly drawn to the line, “To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry.”

“I remember wondering about these terrifyingly large, animal-like angels, and how they managed this continual crying for joy. Didn’t they ever get tired? Or need to eat something?”

This cry for joy reminded her of the story of the 10,000 Greek soldiers in Xenophon’s Anabasis, “who trudged through enemy territory for weeks, forces decimated and leaders slain, trying to get home.”

She let all of these images, texts, and traditions mingle, without strict narrative intent. “Incessabili Voce is more of a dreamscape than a story, more cry than word.”

As a result, the music hovers between dramatic scene and concert piece. There are theatrical elements in the score: players entering and leaving, the singer addressing text to different musicians. “I'm more able to deliver the dramatic breadth of the piece now, with my voice as it is today, and having had many more years of being on stage.”

Bielawa finds a connection between Incessabili Voce and the new work on this Miller program. “There is quite a lot of comedy in the earlier piece. It's kind of quirky, and I see that there was a nascent, almost musical theater quality. Every once in a while my ‘cabaret self’ comes out.”

In Incessabili Voce, Bielawa isn't really a member of the ensemble. “I'm a ringleader. These other players on stage are my army—or they're my angels…”

Balloon Variations

Lyon, 1784. The cusp of the French Revolution. Élisabeth Tible, a local opera singer, becomes the first woman to fly in a balloon, singing an aria from a long-forgotten opera while held aloft.

Two hundred and forty-two years later, composer Lisa Bielawa and librettist Claire Solomon are turning this unbelievable-but-true story into a comic opera. Writing comedy presents a challenge to Bielawa: “to get the timing correct and to speak with musical directness, to capture the wonderfully ugly, awkward, goofy things.”

Balloon Variations, commissioned by Miller Theatre, acts as a kind of study for the opera. It allows Bielawa to write music that is in the “dialect” of the opera, unconstrained by the opera’s story, without any (conventional) singing roles.

Variation form offers Bielawa an opportunity to experiment in an uninhibited way—to throw wild musical ideas against a wall: “Each variation gives me a chance to see what it is like for an audience to experience the piece—how it lands.”

It also allows a chance to explore the musical duality that runs through the opera: the contrast between “high” and “low,” between the opera of the royals (the Academie Royal de Musique, known simply as “the Opéra”) and people’s opera (the comédie en vaudevilles).

In 18th century France there was heightened tension between these two factions, and the popular, politically charged satire of the vaudevilles captured the energy that led to the French Revolution.

Balloon Variations also gives Bielawa a chance to play with these tensions in her own work. Between the popular side of her musical history—as a singing cocktail waitress, cabaret songwriter, tap-dancer—and the “high art” classical side.

Graffiti dell’amante

We swoon. Adrift on rough seas, we swoon. Biting nails to the flesh, we swoon. Playing a serenade under a window, we swoon. The intensity of the music is palpable. The palpitations are intense.

In A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, the essayist and philosopher puts us in the mind of the lover, ruminating on various emotional states: Absence, Devotion, Ravishment, Remembering.

Bielawa was drawn to the idea that the chapters can be read in any order. Like many composers, she finds the blank page unnerving, and reading around a topic allows her to feel her way towards the work. “Research gives me ballast. Once I have the germs on the page, then I can knead and build.”

This phase also allows her to find the reason a work exists. “There has to be a ‘why.’ Otherwise, why are the listeners there? I have to answer that question every damn time. It's agonizing.”

During this research phase for Graffiti, Bielawa spent time seeking texts that she could attach to each particularly Barthesian quality. What captures Barthes’ idea of Ravishment or Absence? And Forgiveness? How can works even capture that profound emotional state?

The work was written during her year as a Rome Prize fellow, and the texts all hold a connection to Rome. Three were written or translated by fellow Rome Prize residents. Then the dead guys—Michelangelo, Shelley, and WW Story (“a horrible but also fantastic poem”)—each of whom have strong connections to the city.

Excited by the choose-your-own-adventure quality of Barthes’ book, Bielawa decided to put the journey of Graffiti dell’amante in the hands of listeners: the order of movements is determined by the audience on the night. “I'm going to find out whether this audience wants a happy love story, or a tragic one.”

Tim Munro is a Brisbane-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. He is currently Associate Professor of Music at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia.

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