Lisa Bielawa

“Until it has had a poet, a place is not a place.”
-Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Lisa Bielwa (2004) (Photo: Pete Checcia)

Last year I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, to witness an annual piano competition at the famous Philharmonic Hall. Young pianists, mostly from Russia and former Soviet Republics, navigated dexterously through pieces by Rachmaninoff and Chopin in this elegant hall that has heard these same pieces thousands of times, outliving several political regimes. Now Russia bears the signs of a nascent capitalist economy—McDonald’s outposts here, bingo parlors there—and at Philharmonic Hall that day the influence of capitalism also exerted its presence. When I attended the awards ceremony, which was nearly five hours long, the stage was full of boxes of different sizes. As the prizes were handed out, it became clear to me what was going on: once a state institution, the competition now needed to fundraise to meet its budget, and a water filter company had been a primary sponsor of the competition. The stage was a sea of water filters and pitchers of different sizes. Each winner got a water filter, corresponding to his/her prize level. The unspoken message seemed to be, “Beautiful playing on that Chopin—here, have a water filter. And you! Even more beautiful playing. Here’s an even bigger water filter.”

The absurdity of attaching exact exchange values to artistic “products” had never been more clearly demonstrated to me than in that ceremony. Here in the US, capitalism is more advanced, and the manifestations of exchange are usually more veiled (and more insidious) than this example. When someone offers to pay me to write a piece of music, how do we decide what it's worth? Truthfully, being paid for such things feels a little like receiving a water filter as a prize—embarrassing in its philosophical incompatibility.

But American society functions around the dollar, and, like anyone, artists need food and shelter. Some fellow artists and arts advocacy groups encourage us to cozy up to the marketplace ethic—to learn to “brand” ourselves, to get sound bites of our compositions on the web, to offer a free sample of the product that is us. Evidently, according to many, the art-as-commodity ethos is actually salutary or—given the indisputable tyranny of the marketplace in our American culture—an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude is the key to survival.

Believing as I do that neither of these premises is acceptable if a composer’s goal is to provide an audience with a valuable artistic experience (i.e., one of value whose worth isn’t measurable in economic terms), I search for ways in which my music itself, without being expressly political, can be a site of resistance. One way to do this is to write pieces that cannot be fixed and traded because their realization is dependent on the live performance situation.

Writing for specific performers, listeners, rooms, and occasions is a guiding practice in my process. Through it I keep faith with my listener, whose experience is necessarily specific as well. Aleatoric writing (requiring spontaneous decisions by the performers themselves, resulting in a different performance every time) enhances the listener’s focus on the present—the musical thing that's happening right now. Both an expanded use of space and the movement of performers within the space emphasize the role of live performance as a unique experience, one whose value operates completely outside of the ubiquitous laws of exchange.

I was in Russia to hear a performance of a piece of mine for piano and drone entitled Wait. In this performance the drone was sung by a motley group of women including a Russian experimental improv singer, the administrative director of Philharmonic Hall, the president of the competition, and myself. They contributed their robust, rough voices to the performance with affecting fervor and sincerity.

Every performance of this piece has had a situation-specific drone. A month after the Russia performance, it appeared as part of a longer work for piano and orchestra called The Right Weather, written expressly for the new Zankel Hall in New York City. In this version, the drone was the entire American Composers Orchestra, which had gradually vacated the stage during the previous movement and spread out in the lobby area just outside the cracked-open house doors. The effect was as if the hall itself was singing, a celebration of the space. After the drone movement, the players came into the hall in small groups, clustered behind and among the audience, and played in chamber groups that called and answered each other across the hall. I took several tours of Zankel Hall before the performance, even while it was still under construction. I remember trying to imagine what the hall would look like with seats in it. Where should the trumpets go? Will there be people here? And then the fire marshal had to clear all of my ideas, of course. They were building a hall, and I would partner them by building a piece expressly for that hall.

Lisa Bielwa The Right Weather performance view at Zankel Hall, New York (2004) (Photo: Pete Checcia)

The Right Weather could be performed in another hall, but would have to be lovingly adapted to the new room. It could be recorded, but all of these spatial and experiential aspects would be lost. I realized at the premiere that two years of work writing the piece and weeks of preparation with the soloist Andrew Armstrong and rehearsals with the orchestra had culminated in the next 40 minutes with these 700 people. As an exercise in efficiency or enterprise it was a colossal failure. What did I have to show for it? But the value of the time we—performers, composer, audience—spent that day is uncapturable and untradeable. A thrill pervaded the experience, the thrill of doing something together, the 700 of us, which ignored questions of efficiency completely.

Since that night I’ve continued to seek ways to let my work be a relieving oasis of inefficiency and economic irrelevance. I’m striving to collaborate with musicians and listeners to create something that won’t ever happen again and can’t be carried away in any concrete form.

The piece I completed most recently, Lamentations for a City, is for 25 voices and English horn. Starting with the Biblical passage Lamentations of Jeremiah, a poetic eyewitness account of the fall of Jerusalem in the first century, I found I was unable to keep the turmoil of current-day cities out of the piece. Language from web news reports from Baghdad, Beslan, modern-day Jerusalem, and New York City found its way into the piece. The individual singers choose from lists of quotes culled from the web, creating textures of crisis language. This language appears in the piece to give testimony to all cities brought to their knees through cruelty, treason, humiliation, and destruction.

Lamentations for a City will be performed on May 15 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York by the excellent vocal group Cerddorion under the direction of Kristina Boerger. They will perform the piece four times this season, and each time the piece will be different because of the independent choices the singers will have to make. If the piece is performed five years from now in St. Petersburg, what language should they use? What troubled cities will provide this language? What will that audience know that we don’t know here in New York, today?

Every new project deepens my understanding of the fact that composing, performing, and listening are all acts of gracious fealty, not business transactions. That said, I could actually really use a water filter.

Composer Lisa Bielawa has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall to write a new vocal work for the 2004-05 season as part of the Harbison/Upshaw Workshop. Her work has been featured at American Music Week in Bulgaria; the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan; the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia; and the Bang On A Can and Lincoln Center Festivals in New York. A recent recipient of the Aaron Copland Award for young composers, Bielawa is also one of the founders and artistic directors of the MATA Festival, which commissions and premieres work by young composers from all over the world. Bielawa is also a two-time NYFA Artists' Fellowship recipient.

For more information on Lisa Bielawa, visit: www.americancomposers.org/ou_sheridan_article.htm
www.rogerreynolds.com/bielawa/bielawa_text.html
www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/episodes/02202004
www.musicattheanthology.org/index.html