Lisa Bielawa Featured in Miller Theatre Composer Portrait Concert at Columbia University

On Thursday, February 26, 2026 at 7:30pm, composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa will be featured in a Composer Portrait at Miller Theatre at Columbia University, with performances of her music by Contemporaneous conducted by Co-Artistic Director David Bloom, and sung by Bielawa herself.

The program includes the world premiere of Balloon Variations, commissioned by Miller Theatre for the occasion, as well as two of Bielawa's earlier works – Incessabili Voce from 2013 and Graffiti dell'amante from 2010.

Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock.” Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times, and “fluid and arresting ... at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is established as one of today's leading composers and performers, consistently incorporating community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; she has composed and produced a twelve-episode, made-for-TV opera that features over 350 musicians and was filmed in locations across the country.

“Creating new work for a fearless and uniquely flexible group like Contemporaneous leads me to find new ways to build wonder between performers and audience, through whimsy and joyful incitement to creating the unexpected,” says Bielawa. “They are game for anything. I can't wait to see what happens in the room when we invite our audience along on this ride.”

Bielawa's new piece for her Composer Portrait, Balloon Variations, written for seven instruments, will showcase the unique virtuosity of Contemporaneous and its conductor David Bloom, exploring the meeting ground between comedy and expansiveness. It is a precursor to Bielawa's full-length opera La Ballonniste – or – Balloon (A Hot Air Opera), which will also be performed by Contemporaneous. La Ballonniste, Bielawa's Guggenheim Fellowship project, is set in 1784 in Lyon on the cusp of the French Revolution and centers on opera singer Élisabeth Tible, the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon, all while singing an aria from a long-forgotten opera. Bielawa and librettist Claire Solomon are turning this true story into a comic opera. Balloon Variations is Bielawa's exploration of music in the “dialect” of the new opera, allowing her to develop the musical language of the new work outside of the opera's story.

Bielawa's piece Incessabili Voce from 2013 was commissioned by Radio France for Ensemble Variances, with the composer as the vocal soloist. The piece was written in response to the theme of “The Cry” as “an expression of a basic language shared by all human beings as well as a majority of animals.” Bielawa writes in her note for the piece, “In designing material for the voice, I thought about singing in church, the ecstatic singing of angels, the roar of soldiers, the mannerisms of Greek storytelling in the great oral tradition, the traditions of Gregorian and Anglican chant. The vocal part coaxes cries of various sorts out of the instruments. The texture of the ensemble writing bears witness to my preoccupation . . .with the sloppy joyfulness of a multitude crying ceaselessly all together – whether angels or soldiers. I let all of these images, texts, traditions and energies enter the piece and mingle together, without strict dramatic intent. It is more of a dreamscape than a story, more cry than word.”

Graffiti dell'amante for string quartet and singer from 2010 was commissioned for Lisa Bielawa to perform with Brooklyn Rider, by Market Square Concerts and the American Academy in Rome during Bielawa's Rome Prize year. It is an open-ended musical-dramatic exploration of the multi-faceted predicament of the Lover inspired by Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Bielawa writes, “The piece uses various declarations of romantic Love from my own meandering reading to enact what Barthes calls the ‘Figures' of the Lover (I call these figures/segments ‘Absence,' ‘Devotion,' ‘Ravishment,' ‘Remembering,' etc.) These 3-5 minute segments can be performed in any order, or in subsets to make performances of different lengths – always chosen by the audience assembled for that performance. In this way each audience hears its own collective romantic consciousness reflected back through the performance.”

On singing these pieces again after so long Bielawa says, “Working up these two virtuoso vocal works so many years later than when I first sang them, I am astounded by how much more dramatic range I am able to get from my own voice, now that I have gone through menopause and my voice has gained a whole new set of colors and powers. As I bring this wonderfully strange new instrument to these familiar works, I am also struck by how my understanding of the texts has evolved because of my own lived experience over these years. It is unlike any other experience I've had as a performer or a composer.”

In addition to her Composer Portrait at Miller Theatre, Lisa Bielawa's 2025-2026 season features bold programming, new collaborations, and world premieres of several new works. Knoxville Broadcast, a new installment in Bielawa's Broadcast series, was premiered on October 17 and 18, 2025 in Knoxville, TN in three site-specific performances at Knoxville's World's Fair Park presented by Big Ears. Violinist Tessa Lark has given the first two premiere performances of Bielawa's Violin Concerto No. 2, PULSE with two of the co-commissioning orchestras – the world premiere performances with the Louisville Orchestra, conducted by Teddy Abrams on October 24 and 25, 2025; and the Cincinnati premiere with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Music Director Cristian Mӑcelaru, on November 29 and 30, 2025. She will perform it with another co-commissioner, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on April 19, 2026. Bielawa also serves as Howard Hanson Visiting Professor at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY for 2025-2026, where she will work with students who will be performing her music throughout the academic year. Eastman will present her next large-scale Broadcast in April 2026.