I love the focus of our concerts this Thanksgiving weekend. All four works on the program ask us to consider what "home" means when it's more than a physical location, but a living tradition, something passed down and remade. The living composers on the concert, Carlos Simon and Lisa Bielawa, both approach American folklore as active, breathing practices that continue to shape who we are, and take traditions we may have only read about or watched in a Ken Burns documentary and illuminate them in front of our eyes (and ears…). Simon's Tales: A Folklore Symphony stages Black history through the lens of Afrofuturism, drawing on Negro spirituals, work songs and mythologies in music that includes so many styles from the heritage of Duke Ellington, gospel singing, film music and art music, among others. The music of Aaron Copland and Antonín Dvořák both construct music that were designed to stir up the image of home for their listeners. In the Great Depression, Copland shifted his musical style to write in a simpler, more accessible way (turning from his more dissonant works of the 1920s and early 30s), leading to a nearly unaltered rendition of a Shaker melody from Maine, “Simple Gifts.” Dvořák, while in Prague, wrote his Seventh Symphony as directly inspired by the arrival of a huge group of fellow anti-Imperialists (the Czech were under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire/the Hapsburgs at the time) for a performance and rally, composing now as an active Czech nationalist.

Bielawa's Violin Concerto No. 2, PULSE takes a different but certainly complementary approach. Rather than composing from a distance (whether temporal or physical distance), Bielawa tends to embed herself in the communities and traditions she explores. For this work, she went to shape note singings in Tennessee, where she learned the ways of Old-time fiddlers in the Smoky Mountains, thereby immersing herself in the lived experience of so many forms of American music-making before writing a single note. Written for violinist Tessa Lark, whose playing draws from Appalachian fiddling, jazz, AND the classical avant-garde, PULSE is a journey through the music of Tin Pan Alley, Singing Schools and Old-time string band traditions. The result, a piece new to this Orchestra and most of the world, is music that attempts to honor these practices without a sense of hodge-podge. In an interview with New Music USA, she poignantly describes her role as a composer as being someone who often creates spaces for collective music-making, then step back and let the community take over: “Leaving a party at its height — that’s heartbreakingly beautiful — and then you go somewhere else. That’s my role. I start fires, you know, and then I leave.”

Within this context, I think these works ask: what does it mean to belong to a tradition (musical or not), and how do we keep it alive?

During “Fresh Ears,” the pre-concert talks on November 29 and 30, I’ll speak at length with Lisa Bielawa about her work PULSE and her music more broadly, but for now, if you’d like to get to know her through her music, listen below.

Moments Representative of Lisa Bielawa's Style

Broadcasts

Bielawa's "Broadcasts" are site-specific works for hundreds of musicians dispersed across abandoned airfields, parks, neighborhoods and large outdoor spaces where audiences move freely among the performers. These pieces capture the energy of a community in a specific place. Bielawa designs the score to allow different groups of musicians to communicate with each other and influence the shape of the work itself, just as the physical space influences the way the groups move and how any one person might hear the work. Groups of musicians might be scattered around the perimeter of a park, eventually to converge and start a musical party all the while new musical groups are forming in different locations. The effect is both exhilarating and bittersweet, a sort of metaphor for the way communities form, peak, and disperse.

In Broadcast from Home, created during the Covid-19 pandemic, Bielawa transforms the concept for virtual performance, with musicians broadcasting from their own homes. An early example of Bielawa’s interest in this style of writing is her work “Chance Encounter,” which sets text overheard in public spaces in a sort of flash-mob performance, creating a site-specific performance for whoever happens to be there, stopping to listen to a soprano singing in a park as a dozen musicians join her out of nowhere.

What I find remarkable about these works is how Bielawa balances the radical inclusivity of her large-scale, on-foot format with musical materials that allow for textures to emerge that can be cacophonic, hymn-like, dancing, peaceful… everything that existing as an individual within our personal groups within our larger society can be. It’s impossible to represent these works in one example, so here is a brief look into the Louisville Broadcast, produced in 2023.

In medias res (2009) and the 15 Synopses (2006-9)

Commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, In medias res is a 25-minute orchestral work that Bielawa conceived as a way of getting to know the individual musicians of the ensemble. Before writing the large-scale piece, she composed fifteen short "synopsis" works, each one a portrait of a different BMOP member, written for them as a soloist. These miniatures became the genetic material for In medias res, which weaves together fragments of all fifteen synopses into a kaleidoscopic whole. The result is music that to me feels both intimately personal and grandly architectural. You can hear individual personalities emerging from the orchestral texture, but they're always in conversation with the larger community of the group.

Bielawa describes her creative process as being "about getting to know others," and this project is perhaps the clearest manifestation of that philosophy. If you begin with the fifteenth Synopsis for solo harp, you will hear these textures quite directly from around 5:10 in the second movement of In medias res, as compared to around 8:35 in the same movement, you’ll hear both percussion solo movements with brass textures from the solo movements which culminates in very Charles Ives-ian textures in ways that balance soloistic spotlight and the collective identity of the ensemble.

Trojan Women (1999, rev. 2001)

Composed to be performed alongside Euripides' ancient Greek tragedy, Trojan Women demonstrates Bielawa's remarkable ability to make old stories feel urgently relevant. The work, scored in different versions but here as a string quartet, strips the myth down to its emotional core: the grief and resilience of women in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Bielawa's writing is striking. The first movement’s string writing is spare, often hovering in the background like a haunted memory. The second movement dances in mixed rhythmic groups, creating a sense of anxious energy. But it is the third movement I find particularly fascinating. She presents these gnarly dissonances that almost ceremoniously find their “right” tuning, which to me sounds like an attempt to untangle oneself from the emotional complexity of mourning. Bielawa seems to refuse to sentimentalize the material. In this work and in so much of her work, there's a sort of musical determination, looking straight in the face of both pain and beauty.

The Electric Ordo Virtutum, Act I (1998)

Hildegard von Bingen's 12th-century morality play, Ordo Virtutum gets a modern reimagining in Bielawa's Electric Ordo Virtutum, which she describes as "a radical recomposition" rather than an arrangement. Scored by the Hildegurls, a quartet of composers (Bielawa, Kitty Brazelton, Eve Beglarian and Elaine Kaplinsky), the work takes Hildegard's original melodies and harmonic language as a starting point, then expands them into something wholly Bielawa's own in Act I. The Moog synthesizer (which has its own nostalgic resonance, given Bielawa's father Herbert's pioneering work in electronic music) adds an otherworldly shimmer to the medieval melodies, creating a sonic bridge between past and present. The piece is both reverent and irreverent, honoring Hildegard's visionary spirituality while also claiming it as part of a living tradition. If you listen from 6:56 or so, you’ll hear Hildegard/Bielawa’s sampled vocal lines atop a sort of bit-video-game-style synthesizer accompaniment, which makes these juxtapositions of texture that feel like the music is communicating between worlds (which you can also hear in almost dial-radio tuning sounds). The music is like psycho-chant and I, frankly, love it.

Bielawa writes in such a collage of styles that I could probably spend all season speaking about her work- I haven’t even gotten into her choral writing! Here’s a Spotify playlist to add to your library to walk around and get even more familiar with Bielawa’s music: