Two Performances on Saturday, April 18, 2026, at 12:00 and 2:00 p.m.

This spring, award-winning composer Lisa Bielawa—currently the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester’s Howard Hanson Visiting Professor—works with Eastman to gather students, faculty, and the local Rochester community for Rochester Broadcast, a large-scale, site-specific “spatial symphony” celebrating the diversity of artistic life in Rochester. There will be two outdoor performances, free and open to the public, on Saturday, April 18, 2026 (rain date April 19), from 12:00-12:30 p.m. and 2:00-2:30 p.m. at Parcel 5 (285 East Main Street, Rochester).

Featured performers are from the Eastman School of Music (Eastman); Eastman Community Music School (ECMS); University of Rochester (URochester), and Rochester community groups: All-In Brass Band (Tom Allen, director), URochester Marching Pep Band (Anika Tripathi, student leader), members of the URochester Concert Choir (Lee Wright, director), Eastman Brass Guild (Mark Kellogg, director), Eastman Saxology (Charles Pillow, director), ECMS Klezmer Ensemble (Jonathan Allentoff, director), Eastman Tuba Mirum (Justin Benavidez, director), Rochester Mandolin Orchestra (Ken Luk, director), ECMS Gamelan Ensemble (Ken Luk, director), Eastman Chorale (Bill Weinert, director), ECMS Chorus (Karie Templeton, director), Rochester Medical Orchestra (Evan Meccarello, director), Rochester School of the Arts Orchestra (John Fetter, director), and Rochester School of the Arts Band (Kerry Venanzi, director).

Eastman trumpet student Cole Pringle ’27E—a Broadcast group leader for Rochester School of the Arts—shares his excitement about the project: “As a Rochester native and student at the Eastman School of Music, the opportunity to collaborate with my fellow Eastman musicians, music students from nearby school districts, and the greater Rochester community is nothing short of inspiring.” He adds that “music is so much more than just the notes on the page. To be able to play even a small part in a much bigger process of community connection is a powerful reminder of how important and valuable music is to our lives.”

Lisa Bielawa

“I’m so happy that Rochester will join the list of Broadcast cities!” says Bielawa. “I create these radically inclusive spatial symphonies for people to fill public urban space with sound, joyfully bringing people together through a celebration of the multiple musical communities in their hometown. Eastman is a perfect partner for this next adventure, in this famously musical city.”

A Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, Lisa Bielawa’s music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic, and harmonically slightly tart” by The New York Times. She is established as one of today’s leading composers and performers, consistently incorporating community-making as part of her artistic vision. In an article which branded Bielawa a “fire starter,” New Music Box reported, “It’s difficult to stand anywhere near composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa and not feel energized by proximity… An extrovert to the core, Bielawa acknowledges that her highly social nature has taken her in some specific directions, both as a composer and as a musical citizen. Community building and close collaboration with performing artists are often central to her compositional process.” 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; the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco; and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Eastman’s Joan and Martin Messinger Dean Kate Sheeran believes that “education and performance are two sides of the same coin.” By inviting Bielawa to helm a Broadcast specifically composed for Rochester, she continues, “we are finding new ways to bring music to members of our local community by inviting them to be a part of it.”

Bielawa’s residency is sponsored by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music.

Watch the video above to hear directly from Lisa why you should attend Rochester Broadcast!

Media only: Lauren Sageer, Associate Director of Public Relations & Digital Content,
(585) 451-8492, lsageer@esm.rochester.edu

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About Lisa Bielawa:

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize winner who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She has received awards and fellowships from the Koussevitzky Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Letters, OPERA America, and American Antiquarian Society, Loghaven Artist Residency, and was part of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps. She received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser. Her music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO, and the Orlando Philharmonic.

Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. Bielawa consistently incorporates 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; the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco; and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the pandemic, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her work Broadcast from Home, now archived by the Library of Congress. For more information, please visit www.lisabielawa.net.   

About Bielawa’s Broadcasts:

Composer Lisa Bielawa’s Rochester Broadcast is the latest in a series of broadly inclusive Broadcast works, starting with her large-scale piece Airfield Broadcasts, a massive 60-minute work for hundreds of musicians that premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin (Tempelhof Broadcast, May 2013) and Crissy Field in San Francisco (Crissy Broadcast, October 2013). Bielawa turned these former airfields into vast musical canvases as professional, amateur, and student musicians executed a spatial symphony. The series continued with Mauer Broadcast at the site of the former Berlin Wall, commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by Kulturprojekte Berlin in 2019; Broadcast from Home, developed remotely during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in 2020, which included the testimonies and home-recorded voices of over 500 people from six continents worldwide; Brickyard Broadcast, developed in 2020 with the city and university in Raleigh, North Carolina, partnering with their libraries to create a performance site entirely in virtual reality; Voters’ Broadcast, commissioned in 2020 as part of the Democracy and Debate Theme Semester by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with support from its School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and developed in partnership with Kaufman Music Center in New York; Louisville Broadcast presented in 2023 by the Louisville Orchestra in two historic locations, Shelby Park and the Big Four Bridge; and Knoxville Broadcast, presented by Big Ears in October 2025 at World’s Fair Park.