“I don’t really feel like a composer-performer per se,” says Lisa Bielawa who, despite the semantics of nomenclature, is indeed both a composer and performer. In the former camp, she was a recipient of the 2009 Rome Prize in Musical Competition and has earned accolades for her albums for Tzadik, her collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and her forthcoming, ambitious installation work at Berlin’s retired Tempelhof Airport (Bielawa revels in site-specific music; perhaps one of her best known works for vocals is the street-performed monodrama Chance Encounter).
However, Bielawa, the daughter of a composer and a performance practice scholar, originally cut her musical teeth as a choral artist and still maintains a separate-but-equal career in that field. She has been a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble for the last two decades (she also cofounded the Music at the Anthology Festival with Glass and Eleonor Sandresky) and is currently touring with the revival of the composer’s landmark opera Einstein on the Beach. We caught Bielawa on break at her home in New York to get more insight into this area of her personality, how it fits in with the artist as a whole, and the emerging communal aspect of the new music scene.
Growing up in San Francisco in a musical family, what were some of your earliest influences?
Well, growing up in San Francisco I was in the San Francisco Girls Chorus. And that was a pretty rigorous experience. We sang in the Reagan White House, we toured to Germany . . . . It was a really formative experience for me. I was touring as a teenager, which I’m still doing. It was one of those experiences that opened up my eyes to the musician’s life at a really young age. People found what they were good at, and the director at that time, Elizabeth Appling really drew me out as a composer.
And so [while] I did have solos from time to time, the thing that was very special about my contribution to the microcosm of the San Francisco Girls Chorus was that I was writing music. [Avakian] really celebrated that. It was a really special honor, the fact that I had this incredible mentor, someone who came from outside of my family. The irony was that it wasn’t very special to be a composer in my family because my brother and my father and I were all doing it. But in the Girls Chorus it was special and it was one thing I could do, that I could really contribute. That was the first thing that made me feel like I had really two different musical selves that I could offer. And that stayed with me.
So the duality was always there.
My mission as a composer is not to make work for myself, nor is my mission as a performer to perform my own work. To me . . . where a lot of the vitality comes from is the collaboration. If I didn’t have any musical talent whatsoever, I’d still be building communities because that’s what makes me tick. . . . [In the Girls Chorus] we had slumber parties where we memorized Brahms lieder in German. It’s funny—that too is part of why music-making became such a communal thing for me.
Was there a similar balance of musical styles in your house as well?
The only kind of music I didn’t hear much of growing up—in terms of art music and classical music, because I didn’t hear much pop, either—was Classical/Romantic music. My mother was getting her doctorate at Stanford in early music practice when I was nine. So there was a harpsichord in my house, Corelli, but there wasn’t much Mozart or Beethoven.
I had a big hole in my music education that spanned the 200 years that contained what most people think of as classical music. My father is still a composer and was also really involved in the community, had students, had people over to the house and had relationships with all kinds of Bay Area composers. I knew more about Morton Subotnick than I did about Beethoven.
I certainly knew a lot about Bach; my father revered Bach. He thought he was the greatest musical mind ever. And my mother was a sort of expert on Bach. So I had a very Bach-and-before and Stravinsky-and-after diet growing up.
With so much music in your childhood, what led you to major in literature in college?
When I got to Yale, it had such an unbelievably superb and competitive literature department. If you want to get into the advanced, high-level literature courses at Yale, you have to be a major. And if you’re a double-major, then you get weeded out as someone who’s not serious enough. Meanwhile, because music is such an advanced and peculiar kind of language, anybody who is advanced enough to take advanced music courses could take them. The only way I could take both advanced courses in music and literature was to major in literature. They really wanted me to be a [music] major, but I never felt entirely comfortable in the academic music environment, and I didn’t want to be uncomfortable there.
When you say that you were uncomfortable, was it because the styles of music that you wanted to pursue were not encouraged?
I think at the time it was because there was a feeling that the things I was most interested in and curious about were things that were not OK to explore within the program. So I was sort of at a loss to find a way to become engaged. And I knew I was going to go into music, and I had reached a certain level of training before college. So Yale offered the opportunity to see for once what it might be like to do something else as well, to see what it might be like to get interested in something and go into it from the outside.
Oddly enough, I think I was probably helping myself become whatever kind of compositional thinker I became by doing this instead. How you use your four years in college has to be about giving yourself the spiritual, intellectual anchoring you’re going to need throughout your life. I would never claim that this was something I did consciously. I just look back on it now and think, “Wow, my gut was good.” But at the time it felt much more reactive.
How did you then go from college to becoming involved with the downtown New York music scene, especially the Philip Glass Ensemble?
There was a short transition period that I would not recommend to anybody: I couch-surfed, I worked as a singing cocktail waitress on Martha’s Vineyard, I worked in a rodent-infested music publisher’s library, and I was living on less than $2 a day. The job from Philip Glass came through a choral contractor, Jackie Pierce, who is still a choral contractor. She had just been contacted by the Philip Glass Ensemble management who was looking for someone to do a Music in Twelve Parts tour. I was like 22, 23, and most of the people they had been finding at that point were too last minute. Most working singers can’t drop everything in three weeks’ time to go on a five-week tour. But I was available.
Was there an initial learning curve when you were doing that first audition and tour?
It was something that various forces in my life had been careful to warn me against. It was not sophisticated, [was] bad for singers—there were all kinds of reasons I was supposed to be steering clear of it. But I needed work. And I had never really had much firsthand personal experience with it. I actually hadn’t heard a concert of his music live on my own. I knew the fact that I was working for him was going to be something difficult to break to the people in my life. [Laughs.]
It sounds like it was another gut feeling.
It was a gut feeling called hunger! Even after I got that first tour, I was a sub. I was still auditioning. Because I was finally making a little money, I got my first really good voice teacher ever—Norma Newton was her name. And I worked very hard with her. I didn’t have any technique. It took a year and a half of me working with her, while touring with Philip, to get my act together. It wasn’t until Philip and [conductor] Michael Riesman heard that I was singing better and finding my way as a singer that I actually got the soprano chair in the Glass Ensemble. It was a Cinderella story, but a protracted Cinderella story with an additional chapter on hard work and uncertainty.
What were your initial impressions of Glass’ music?
I remember writing in my diary that it was like running alongside a speeding train and jumping on and off of it. That’s what it felt like. I always loved it; I have to say I’m intellectually and physically suited for it. I don’t know how I would have found that out, but it is definitely true. I’ve been doing it 20 years and I feel like I’m probably anatomically altered at this point. I’m also a runner, and there’s a body awareness in Glass that is really exciting that reminds me of the feeling when you run longer distances. The mental concentration that it requires both to control your body in that way but also to stay sharply on top of hearing your colleagues and being ready in case there’s any kind of derailment to jump in and get that back together. Since it’s impossible to sing, you could spend your whole lifetime finding ways to get better at it because it’s an unconquerable goal.
You’re currently working with the international Einstein on the Beach tour and you were involved with the work in the early stages of your career. How has that experience changed in the interim?
The way it was originally intended, the Philip Glass Ensemble—including the singer—was in the pit. And the singer sings all of the solo stuff, which is a lot of singing. And then you have a chorus that does all the choral singing. When we did “Einstein” last time, instead of having 12 choral members, they still hadn’t decided what they were going to do with the soprano chair. So they had a 13-person choral member and the soprano book was being shared and I was also in the chorus. This time, I’m in the pit. I’m not onstage. I sing the book the way it was intended to be done. And the chorus is 12 people and they’re onstage.
Do you notice anything different between the singers you originally worked with 20 years ago and the singers who audition for works like “Einstein” today?
The level of singers, in terms of their ability to do this kind of super-agility and super-rhythmic acuity kind of singing, is really high now. These singers . . . a lot of the singers that we hired for the chorus are in their late 20s or so. Their friends in whatever conservatory they studied in—their buddies who are composers—are influenced by post-minimalism. It seems to me that music programs are very different from the ones I found so difficult 20 years ago. There’s a lot more music out there that has benefitted from the consideration of these techniques. So singers, they’re coming in, they’re having the skills already. It’s freaky! [Laughs.] They know what the deal is.
Certainly no one is cautioning them against Philip Glass these days.
Singers, also, I think now are much more a part of the sort of new music environment in conservatories and institutions, as opposed to instrumental chamber music with the occasional classically trained singer in a sort of Pierrot Lunaire setting. And I think it does have something to do with the way that composers like Philip have included the human voice in a large part of their bodies of work. They’re being taken very seriously as musicians now. Singers no longer have a handicapped, shameful identity. They are definitely full partners now in the creation of new works. Whatever needs to get done gets done. It’s like a family.
You show up now with not just instrumental skills but musical skills. You make stuff happen. Basically what I see is a lot of people questioning opera, saying to opera, “What else can you be? How can we shift into a new paradigm?” And there are a lot of answers to that question and a lot of solutions and ideas coming to the forum.
It seems that dialog is essential to what forms the new music community.
The field is too small for that kind of communal support to not be there.
