World premiere by the Louisville Orchestra on January 13, 2023.

I set out to compose this piece knowing it would be premiered alongside two of the best-loved works by Beethoven, history’s most celebrated composer. As it turned out, I spent that morning watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, one of history’s most celebrated monarchs. She had in fact “composed” the whole pageant herself, down to every detail – and there she was, at the center of it all, yet absent from it. As I watched the astounding choreography of the procession, I ruminated: what does the way we enshrine people who are gone, especially great leaders, say about us? The mystique of great musical leaders crumbles somewhat when one takes a closer look. In Beethoven’s time, the leadership paradigm for the orchestra was in great flux. Composers usually led their own works, sometimes from the keyboard or from the concertmaster’s chair. When they did not also play, they conducted facing the audience, sometimes banging a stick on the ground. (Beethoven was a notoriously poor leader, especially as his hearing loss became more advanced. He yelled during loud passages and crouched out of sight during pianissimos. His musicians learned to ignore him in order to stay together.) The word “conductor” did not appear in print until 1820, years after his Fifth Symphony and Emperor Concerto were composed. I began to imagine a piece in which we could take a ride through this colorful history of musical leadership. How many different forms can (musical) leadership take?

I watched the Queen’s slow, solemn progress. No one person was “conducting” the epic spectacle. From different locations at different moments, the rhythmic commands rang out – “Bearer party – slow march,” “remove headdress,” and, most poetic of all, “Send the carriage through.” I began transcribing the rhythms of these commands and the patterned groove of the drums (at exactly 75 beats a minute, presumably as specified by the Queen herself in her role as composer) as they ricocheted off of the buildings along the route. But what began as a rumination on greatness and mortality took on more and more playfulness and joy as the weeks and months went by, and my relationship with Louisville – the city, its Orchestra, its audience and community – became more and more colorful and engaged. I began to celebrate the exhilaration of music-making as a team sport, a kind of relay race in which one could literally “pass the baton,” sometimes leading, sometimes following. Six players start the piece in the balcony, sometimes leading and sometimes following. The role of conductor/leader multiplies, splits and flows. Eventually we find ourselves in a game featuring orchestra members in smaller groups, passing the baton until their balcony friends retake their chairs onstage. Meanwhile the conductor effectively holds the carriage until the whole team is together again, then sends it through, into the unknown.

Send the Carriage Through is, at its core, a gift of gratitude to the players of the LO and a celebration of Teddy’s own open-hearted vision of leadership as connection and invitation.

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Libretto by Claire Solomon.

World premiere by the Louisville Orchestra with Lisa Bielawa (narrator) on March 15, 2023.

Composed for Louisville Orchestra’s celebrated MakingMUSIC educational concert series, which has brought live orchestral music to every 4th and 5th grader in the public school system for over 80 years, Spacelord and Queen is a “musical fairy tale” with an ecological theme for narrator and orchestra with a libretto by Claire Solomon. The story concerns an ambitious drop of water named Spacelord and his various sparring encounters with a vain stinkbug named Queen. Concepts from the school science curriculum – precipitation, evaporation, weather systems – appear as plot elements alongside conflicts that stem from the wasteful and environmentally disruptive behaviors of the “Human Geniuses.” The orchestra illustrates and dramatizes these environments and conflicts as the narrator engages the live audience in active storytelling. Bielawa was the narrator for the six premiere performances, reaching thousands of schoolkids.

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On April 23, 2023, The Louisville Orchestra presented LO Creators Corps composer Lisa Bielawa’s Louisville Broadcast, a new 45-minute musical piece for an unlimited number of participants that celebrated two historic sites and the vitality of Louisville’s many musical communities. Two free performances occurred in Shelby Park and Waterfront Park-Big Four Bridge. Bielawa created the piece specifically for these sites, transforming them into vast musical canvases.

Louisville Broadcast featured hundreds of musicians, celebrating the diversity of Louisville’s musical life. A varied roster of over 400 professional, student, and amateur musicians from throughout Jefferson County joined together for the performances, including members of the LO, students and parents from the Louisville Academy of Music, the Louisville Civic Orchestra, the University of Louisville Orchestra, VOICES of Kentuckiana choir, the Louisville Leopard Percussionists, the Louisville Drumline Academy, and ensembles from several JCPS schools: Male High School, Moore High School, Johnson Middle School, as well as the Louisville Classical Academy.

Additionally, Bielawa and the LO helped form The Town Criers, a community choir that anyone could join regardless of musical background. Bielawa composed music for the Town Criers that was easy to learn without any music-reading skills or training. It was accessible to anyone who wished to raise their voice and join the performances.

The texts Bielawa set in Louisville Broadcast – sung by several participating ensembles — were collected from Louisville residents who submitted responses to the Louisville Orchestra’s website. In addition, Bielawa incorporated texts from oral histories about the Shelby Park neighborhood, as told by longtime Shelby Park residents in interviews.

Bielawa chose Shelby Park and the Big Four Bridge as performance sites for their historical significance to Louisville. Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm designed Shelby Park in 1907, the only park in Louisville designed explicitly with a Carnegie Library (now the Shelby Park Community Center). It is the geographic anchor of the Shelby Park neighborhood, where the LO has established residences for the Creators Corps (including Bielawa). From 1895 to its decommission in 1969, the Big Four Bridge was a railroad bridge connecting Louisville and Southern Indiana for freight and passengers. It was converted into a pedestrian bridge in 2013 and has since become an iconic landmark in the city, with 1.5 million pedestrians and cyclists crossing its span each year.

“The goal of Louisville Broadcast was to interpret and celebrate these important public spaces in Louisville, allowing listeners to draw their own meaning and experience from them,” said Bielawa. “I envisioned this event bringing about new partnerships, new vitality, and new relationships between different generations, musical traditions and identities, and between arts or music lovers and non-arts-identified park-goers enjoying a surprise encounter with music as a ‘happening’ in the middle of their familiar and beloved city. By inviting anyone in the city to contribute their words to be sung by the participating choirs, I could multiply the diversity of Louisvillian voices that speak through the piece. It is the sound of a whole city’s history, people, neighborhoods, and communities.”

The nature of Bielawa’s work is in keeping with the definition of the word broadcast, “cast or scattered in all directions.” Musicians began in the center of the sites and dispersed outwards according to instructions in Bielawa’s musical score, coordinated only by absolute time and long-distance musical cues. Players spread out in long chains, flanking the walkways and bridge. Audience members chose how to hear the pieces, deciding where to move as the musicians disperse. They took in several different points of view from throughout the site during the performances.

Louisville Broadcast resulted from a collaboration between the Louisville Orchestra and several community organizations, including the Louisville Academy of Music, Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Metro Parks, and Waterfront Park.

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World premiere by the Louisville Orchestra, Lindsey Branson (guitar and voice), Renee Chapman (voice), Tessa Lark (violin), Scott Napier (mandolin), Dean Osborne (banjo), and Paul Wooton (violin) on May 17, 2023.

Our new piece, Home, has had a variety of homes. Before starting my tenure as one of the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps members in September, making my home for a year in Louisville, I had never been to Kentucky before. My only direct connection to the traditional music of Appalachia, which – as a former violinist myself – I had always admired and enjoyed, was through my friend and colleague violinist Tessa Lark, who was born and raised in Lexington, KY, but ended up in my life, many years later, because she was living on my floor in my building in Manhattan. (She reached out via email one day, having seen my name both in a professional context and on a package delivered downstairs, saying, “I think you live in my building!” …and sure enough, there she was: we could wave at each other through our windows, across the air shaft.)

When I got the opportunity to come to Hazard, KY, this Spring to open my ears to the music happening there, I reached out to Tessa in advance for a listener’s/composer’s guide. Thanks to the Appalachian Arts Alliance and its director, Tim Deaton, I met Lindsey Branson, a graduate of the Bluegrass School, Director of Education at the Arts Alliance, and a brilliant singer-songwriter. We went as a team to the Bluegrass School, where I was welcomed into a weekly song circle that called themselves Mountain Traditions, and I learned some songs from these esteemed veterans first-hand. In the midst of it all, I met mezzo-soprano Renée Chapman, whose luminous voice is well-known through her role in choral and classical music-making in Hazard, also a vibrant part of Hazard's musical life. At the end of the trip, after hearing her sing some of her own songs at the local pub, Lindsey spoke of her musical inspirations in ways that resonated for me, like the pervasiveness of a kind of yearning that evokes both placelessness and nostalgia. Over the next weeks, I shared some of my own music with her, and she responded in words and melodies that I then wove together in an orchestral language, incorporating parts for both Renée and Tessa while leaving room for Lindsey to continue developing the melodies in collaboration with traditional music colleagues in Hazard. – Lisa Bielawa

Home is a word many people can relate to. Most think of a physical place, but home isn’t always that. Home is a feeling, a person, a song, and it’s within you. This piece is about longing for what home means to me. – Lindsey Branson

LYRICS by Lindsey Branson

I’mma Goin’ Home.
I’mma Goin’ Home.
It’s the place that I call mine, the sun always shines.
I’mma Goin’ Home.

I’mma Goin’ Home.
I’mma Goin’ Home.
It’s a feeling I can’t forget, to live without regrets.
I’mma Goin’ Home

I’mma Goin’ Home.
I’mma Goin’ Home.
Where the River Flows, where I can sing my woes.
I’mma Goin’ Home.

Let’s go home. Let’s go home.
I’mma
Goin’ Home.

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• Friday, September 16, 2022 | Coffee: Swing, Swagger, & Sway | Whitney Hall | Drama/Self-Pity
• Saturday, September 17, 2022 | Classics: Swing, Swagger, & Sway | Whitney Hall | Drama/Self-Pity
• Thursday, October 27, 2022 | Music Without Borders: Symphonic Sparks | The Jeffersonian | Fictional Migrations
• Friday, October 28, 2022 | Music Without Borders: Symphonic Sparks | Logan Street Market | Fictional Migrations
• Saturday, October 29, 2022 | Music Without Borders: Symphonic Sparks |California Community Center | Fictional Migrations
• Friday, January 13, 2023 | Coffee: Fifths of Beethoven | Whitney Hall | Send the Carriage Through
• Saturday, January 14, 2023 | Classics: Fifths of Beethoven | Whitney Hall | Send the Carriage Through
• Wednesday, March 15, 2023 | MakingMUSIC | Whitney Hall | Spacelord and Queen
• Thursday, March 16, 2023 | MakingMUSIC | Whitney Hall | Spacelord and Queen
• Friday, March 17, 2023 | MakingMUSIC | Whitney Hall | Spacelord and Queen
• Saturday, April 23, 2023 | Shelby Park | Louisville Broadcast
• Saturday, April 23, 2023 | Big Four Bridge | Louisville Broadcast
• Wednesday, May 17, 2023 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Mountain Arts Center (Prestonsburg, KY) | HOME
• Thursday, May 18, 2023 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Appalachian Wireless Arena (Pikeville, KY) | HOME
• Friday, May 19, 2023 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Harlan County High School (Harlan, KY) | HOME
• Thursday, September 14, 2023 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Lovett Auditorium (Murray, KY) | HOME
• Saturday, September 16, 2023 | Classics: Our Kentucky Home | Iroquois Amphitheatre | HOME
• Tuesday, September 19, 2023 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Glema Mahr Center for the Arts (Madisonville, KY) | HOME
• Saturday, September 23, 2023 | In Harmony Commonwealth Tour | Preston Arts Center (Henderson, KY) | HOME
• Friday, October 24, 2025 | Coffee: Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony | Violin Concerto No. 2: Pulse
• Saturday, October 25, 2025 | Classics: Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony | Violin Concerto No. 2: Pulse