Creative Capital

Next time you get the feeling that someone is listening in on your conversation, take a quick look around for a slender young composer scribbling in a little notebook. Her name is Lisa Bielawa, and for the past year she and her collaborator, vocalist Susan Narucki, have been eavesdropping all over the globe. The composer admits to becoming so enthralled with strangers’ discussions that she’s bought food she never intended to eat from more than a few hot dog vendors, and feigned deep interest in restaurant menus and posted schedules and maps.

Although Bielawa read a lot of Harriet the Spy books when she was a kid, her activities aren’t really a comment on surveillance. The composer isn’t interested in intimate personal details or gossip. Instead, she’s hunting for the banal utterances we involuntarily exchange throughout daily life. Why would she and Narucki go to such great lengths to amass such bland collection of prose? Their stockpile of everyday phrases all have something in common: they were collected in the same type of public spaces that will soon host performances of Bielawa’s Creative Capital-funded music performance work, Chance Encounter.

Both Bielawa and Narucki have committed themselves to classical music, and their individual touring schedules keep them busy performing in the world’s leading concert halls. Yet it’s these same venues, and the way they uphold the architectural and social conventions surrounding classical music, that Bielawa and Narucki find incongruent. “I love orchestras,” declares Bielawa. “I have a problem with the fact that it costs $65 to hear them and some guy is waving a stick and he’s in charge.” The composer’s past large-scale works, such as The Trojan Women (2002), have been valiantly performed without a conductor. For the world premiere of her orchestral piece The Right Weather (2004), musicians were spatially dispersed in and around Zankel Hall, a performance space at Carnegie Hall.

Once again Bielawa plans to divide her ensemble of musicians site-specifically, distributing a soprano and 12 musicians in two locations as far as a city block apart and choreographing their migration through the outdoor performance space. Each instrumentalist will eventually memorize the 30-minute composition in order to navigate the surroundings and visually cue one another during the piece. Chance Encounter is intended to be experienced as its title suggests: someone on a casual stroll during his or her lunch break decides to linger and listen for a while; brass chords heard in the distance momentarily perplex a letter carrier; a few sunbathers decide to take out their ear buds to experience the entire spectacle.

The centerpiece of Chance Encounter is those overheard snippets of communication, which the composer has transformed into a series of brief “aria-ettes” sung by Narucki. They may be an enigmatic, communal über-libretto, but Bielawa treats these texts with every ounce of exalt and refinement that classical music can muster.

Do you ever go to your old apartment?
Remember it was snowing horribly, and she was holding the dog?
She had it coming. So don’t feel so bad.
Such fragments of speech are evocative, yet at the same time ordinary; their implications seek completion. Setting these words to music, Bielawa rhapsodically injects not only musical meaning, but also a sense of urgency and loftiness.
The artists plan to premiere the work in New York City at the Seward Park Library and its environs on September 28, 2007, in two separate performances at two times of the day, then tour the piece in other cities using the same ensemble of players. But this isn’t just contemporary classical music minus the concert hall. Chance Encounter keeps the art of music’s canonical tradition completely intact while jettisoning the conventions of the maestro, and admission fees. It’s also an ephemeral social sculpture, an enactment of personal experiences transpiring in public. For Bielawa and her collaborator Narucki, it’s a quest to find a common thread in humanity—a consoling commonality—shaping our collective existence into an extraordinary work of art.