Louisville Broadcast

Louisville Orchestra Event
Project: Louisville Broadcast

Location: Big Four Bridge

Louisville Broadcast integrates music and contemporary urban life beyond the concert hall tradition on a huge scale. This 40-50-minute site-specific performance composed by Lisa Bielawa will engage multiple musical communities and celebrate the public life that now animates this wonderful city. It will be free to the public and happen around and among the regular public uses of city space without any added electrical equipment, seating, or ticketing.

Louisville Broadcast will involve hundreds of professional, amateur, and student musicians of all ages and backgrounds. Multiple musical groups will participate, including orchestras, choirs, collectives, and bands. Each group will have its own musical part to play, conceived as a set of game-like “tasks.” All musicians will play acoustically, without amplification, in groups that will enliven the whole area. Lisa Bielawa will compose music customized for each group’s instrumentation and playing ability. She will also map out an individual “movement path” throughout the sites for each ensemble.

All groups will begin playing in the center of the site: at the gazebo in Shelby Park and the center of the Big Four Bridge. After five minutes or so, the groups will gradually disperse: each group will move as a unit away from the center, increasing the distance between the groups (never playing and walking at the same time – always only one or the other). The music will be composed to form different relationships between the groups as they approach, transect, or retreat from one another.

Two performances will take place on Sunday, April 23, 2023:

1. Shelby Park (600 E. Oak St.), 11:30 AM
2. Big Four Bridge (1101 River Rd.), 7:00 PM

In case of rain, the performances will be rescheduled to Sunday, April 30, 2023.

Louisville Broadcast is being developed in collaboration with the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps program.