Brickyard Broadcast
Virtual Reality Premiere on November 12, 2020 at 6pm ET

Featuring NC State University orchestras and choirs
Raleigh Civic Orchestras
Concert Singers of Cary

Lisa Bielawa, Composer / Producer
Dr. Peter Askim, Director of Orchestral Studies, NC State
Dr. Nathan Leaf, Director of Choral Activities, NC State
Jason Evans Groth, Digital Media Librarian
Colin Keenan, University Libraries Specialist
Kyle Langdon, University Libraries Specialist
Colin Moore, Operations Coordinator, NCSU Department of Music

The North Carolina State University Department of Music, NC State/Raleigh Civic Orchestras, the NC State Choirs and the Concert Singers of Cary have co-commissioned acclaimed composer Lisa Bielawa to create Brickyard Broadcast, a spatialized work for hundreds of musicians that will have its world premiere in a Virtual Reality environment designed expressly by the digital media teams at the NC State University Libraries on November 12, 2020. Brickyard Broadcast will use technology and interactivity to reinterpret the NC State Brickyard, the university’s beloved and iconic gathering area outside of D. H. Hill Jr. Library, as a virtual space in which the musical action will unfold, with the integration of hundreds of audio recordings, created by individual musicians playing and singing in isolation under the guidance of Bielawa, Askim, and Leaf, and avatars designed by the musicians themselves.

It represents an energizing participatory artistic process that is designed to help address the challenges faced by orchestras and choirs during this prolonged period of social distancing. Rather than trying to stage a synchronous performance via remote platforms, Brickyard Broadcast lets musicians create sonic-visual avatars of themselves that can then “gather” virtually in a playful, interactive common space that mirrors their own campus common space, opening up the gathering to anyone in the world who wishes to join them there. Bielawa will create a 20-minute musical work that viewers can experience either from start to finish in a curated sound experience or in a self-guided choose-your-own-adventure modular way. Nine separate musical groups will animate the various areas of the virtual Brickyard, creating an immersive sound experience for anyone who visits the site, accessible either with VR interface or, in a 3-D stereo version, via any personal web device.

Organic to this sound experience will be the texts that the choirs are singing – fragments taken from the writings of various thinkers from a broad historical range who mused on the phenomenon of people gathering in common space: H.G. Wells (“It takes a multitude to make such a stillness”); Wallace Stegner (“There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters”); plus Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Ives, and others.

While Brickyard Broadcast will be developed expressly for VR premiere on the web, because it will have been designed expressly for the landscape of the Brickyard at NC State, it has the potential to be mounted as a physical performance with groups performing at varying distances from each other on the Brickyard itself. In either case, whether on the web or in person, every audience member’s experience will be completely unique, depending on how they choose to move among the sounds they hear.