The theme is transforming sorrow into hope, and bondage into a cocoon to give birth to the wings of creation. This theme is manifesting itself in the many creative talents and supportive organizations that are emerging from their pandemic cocoons with works that can be likened to butterflies emerging to take flight and inspire us with their beauty and freedom of movement in an open sky.

This San Francisco Bay Area born project has now grown into an International project, that is continuing to expand and involves many creators and organizations. This website tracks the creations and contributions to the Breathe Free on Wings in Rhythm Project which includes music compositions, arrangements, recordings, performances, dance choreographies, film, art, piano donations and historical piano and tall ship restorations.

History of the Project

In July 2020, just as the pandemic was continuing to shut down events, businesses, travel, museums, non-profit organizations and music and dance performances all around the world, Karen Earle Lile conceived this project.

Hearing all of the sorrow caused by political tensions, George Floyd’s death, country borders closing, deaths due to the pandemic, and the many artists and musicians that were affected by shuttered venues and closed events, and inspired by the creativity of Bruce Chrisp and the Musicians of the Oakland Symphony: Lile woke up at 2 am one morning with a powerful idea. Lile describes it “as abstract thought and movement, like the birth of a miniature galaxy of potential stars with planets and moons about to be formed from its creative energy”. Lile took just one element from this concept and wrote prose within a few hours, with the intention that it should be used to inspire the creation of music, written by Kendall Ross Bean, for the Musicians of the Oakland Symphony.

Karen had met the Executive Director of the Oakland Symphony, Mieko Hatano during a Metropolitan Club lecture she was hosting that celebrated the creation of the Musicians of Oakland Symphony’s video performance of “This Land is your Land” during the pandemic shutdowns. Within that same month, the Oakland Symphony and the Musicians of the Oakland Symphony partnered with Karen Lile Productions to make “Breathe Free on Wings in Rhythm” a project, with Karen Earle Lile as its founder and Executive Producer and the Oakland Symphony as a partner in the commission of the first musical work.

Piano Finders joined the team and, with the Oakland Symphony, began to convert donated pianos into an Oakland Symphony commission for a Rhapsody to be composed by Kendall Ross Bean, with Libretto by Karen Earle Lile. That first composition was finished in Nov 2020 as a score with a piano reduction of an orchestral concept and the complete choral, tenor and soprano soloist arrangement. Lile and Bean gave it the title, “Break Free on Wings of Music”. All subsequent musical arrangements and derivations in this project started with this composition and libretto.