Skidmore Orchestra feat. Molly Lewis

About this event

With a sound The New Yorker describes as “part Snow White communing with the birds, part haunted theremin,” Molly Lewis has made the human whistle a distinctive contemporary musical voice. Millions heard her in Barbie, where she whistles the melody of Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” during a pivotal scene and over the film’s closing credits. In 2026, the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured newly commissioned footage of Lewis in Musical Bodies, an exhibition tracing the relationship between music and the human body across 4,000 years. 

Born in Sydney, Australia, Lewis grew up whistling, and eventually pursued it as a career. After her parents showed her the documentary Pucker Up: The Fine Art of Whistling, she entered her first whistling competition, the 2012 International Whistlers Convention in North Carolina. She later won first place in the Live Band Accompaniment Division at 2015’s Masters of Musical Whistling competition in Los Angeles. Her debut EP The Forgotten Edge was released in 2021 on Jagjaguwar, after the label saw her lounge show Café Molly in LA. A second EP, Mirage, followed in 2022 and her debut LP On the Lips was released in 2024, which she promoted by playing headline shows all over the world, as well as supporting Weyes Blood and Beck on his symphony tour. She is currently co-starring in a new documentary, Whistle, which has been making the rounds of film festivals across the globe after debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. 

Lewis brings her singular artistry to the Skidmore Orchestra under the direction of Dr. Georgia Mills, with arrangements by Icelandic composer Thomas Stankiewicz. The program places the whistle in the role of orchestral soloist through beloved melodies from Delibes’s Lakmé, Saint-Saëns’s The Swan, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and Mozart’s famously virtuosic “Queen of the Night” aria, alongside Lewis’s own Oceanic Feeling and Miracle Fruit. The Skidmore Orchestra also takes the spotlight in “Carillon,” “Pastorale,” and “Farandole” from Georges Bizet’s L’Arlésienne.