Skidmore Orchestra feat. Molly Lewis

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 Molly in Musical Bodies , an exhibition tracing the relationship between music and the human body across 4,000 years. Born in Sydney, Australia, Molly 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. Molly 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 Molly’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 . Molly Lewis’s Skidmore residency began in The Artist-Centered Approach , an Arts Administration course taught by Zankel Director Zhenelle LeBel, that asks students to imagine presenting practices built around artists’ creative identities, needs, and ambitions. For her final project, student Grace Higginbotham developed a proposal for an engagement with Lewis, which her classmates ultimately selected to move forward. Zankel then worked directly with Lewis to grow that student-generated idea into a weeklong residency shaped around her artistry, culminating in a performance on the Zankel stage. This October, Grace will return to Skidmore as a recent graduate to support Lewis during the residency—giving her the unusual opportunity to see an idea developed in the classroom become a professional artistic engagement and to take part in realizing it firsthand. Presented by the Arthur Zankel Music Center in partnership with the Skidmore Department of Music. Made possible by the Zankel Music Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the family of Elisabeth Luce Moore.