Hearing Voices: A Conversation with George Lewis

While many organizations present contemporary classical music, the International Contemporary Ensemble has stood out since its founding twenty-two years ago. The Ensemble’s success has come largely due to its stated goal of cultivating a musical ecosystem that honors diversity while focusing on equity, belonging, and cultural responsiveness. The organization’s openness and consideration of all musical ideas starkly contrast a status quo that often marginalizes or outright ignores the compositional thoughts of anyone other than a white man. Emphasizing increased inclusiveness and diversity allows the Ensemble to present more compelling pieces than most. This ethos also partly explains the group’s April 2022 selection of George Lewis as its most recent Artistic Director. Although all previous holders of the designation came from artists within the Ensemble’s ranks, Lewis – a composer at the front lines of musical decolonization and representation of Afrodiasporic voices – was a natural choice for the role despite his outsider status. Indeed, the Ensemble’s performance at Roulette Intermedium on October 5, 2023, George Lewis: Hearing Voices, is built upon the composer’s continued explorations of how decolonized music may sound. 

Hearing Voices will consist of five pieces. The first, ‘Melodies for Miles’, is a violin solo performance Lewis debuted last year, partly to honor his friend and gifted violinist Miles Hoffman. Following ‘Melodies for Miles’ will be three pieces incorporating written texts. The first, ‘a whispered nine’, finds a soprano vocalist, flute, guitar, viola, and percussion utilizing the work of cultural theorist, poet, and scholar Fred Moten. The following ‘Apis’ uses the lower and darker sounds of baritone vocals, clarinet/bass clarinet, trumpet in C, and trombone to examine the works of the Language poetry movement founding figure, Lyn Hejinan. In its US debut, the last in the trilogy, ‘H.narrans,’ will find contralto voice, clarinet/bass clarinet, trumpet in c, percussion, violin, and double bass incorporating the works of Sylvia Wynter, the novelist, dramatist, critic, philosopher, and essayist who has long tried to unsettle the “overrepresentation of Man.” The evening will conclude with a presentation of ‘Creative Construction Set™’; open improvisation guided by the musicians’ use of instruction cards. 

One should also be mindful of the title ‘Creative Construction Set™’ itself. It harkens to the Creative Construction Company, an early group of the incomparable Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The ties between Lewis’ contemporary classical works and the AACM should be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the composer’s history. Lewis himself was a pupil of AACM co-founder, Muhal Richard Abrams and remains a member of the organization. He’s also written A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2007), one of the finest studies on the organization. Actually, Lewis – Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Composition & Historical Musicology at Columbia University for almost twenty years – has several excellent scholarly works to his credit. Such contributions include the recently released Composing While Black: Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute / Afrodiasporic New Music Today (Volke Verlag, 2023), a critically significant collection of essays on the topic, for which Lewis served as co-editor. Lewis himself likely deserves recognition in such a book, given his long – and continued – history of creating music – including his pioneering work in Computer Music – that is often still ahead of its time. His forward-thinking mindset is also evident in the composer’s first opera, Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts, a provocative work inspired by the AACM. A recording of the opera will be released on New Focus Recordings a day after Hearing Voices.

We are honored to have interviewed Professor Lewis via email on Hearing Voices, musical decolonization, and more.

PostGenre: What interested you in becoming Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble and what do you feel you have learned the most from serving in that capacity?

George Lewis: Beginning with my two years at the Kitchen in New York in 1980-81, I have found curation to be a crucial site for fostering the kind of change I want to see in the various creative communities I’ve been part of over the years. More recently, curating the Ensemble Modern Afromodernism concerts in 2020-21, during the pandemic, brought me to a place where I have been able to advocate across Europe for the decolonization of one of my several fields, contemporary classical music. This led directly to my articles, “A Small Act of Curation” and “New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps,” and perhaps most importantly, my bilingual German-English co-edited book with Dr. Harald Kisiedu, Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today, which we saw as a guide to combating the sensory deprivation and devolution of the field that results from not hearing Afrodiasporic voices. I felt that much more than most ensembles, ICE’s musicians, staff, and board were well aware of the stakes involved in changing the identity matrix of new music and had already been taking steps over the past few years in doing so. Also, the organization helped me so much in reconceiving my own identity back in 2010, when I first started working with them. As for what I have learned the most? That decolonization starts at home.

PG: ‘Melodies for Miles’ is dedicated to your old college roommate, Miles Hoffman. Among other things, Hoffman introduced you to the existence of the Afrodiasporic contemporary composer when he was working on Alvin Singleton’s Mestizo II. Do you feel the fact it was through Hoffman, or as you call him, “Mike” – a white musician – that you first learned of Afrodiasporic contemporary composers despite having your own interest in the field and being a musician reflects how marginalized those composers’ contributions have been, at least at that time?

GL: I don’t remember Mike saying, “You gotta hear this black composer.” He was talking about the music. He thought I would like it—maybe even more than he did. I was the one who was surprised when Alvin came out to take the bows. As for all that black/white stuff, you learn where you learn, and hopefully, you do learn something.  

PG: The aim of ‘Melodies for Miles’ has been not to emphasize the era in which you learned about the tradition of Western classical violin but to reconnect you, Mike, and Alvin Singleton in the real-time of listening. 

GL: Well, sort of—but not really. Johnny Gandelsman got to know Mike, and had the idea of co-commissioning a solo work in his honor. We knew that Mike was ill, and we really wanted him to have this honor. 

PG: When you premiered the piece in 2022, all three of you were living but Mike passed away earlier this summer. Do you feel his death changes the piece or how you approach it at all?

GL: In the end, Johnny wasn’t able to give the premiere, so Josh Modney did it, and Mike got to see the video. He said, “Wow, that Josh Modney can really play!” And it turned out that Josh had heard Mike play when he was just starting out as a violinist. So on multiple levels, for Johnny, Josh, and me, the goal of the piece was to honor Mike, and now we have a piece that helps keep the memory of Mike’s music-making alive.

PG: What do you feel is the most significant misconception about Afrodiasporic contemporary composers?

GL: The main misconception is that Afrodiasporic contemporary composers do not exist.  

PG: Composing While Black focuses primarily on great living contemporary composers. Many, myself included, would place you in that category, including for your work with computer music. Now that we are at an age where AI is an ever more present force, people are increasingly analyzing works like Voyager. Do you feel the increased attention is primarily because of advancements in technology since those earlier works or is it due to an increased awareness of Black composers more generally?

GL: I’m sure that Voyager, the computer music piece/system with which I have been most often associated, has benefited from the rise in awareness of AI—the promises and the pitfalls. We had an excellent concert with Ensemble Signal and Nicole Mitchell recently in which the commentary brought up these ideas. I did write an article in 2000 characterizing Voyager as a way of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices. This was at a time when computer music was invariably characterized as exclusively white, so that was an early intervention. Later, some commentators, like Paul Steinbeck, have perceptively noted the influence of AACM multi-instrumentalism on Voyager, as well as on my earlier computer music, such as Rainbow Family. But when you speak of “advances in technology since those earlier works,” I’ve actually been a part of that, with new initiatives in real-time recognition and classification, such as my Forager project with PriSM. But I’m not expecting a call from Google anytime soon.

PG: Composing While Black discusses the Society of Black Composers, which operated in New York from 1968 to 1973. The AACM was formed three years earlier than the Society of Black Composers and you joined in 1971. Do you see any parallels between the Society of Black Composers and the AACM? 

GL: The section on the Society of Black Composers in Composing While Black draws on Harald Kisiedu’s research. For Harald, the Society’s mission was “to highlight the music of Black contemporary composers through concerts, symposia, and lectures in which the members’ compositions were performed.” That’s very similar to the AACM’s set of purposes, which I quoted in my 2008 book on the organization–“creating an atmosphere conducive to artistic endeavors for the artistically inclined by maintaining a workshop for the express purpose of bringing talented musicians together…To stimulate spiritual growth in creative artists through recitals, concerts, etc.” Both groups emphasized diversity. For the Society, “a common vocabulary or grammar is not even desirable.” Lester Bowie said that in the AACM, “you don’t have any particular dogma forced on you.”

PG: And does the continued existence of the AACM speak to the fact that society is seemingly more comfortable with Black music than can be labeled as “jazz” compared to “classical” music?

GL: I did say in a New York Times article that the work of Black composers is more often heard if they are working in forms said to exemplify “the Black experience”: jazz, blues, rap, etc.” But the reasons why organizations come and go aren’t always related to genre. In fact, your question seems to point to what I feel to be a very unhealthy obsession with genre that still prevails in the field of music.

PG: Hearing Voices will include three pieces – ‘a whispered nine’, ‘Apis’, and ‘H.narrans’ – which will incorporate texts by Fred Moten, Lyn Hejinian, and Sylvia Wynter, respectively. You use the work of all three writers as part of your ongoing exploration of how decolonization might sound. Do you see genre itself as a result of the colonization of sound and something that should be eliminated as part of decolonization? 

GL: In music, genre, kinship and race often co-present in ways that cry out for decolonization. I borrow from Sara Ahmed in seeing genre as a technology of kinship. In the contemporary visual arts, scholarship and criticism most often focus on practices and historical periods rather than genres (for example, landscape painting is a genre, but “painting” is a practice). In music, genres all too often function as institutionalizations of kinship-like discourses. As these become naturalized by institutions, fields and critical discourses, their racial metonymics also become embedded. While one often hears that genre-based explanatories bring people together, or render a work more transparent and intelligible, I find that excessive reliance on genre-based framings risks leaving us both blind and deaf to other, more salient modes of meaning. 

PG: When composing using text, what is your process? Do you preselect textual components and then create music to work with it or do you create the music and find text later? 

GL: The text always comes first—one of the many useful things I’ve learned from Petr Kotik, who helped me to create my first opera, Afterword.

PG: Do you see a connection between the written word and music or are they two distinct things being combined in these pieces?

GL: The music/language connection is a huge cliché with a grain of truth buried within. But I try to retain and relate to the music embedded in the texts. I try not to disturb the prosody and the syntax, for example. I also like the words to be intelligible. This is old-fashioned thinking that has become new again.

PG: Hearing Voices will conclude with a performance of ‘Creative Construction Set™’, which uses a set of instruction cards to create and explore sonic environments. What was your process for creating these cards?

GL: CCS™ is one of a series of relational works that deal with what I call “situational form.” Those include Artificial Life 2007 (2007), and P. Multitudinis (2018). They don’t need centralizing conductors; performers interact with and signal each other. New materials are brought in according to what is going on at the moment, rather than going for explicit production of contrast, which generally is overrated. There is always lots of contrast going on—no need to fake it.

The cards present primitives: louder, softer, faster, slower, denser, sparse, stop, go, wait, relate—all basic stuff that people do anyway. The difference is that an individual player can use the cards to quickly and relatively precisely suggest that to others, rather than just being on their own

PG: One card that you did not create, however, is to end the piece. 

GL: Actually, the END? card is part of the original set. This is the only moment in the piece where the members of the ensemble take a vote on whether they should begin to work toward an ending. One or more performers get the idea that the piece should end, and use this card to suggest that publicly to their colleagues. The audience can also see the cards, and perhaps some of them were thinking the same thing. It’s a way to bring audience and musicians together.

PG: The musicians find the proper ending on their own. 

GL: They do that in any case.

PG: Have you found the performances ever turn unruly in length as there is no direction to an end?

GL: In any social space, there is a risk that an interaction goes on too long or not long enough. Music isn’t any different in that regard, and in my work, “unruly” is the way to go anyway. But groups of people create conclusions to their interactions all the time–“Well, I’ll let you go now…but before you go, let me ask you this.” In fact, the musicians are doing this using sounds. But all kinds of people, not just musicians, can read desire and intention in sound.  

PG: ‘Creative Construction Set™’ reflects your interest in finding new ways to incorporate improvisation in a precomposed work. 

GL: Not really, no. That’s not a major preoccupation of mine these days. Also, Creative Construction Set™  isn’t a “work.” It’s a set of tools that help the improvisors to act in concert in specific ways. Using the cards, any musician in the group can ask the entire group or any subset to make silences, get louder or softer, play higher or lower, denser or sparser, or even stop playing altogether. Without a tool like this, there are limits to what you as an individual musician in an ensemble can do to realize group orchestrational ideas that you suddenly think of. I guess you can wave your hands or look intently at someone and hope that they get the message. But the cards give everyone a tool with which they can improvise more complex situations than they could by just acting alone.

There are no cards that mandate the performance of specific material. Basically, everyone is improvising throughout the piece, but they have an additional tool that allows them to improvise with more complex social behaviors. In fact, you could use the cards anywhere, not just in a performance of CCS™.

PG: Some composers seem to avoid the term “improvisation” in favor of things like “live composing” that they feel better reflect their work. Do you see a significant difference between improvisation and precomposition? 

GL: Well, the main difference is in when structuration occurs, not whether it occurs. More centrally, any improvisation, including our everyday efforts beyond the aesthetic, takes place within a matrix of indeterminacy, agency, analysis, judgment, and choice. Composers who specify as much as possible in advance and don’t make a space for improvisation in their compositions (the kind of work I often do) are still subject to those conditions as they create. So even composers are improvising, and when we do these five things, whether or not we are even doing music, we are improvising. You can even say that if one of those elements is absent, what they are doing isn’t improvised.

PG: The title of ‘Creative Construction Set ™’ honors the AACM. You were not only a member of the AACM — 

GL: I’m still a member.

PG: — you also wrote ‘A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,’ which many consider a definitive text on the subject.

GL: Well, there are others. Paul Steinbeck’s Message To Our Folks about the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Alexandre Pierrepont’s La Nuée, L’AACM: Un jeu de société musicale—both powerful books. The AACM is too diverse for anyone to be able to write anything “definitive.”

PG: Do you feel that researching and writing about the AACM gave you a different perspective on the organization than you had as a member?

GL: Let’s hope so. I met members whom I hadn’t worked with musically, as well as supporters and audience members. Of course, I learned lots of things I didn’t know, not only about the AACM but about the world in which it came to be and will inhabit in the future. Reading the book also provided new perspectives to the membership. I mainly wrote it for them, after all—particularly the younger members, so they could experience that historical grounding.

PG: You studied also composition with Muhal Richard Abrams. What do you feel you learned the most from him?

GL: The main thing Muhal taught everyone was how to be what he called an “individual.”

PG: How can that be heard in the works you are presenting for Hearing Voices?

GL: Now that would really be needlessly granular. My music reflects everything I’ve experienced. Singling one person out, even Muhal, would be a slight to all the others. People in the AACM said, Listen to everything. I’ve tried to do that.

The International Contemporary Ensemble, under the Artistic Direction of George Lewis, will present George Lewis: Hearing Voices at Roulette Intermedium on Thursday, October 5, 2023 at 8:00 PM. More information on the event, including how to purchase tickets, can be found on Roulette’s website. The evening can also be livestreamed, for free, on Youtube and archived for future viewing. You can learn more about Lewis from Columbia University’s bio of him. Additionally, more information is available on the International Contemporary Ensemble on its website.

Photo credit: Maurice Weiss