Minds in Flux (2021)

Composer note
Minds in Flux, composed at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and completed in June 2021, deploys one of American music’s most enduring tropes — that of depiction, centrally represented by Charles Ives, Blind Tom, Elliott Carter, Florence Price, and so many others. The musical logics of Minds in Flux include new imaginings of sonic kinship, offering both unfamiliar sounds and familiar sounds in new combinations. Quicksilver reversals, extremes of volume and pitch, and noisy manifestations of resistance and incommensurability all combine to declare, after Chinua Achebe, that we are no longer at ease.

The “German” seating of the orchestra, in which first violins and cellos are on one side of the stage and second violins and violas on the other, combines with digital electronics to enact the production of space. Digitally mediated entities emerge from the orchestra to mutate into recombinant doppelgängers that follow diverse spatial trajectories around the hall. The combined forces suggest an unstable interregnum, the soil that nurtures change — what Duke Ellington might call a “tone parallel” to an instinctive incredulity toward systems and individuals that comfortably countenance the devolution of the field of new music that has resulted from the consistent absences of the same ethnic, racial, and gendered voices from our stages, media, and music histories.

The title of this event (World Premiere at the 2021 Proms), "George Lewis and Beethoven,” recalls an earlier event at New York’s Lincoln Centre with exactly the same title, in which Born Obbligato, my 2013 response piece to the Septet, Op. 20, was premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble.  My title came from a letter from Beethoven to his publisher, announcing proudly that all seven instruments would be “tutti obligati.”  “Ich kann gar nichts unobligates schreiben," Beethoven wrote, „weil ich schon mit einem obligaten Akkompagnement auf die Welt gekommen bin.” A number of musicologists have interpreted this difficult-to-translate remark as a characterization of compositional procedure, but I have long felt that Beethoven was putting a deeper sense of personal identity in play. 

As the old verities of identify and consciousness fall away under an uncontainable pressure on our species to finally realize the best of what it means to be human, both societies and individuals are experiencing an intense flux of emotions, from joy to dread. Decolonisation is proving noisy, unpredictable, and conflictual, but as philosopher Arnold I. Davidson promises, "Multiplication of perspectives means multiplication of possibilities." In that light, I find myself using this notion of "tutti obligati" as a touchstone for this sonic meditation on what processes of decolonisation might sound like.

— George Lewis