George Lewis is one of the most formidable figures in modern music: a composer of international renown, a legendary improvising trombonist, a computer-music pioneer, a professor at Columbia, a stalwart of the Black avant-garde collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Yet a routine encomium to Lewis’s achievements and influence would ignore the import of his scholarly writings, which resist the usual narratives of individual genius. His 2008 book, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,” is a riveting portrait of communal originality, with the author assuming a background role. Let’s simply say, then, that this genially authoritative figure deserves an extended round of applause. At the age of seventy-one, he is at the height of his productivity; he had seven premières in 2023, in New York, Vienna, and points in between. In a December concert at the Park Avenue Armory, the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which Lewis is the artistic director, played his music on a double bill with a performance by the composer-pianist Amina Claudine Myers, another A.A.C.M. veteran. The ensemble has also recorded “Afterword,” Lewis’s first opera. His second, “Comet/Poppea,” arrives in June, in Los Angeles.
Denne historien er fra January 15, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.