About the Piece

This piece 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 single obsessive motif that dominates the arrangement constitutes what Duke Ellington might call a "tone parallel" to Amiri Baraka's influential 1966 essay, "The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)," which argues for a transhistorical essence of Afrodiasporic musical creativity.  While I am suspicious of essentialisms, the George Floyd murder and the copycat responses by law enforcement that immediately followed the perpetrator’s conviction fueled a certain Afro-pessimism regarding the possibility of real change in America.  This wariness is reflected in the piece, which converts the melody of "America, The Beautiful" into a kind of Schenkerian Ursatz; some notes are missing, but they can be redeemed when the country proves itself worthy of their return.

About George Lewis

George E. Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians since 1971, Lewis’s compositions (including the widely influential interactive improvisation software, Voyager), have been performed by ensembles worldwide, and he holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University.  Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies.