During my intro for the Summer Listening Project this year, I mentioned that this was a personal journey of exploration - an opportunity to seek out answers to questions I had about my compositional process by looking at the work of other composers. Every printed score is a master class, each recording - a private lesson, every performance - an intimate communion.

Improvisation remains a topic of great interest for me. As a listener, it can thrill as when a technically masterful guitarist lets loose with a pyrotechnic solo, and it can induce a blissful trance as when a jazz soloist stops time and lingers in a harmonic exploration of melodic potentialities. As a performer, improvisation can be frustrating if you worry about being open and vulnerable with an audience. It requires having something to say at a specific moment in time, like being able to have the perfect story ready to go at a cocktail party or just the right witty anecdote during an interview. Listeners are expecting profundity, or at least something worthy of their attention. As a composer, it is the ocean of material one casts a line into with the hope of reeling in your next meal. But, it can also be a philosophical approach incorporated into the thing itself at various stages for various purposes. 

George Lewis combines his experiences as an improvisational jazz trombonist and his interests in artificial intelligence into a unique compositional approach. His music explores what it means for a mind to improvise musical material within a given space and time and how those improvisations affect listeners and performers. The act of improvisation is placed in different locations in his process, depending on the goal for each piece. Sometimes it is a very prominent and focal ingredient. Other times, it is a hidden process. Still, it's usually there, somewhere, either in the performance requirements of a human participant or in the processing of a human's musical expressions by an algorithm. Sometimes human and algorithmic performers improvise with each other in real-time performance. 

George Lewis (b.1952), Minds in Flux (2021)

Minds in Flux is a work for full symphonic orchestra and interactive electronics. With that setting, one could assume that the "Minds" of the title refers to the interaction of human and artificial intelligence, and to some degree, it is. However, the work's overall theme deals with what Lewis describes as "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.

As the old verities of identity 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

During the work’s approximately 28 minutes, Lewis employs multiple musical gestures and sets them against each other with exquisite contrapuntal craftsmanship, a technique composers have been using for thousands of years. Complex rhythmic ostinatos coexist with alternating glissandos, stacked harmonies crescendo in and out of dynamic range, and extended passages of textural phrases build to a climax and fade into nothingness. There are moments of respite, but they never last very long. Another dialogue between contrasting orchestral voices is just around the corner. Constant change is a feature, not a bug.

Improvisation is present in both the electronic aspects and the human performers’ notated music. Electronically,

16 instruments from the orchestra – flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, 1st and 2nd violin, viola, cello, bass, harp, piano, and two percussionists – are closely miked. Their sounds are sent to a software platform written by Damon Holzborn.

The software can do some combination of the following:

Change the sound of the instruments—transpose passages up or down, play them backwards, play multiple, delayed copies of passages, make the sounds rougher or more “electronic.” A bassoon can become a contra-contrabassoon, a single flute can become a flock of birds, etc;

Spatialize the instrumental sounds, causing them to move around the hall following various trajectories: circle, square, side-to-side, up and back, diagonal, even jumping around.

Within the score are instructions for various instruments to “make air sounds, growls, or other productions of indefinite pitch.” Multiphonics, an extended technique whereby a wind instrument performer plays a pitch while humming a different one, is used throughout. Box notation is utilized when a pattern is established for a given timeframe and then repeated with variation left up to the performer. Slap tonguing, a process whereby a wind performer articulates in a percussive manner with indeterminate pitch, is also used. 

Each instrument can have its own set of timbres and trajectories. Some passages in the work do not use electronics.

My task as composer is to use the software as a tool to compose sounds and trajectories and use them as musical material, part of the orchestration of the piece. I’ve previously likened this process to a kind of choreography, what Andrew Pickering calls “dances of agency.”

The effect is to place the orchestra inside the orchestra, by expanding beyond the stage so that the sounds of the instruments can come from anywhere. Another intent is to blend the orchestra with the electronics to create hybrids.

Minds in Flux uses human and computer-based improvisation to represent our current moment. Your experience with it will be determined partially by how comfortable you are being in the center of our shared existence in the malestrom. 

To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one's own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.—Marshall Berman, from All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

This history is not your fault. But, it is your responsibility. —Nikki Sanchez, from Decolonization is for Everyone.

Thanks for following along this summer.