International Contemporary Ensemble Releases AFTERWORD: AN OPERA IN TWO ACTS By George Lewis
Lewis's first opera, Afterword premiered in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and subsequently appeared in European and US venues.
By: A.A. Cristi Sep. 19, 2023
International Contemporary Ensemble releases Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts by George Lewis on Friday, October 6, 2023 on New Focus Recordings/TUNDRA. Lewis's first opera, Afterword premiered in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and subsequently appeared in European and US venues.
The opera was created in conjunction with the exhibition The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, as part of the 50th anniversary commemorations of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Chicago-born and now internationally acclaimed African American collective whose members have explored an unprecedentedly wide range of new and influential ideas in new music.
The opera takes its title from the concluding chapter of Lewis's history of the AACM, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008). In this chapter Lewis selects quotes from nearly one hundred interviews with AACM members that engage aesthetic, social, cultural, and political issues that the organization and its individual members have faced across the historical periods through which the collective's members have lived, an era marked by the Great Migration, the urbanization of American life, the civil rights struggle, and decolonization.
Lewis describes Afterword as “an opera of ideas, positionality, and testament…exploring history to reaffirm fundamentally human perspectives that mark not only the AACM, but also any social formation.” The opera presents the AACM not as a set of fixed characters and plot lines, but as an avatar for experimental Blackness itself. As the action unfolds, we witness young Black experimentalists interrogating issues of power, authority, identity, representation, culture, economics, politics, and aesthetics; self-fashioning and self-determination; personal, professional, and collective aspiration; and tradition, innovation, change, spiritual growth, death, and rebirth.
Act One begins with reminiscences of Black life in the Southern United States, from antebellum days to the early Great Migration and the first stirrings of the Black Power movement, which inspires the musicians to create a better future for themselves and their community through the interlocking powers of music and collective action. The founding meetings of the AACM, where the musicians realize that creativity itself could play a crucial role in fostering social, political, and cultural change, are portrayed in a scene drawn largely from audio recordings of AACM meetings from 1965 and 1966.
Act Two sees the AACM exploring the new individual and collective identities they have fashioned for themselves. Listeners can eavesdrop on history as it is being made in real, human time. In the wake of conflicts between tradition and innovation and the untimely passing of two AACM members, the musicians are invited to France as they turn toward an understanding that life is fleeting, mobility is power, and the world is open for them to explore.
George Lewis calls Afterword a Bildungsoper, a term derived from the Bildungsroman—a coming-of-age novel. Traditionally, Bildungsoper refers to the practice in opera for characters to realize themselves in the course of the story, as in Mozart's The Magic Flute. In an interview with musicologist Alexander K. Rothe, Lewis notes, “The organization comes of age, and the people do too. Their parents start out in Coon Town and the Great Migration. They go to Chicago and they live on the South Side and, you know, do stuff like hustling people for money and pickpocketing, living in these horrible places and doing what the migrants did to survive. Then they decide to do something to better their lives. They form an organization to better themselves. They go off to Paris and learn a lot there, they start to find out things about themselves and about the nature of the world.”
About George Lewis
George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and Area Chair in Composition, as well as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. 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, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Lewis's other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work is presented by ensembles worldwide, published by Edition Peters. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians. His widely read book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society's Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is the co-editor (with Benjamin Piekut) of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), and (with Harald Kisiedu) the bilingual edited volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College of Florida, and Birmingham City University, among others.
About Sean Griffin
For decades, Sean Griffin has been active in interdisciplinary contemporary music, bridging performance and art communities of Los Angeles, Chicago and abroad. Griffin has composed, directed, conducted and produced new intermedia works, bringing to life dazzling, unique interpretations to the stage and gallery with his opera design and performance consortium called Opera Povera, with which he has created new works with George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, Charles Gaines, Ron Athey, Catherine Sullivan, and others. Often characterized by rigorous rhythmic scores and choreographies mixed with improvisation, Griffin's operas navigate interactions between contemporary music performers, performance artists, dancers, vocalists, actors and sculptural sets through uncharted interdisciplinary forms. As a director, Griffin has established a distinctive form of physically-based, interdisciplinary operatic theater, creating large-scale works that integrate choreography, archives, public outreach, interactive media and his distinctive vocal method, Full Body Singing. These new forms of opera include archival, algorithmic, ritual and gallery-based events that engage the public in new kinds of performing arts experiences. In 2020, during Covid lockdown, Opera Povera created a version of Pauline Oliveros's Lunar Opera called Full Pink Moon, a participant's opera that featured over 270 international performers connected through Zoom. Described as the first Zoom opera, Full Pink Moon was acknowledged and archived by the Library of Congress. Griffin's critically acclaimed productions, recordings, live performances, installations, operas and stage designs have been featured at EMPAC, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, RedCat, LACMA, 56th Venice Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Ostrava Days Festival, Ojai Festival, The Broad Museum, and Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series. Griffin is an award-winning and prolific visual artist, exhibiting his drawings and graphic scores in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. He holds a PhD in music composition from the University of California, San Diego.
About Catherine Sullivan
Born in Los Angeles (1968) and based in Chicago, Catherine Sullivan works in film, theater and installation. The ensembles she works with are her true medium, and her highly collaborative productions are often concerned with aesthetic behaviors in historically conditioned contexts. Solo exhibitions include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metro Pictures, New York and Tate Modern, London, and she has also participated in the Lyon, Whitney, Moscow and Gwang Ju biennials. Screenings include the Berlin International Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam and theater works have been staged at venues including Opéra de Lyon; Volksbühne, Berlin; Cricoteka, Krakow and Trap Door Theatre, Chicago. Her work is held in public and private collections including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Castello di Rivoli, Turin and Sammlung Goetz, Munich. Awards include a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin residency, a United States Artists Walker Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a BFA in Acting from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design. She is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
About David Fulmer
Winner of the 2019 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, David Fulmer has garnered numerous international accolades for his bold compositional aesthetic combined with his thrilling performances. A Guggenheim Fellow, and a leader in his generation of composer-performers, the success of his Violin Concerto at Lincoln Center in 2010 earned international attention and resulted in immediate engagement to perform the work with major orchestras and at festivals in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and Australia. A surge of recent and upcoming commissions include new works for the New York Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, BMI Foundation, Concert Artists Guild, Washington Performing Arts, Kennedy Center, Fromm Music Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, and Tanglewood. As conductor, Fulmer recently led the Ensemble Intercontemporain, NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Elision Ensemble, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble. His work has been recorded by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the New York Philharmonic. He has appeared regularly on the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Live from Lincoln Center broadcasts. He graduated from The Juilliard School.
About Joelle Lamarre
American soprano Joelle Lamarre is an in-demand performer of new works by today's living composers. Notable recent performances include George Lewis's experimental opera Afterword the Chicago premiere of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking; working with multi-disciplinary artist Sean Griffin in Charles Gaines's Manifestos 2, a score based on Malcolm X's last public speech made in 1965 in Detroit's Ford Auditorium; the South Shore Opera of Chicago's production of Nkeiru Okoye's Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom; the Lyric Opera Unlimited's comedic opera, Factotum, by Liverman DJ Rico & Maharaj; the Lyric Opera of Chicago's performance of Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones; Chicago Opera Theater's world premiere of Errolyn Wallen's Quamino's Map; and Long Beach Opera's production and recording of Anthony Davis's Pulitzer Prize–winning opera The Central Park Five. A 3Arts Make a Wave grant recipient, Lamarre performs across genres in theater, musical theater, and opera, and seeks to push boundaries as a librettist, poet, and artistic advisor. She is the creator of the one-act play The Violet Hour, which explores the life and career of American soprano Leontyne Price, as well as her own EP The Other American.
About Julian Terrell Otis
Multidisciplinary artist, creative vocalist and composer Julian Terrell Otis progressively pushes positive energy into his interests in experimental music, movement, and theater making. As a vocalist he has collaborated with Nicole Mitchell, VijayIyer, Renée Baker, Dougla R. Ewart, Sean Griffin, Angel Bat Dawid, Isaiah Collier, Asher Gamedze, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, and Chicago Sinfonietta among others. Julius Eastman's vocal music has been of particular interest to him, with multiple performances of Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D'Arc performed nationally. Otis's own explorations involve a melding of fact and fable to piece together new recollections/imaginings of personal narrative, word games, sense and nonsense utterances, digital layering and looping. This storytelling ritual has culminated in a musical release of All the Pretty Flowers on the Chicago Improvised Music label, and a recent Creative Capital award has allowed him to expand on this through his project, Resolved: Critiquing Contemporary Music Through Improvised Performance.
About Gwendolyn Brown
Contralto Gwendolyn Brown's extraordinary versatility in operatic performances in traditional, 20th century, American Art Song, Negro Spiritual, and avant-garde settings has earned her many superlatives: “...astonishing range and timbre, a stern voice of certainty” (Huddersfield Examiner); “a transfixing force of nature” (Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times); “an overwhelming power” (Tageszeitung, Berlin). Ms. Brown's performances in George Lewis' opera Afterword (2015) and his monodrama Song of The Shank (2023) with the Ensemble Modern were met with critical acclaim, as well as her creation of the lead role of Marie Laveau in Anne LeBaron's Crescent City (2012) for Los Angeles' The Industry. Ms. Brown has performed with opera companies and orchestras throughout the United States and overseas, and has been lauded for her interpretation of such character roles as the Principessa in Suor Angelica, Zita in Gianni Schicchi, Erda in Das Rheingold, and her signature role of Maria in Porgy and Bess. Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, Ms. Brown studied music at the University of Memphis, the American Conservatory of Music, and Fisk University, where she is now Assistant Professor of Music. She participated in the young artist programs of Des Moines Metro Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago Center for American Artists.
About International Contemporary Ensemble
With a commitment to cultivating a more curious and engaged society through music, the International Contemporary Ensemble – as a commissioner and performer at the highest level – amplifies creators whose work propels and challenges how music is made and experienced. The Ensemble's 39 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble's programming since its founding in 2001, and the group's recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music's present.
Acclaimed as “America's foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), the Ensemble has become a leading force in new music throughout the last 20 years, having premiered over 1,000 works and having been a vehicle for the workshop and performance of thousands of works by student composers across the U.S. The Ensemble's composer-collaborators—many who were unknown at the time of their first Ensemble collaboration—have fundamentally shaped its creative ethos and have continued to highly visible and influential careers, including MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey; long-time Ensemble collaborator, founding member, and 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winner Du Yun; and the Ensemble's founder, 2012 MacArthur Fellow, and first-ever flutist to win Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Prize, Claire Chase.
A recipient of the American Music Center's Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the International Contemporary Ensemble was also named Musical America's Ensemble of the Year in 2014. The group has served as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival (2008-2020), Ojai Music Festival (2015-17), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010-2015). In addition, the Ensemble has presented and performed at festivals in the U.S. such as Big Ears Festival and Opera Omaha's ONE Festival, as well as abroad, including GMEM-Centre National de Création Musicale (CNCM) de Marseille, Vértice at Cultura UNAM, Warsaw Autumn, International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, and Cité de la Musique in Paris. Other performance stages have included the Park Avenue Armory, ice floes at Greenland's Diskotek Sessions, Brooklyn warehouses, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and boats on the Amazon River.
The International Contemporary Ensemble advances music technology and digital communications as an empowering tool for artists from all backgrounds. Digitice provides high-quality video documentation for artist-collaborators and provides access to an in-depth archive of composers' workshops and performances. The Ensemble regularly engages new listeners through free concerts and interactive, educational programming with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Curricular activities include a partnership at The New School's College of Performing Arts (CoPA), along with a summer intensive program, called Ensemble Evolution, where topics of equity, diversity, and inclusion build new bridges and pathways for the future of creative sound practices. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the Ensemble. Read more at www.iceorg.org and watch over 350 videos of live performances and documentaries at www.digitice.org.
The International Contemporary Ensemble's performances and commissioning activities during the 2023-24 concert season are made possible by the generous support of the Ensemble's board, many individuals, as well as the Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Aaron Copland Fund for Music Inc., Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts, The Cheswatyr Foundation, Amphion Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New Music USA's Organizational Development Fund, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, BMI Foundation, as well as public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) from the U.S. Small Business Administration. The International Contemporary Ensemble was the Ensemble in Residence of the Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology from 2018-2021. Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for the International Contemporary Ensemble.
New Focus Recordings
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed around the production of the first five albums in the catalog. Many of the subsequent releases within those first years involved artists who also continue to be heard on recordings on the label in recent years - featured members of the International Contemporary Ensemble including pianist Jacob Greenberg, flutist Claire Chase, cellist Kivie-Cahn Lipman, soprano Tony Arnold, composer/percussionist Nathan Davis, clarinetist Joshua Rubin, composer/performer Du Yun, composer Dai Fujikura, composer/pianist Phyllis Chen, alongside others in the ICE community, and members of new music quartet Flexible Music, pianist Eric Huebner, percussionist Haruka Fujii, and saxophonist Tim Ruedeman, along with several of the group's associated composer and performer colleagues, notably John Link, Steve Ricks, Jeff Irving, David Laganella, Adam Silverman, Antares, Orianna Webb, Vineet Shende, Van Stiefel, Erin Lesser, and Mikel Kuehn, who released recordings or appeared as guests on others. In the first several years of New Focus, these musicians shared their artistry in fantastic recordings which shaped the direction of the New Focus catalog and helped to lay the foundation for the label.
Afterward, An Opera in Two Acts Tracklist
DISC 1 - ACT ONE
1. Prologue to Scene 1 [1:08]
2. Scene 1: Down South [11:55]
3. Prologue to Scene 2 [0:31]
4. Scene 2: In Chicago [8:56]
5. Scene 3: The Cemetery [7:23]
6. Prologue to Scene 4 [2:20]
7. Scene 4: First Meeting [12:49]
8. Prologue to Scene 5 [0:53]
9. Scene 5: Naming [3:06]
Total: 49:01
DISC 2 - ACT TWO
1. Improvisation: Remembrances [4:10]
2. Scene 6: Ariae [9:53]
3. Scene 7:The Split [10:31]
4. Scene 8: Death [8:42]
5. Scene 9: Departure [4:29]
6. Scene 10: Paris [9:34]
7. Interlude [5:23]
8. Scene 11: Afterword [16:30]
Total: 69:12
George Lewis, composer and librettist
Joelle Lamarre, soprano
Gwendolyn Brown, contralto
Julian Terrell Otis, tenor
Sean Griffin and Catherine Sullivan, directors
Otis Harris, Zachary Nicol, Ninah Snipes, actor-movers
INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLE
David Fulmer, conductor
Joshua Modney, violin
Michael Nicolas, cello
Brandon George, flutes
Joshua Rubin, clarinets
David Byrd-Marrow, horn
Cory Smythe, piano
Ross Karre, percussion
Levy Lorenzo, audio engineering
With cameo vocal appearances by Ann E. Ward, Douglas R. Ewart, Discopoet Khari B., Coco Elysses, Zachary Nicol, Ninah Snipes, and Otis Harris.
Recorded live, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, October 16 and 17, 2015
Recording Engineer: Levy Lorenzo
Mixing, editing: Ryan Streber, Jacob Greenberg
Mastering: Ryan Streber, oktavenaudio.com
For the International Contemporary Ensemble:
Jenni Bowman, Executive Producer
Jacob Greenberg, Director of Recordings
Design and layout: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Cover photo by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
Stage photos: Nathan Keay and Sean Griffin
George Lewis photo by Maurice Weiss
David Fulmer © Sonja Georgevich; Joelle Lamarre © Teresa Dalbéra
Julian Terrell Otis © Elias Rios; Gwendolyn Brown © Devon Cass
Synopses: George Lewis
Publisher: Edition Peters
All compositions © 2023 C.F. Peters Corporation, BMI
This recording was funded in part by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., and with the support of the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music, Columbia University
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