George E. Lewis

Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager

The author discusses his computer music composition, Voyager, which employs a computer-driven, interactive & virtual improvising orchestra that analyzes an improvisors performance in real time, generating both complex responses to the musicians playing and independent behavior arising from the programs own internal processes. The author contends that notions about the nature and function of music are embedded in the structure of software-based music systems and that interactions with these systems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought and culture that produced them. Thus, Voyager is considered as a kind of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices.

Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives

Since the early 1950s, controversy over the nature and function of improvisation in musical expression has occupied considerable attention among improvisers, composers, performers, and theorists active in that sociomusical art world that has constructed itself in terms of an assumed high-culture bond between selected sectors of the European and American musical landscapes. Prior to 1950, the work of many composers operating in this art world tended to be completely notated, using a well-known, European-derived system. After 1950, composers began to experiment with open forms and with more personally expressive systems of notation. Moreover, these composers began to designate salient aspects of a composition as performer-supplied rather than composer-specified, thereby renewing an interest in the generation of musical structure in real time as a formal aspect of a composed work. After a gap of nearly one hundred and fifty years, during which real-time generation of musical structure had been nearly eliminated from the musical activity of this Western or pan-European tradition, the postwar putative heirs to this tradition have promulgated renewed investigation of real-time forms of musicality, including a direct confrontation with the role of improvisation. This ongoing reappraisal of improvisation may be due in no small measure to musical and social events taking place in quite a different sector of the overall musical landscape. In particular, the anointing, since the early 1950s, of various forms of jazz, the African-American musical constellation most commonly associated with the exploration of improvisation in both Europe and America, as a form of art has in all likelihood been a salient stimulating factor in this reevaluation of the possibilities of improvisation. Already active in the 1940s, a group of radical young black American improvisers, for the most part lacking access to economic and political resources often taken for granted in high-culture musical circles, nonetheless posed potent challenges to Western notions of structure, form, communication, and expression. These improvisers, while cognizant of Western musical tradition, located and centered their modes of musical expression within a stream emanating largely from African and African-American cultural and social history. The international influence and dissemination of their music, dubbed bebop, as well as the strong influences coming from later forms of jazz, has resulted in the emergence of new sites for transnational, transcultural improvisative musical activity. In particular, a strong circumstantial case can be made for the proposition that the emergence of these new, vigorous, and highly influential improvisative forms provided an impetus for musical workers in other traditions, particularly European and American composers active in the construction of a transnational European-based tradition, to come to grips with some of the implications of musical improvisation. This confrontation, however, took place amid an ongoing narrative of dismissal, on the part of many of these composers, of the tenets of African-American improvisative forms. Moreover, texts documenting the musical products of the American version of the move to incorporate real-time music-making into composition often present this activity as a part of American music since 1945, a construct almost invariably theorized as emanating almost exclusively from a generally venerated stream of European cultural, social, and intellectual history--the Western tradition. In such texts, an attempted erasure or denial of the impact of African-American forms on the real-time work of European and Euro-American composers is commonly asserted. This denial itself, however, drew the outlines of a space where improvisation as a theoretical construct could clearly be viewed as a site not only for music-theoretical contention but for social and cultural competition between musicians representing improvisative and compositional modes of musical discourse. …

Interacting with latter-day musical automata

The idea of music that somehow plays itself, or emerges from a nonhuman intelligence, is a common, transculturally present theme in folklore, science, and art. Over the centuries, this notion has been expressed through the development of various technological means. This paper explores aspects of my ongoing encounter with computers in improvised music, as exemplified by my most recent interactive computer music compositions. These works involve extensive interaction between improvising musicians and computer music-creating programs at the performance (“real-time”) level. In both theory and practice, this means that both human musicians and computer programs play central organizing and structuring roles in any performance of these works. This paper seeks to explore aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and social implications of this work. In addition, the nature and practice of improvisation itself will be explored, since an understanding of this ubiquitous musical activity is essential to establishing the c...

Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970-1985

new ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and inxad strumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of imxad provisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures.! In a 1973 article, two early AACM members, trumpeter John Shenoy Jackson and co-founder and pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, asxad serted that, The AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies (Abrams and Jackson 1973:72). This optimistic declaration, based on noxad tions of self-help as fundamental to racial uplift, cultural preservation, and spiritual rebirth, was in accord with many other challenges to traditional notions of order and authority that emerged in the wake of the Black Power Movement. The AACMs goals of individual and collective self-production and proxad motion challenged racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure, serving as an example to other artists in rethinking the artist/business rexad lationship. A number of organizations in which Mrican American musixad cians took leadership roles, including the early-twentieth-century Clef Club, the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, the Collective Black Artists, and the Los Angeles-based Union of Gods Musicians and Artists Ascension, or Underground Musicians Association (UGMAA/UGMA), preceded the AACM in attempting to pursue these self-help strategies. The AACM, howxad ever, has become the most well-known and influential of the post-1960 organizations, and is still active almost forty years later. 2 The Art Ensemble of Chicago (AEC), which emerged from the AACM and has been active in one form or another from 1969 to the present, is one of the groups that most radically exemplifies AACM-style collectivity, or in the words of Samuel Floyd, individuality within the aggregate (Floyd Current Musicology, nos. 71-73 (Spring 200l-Spring 2002)

Mobilitas Animi: Improvising Technologies, Intending Chance

If he is not at once improvising and improvising warily, he is not engaging his somewhat trained wits in some momentarily live issue, but perhaps acting from sheer unthinking habit. So thinking, I now declare quite generally, is, at the least, the engaging of partly trained wits in a partly fresh situation. It is the pitting of an acquired competence or skill against an unprogrammed opportunity, obstacle or hazard. It is a bit like putting new wine into some old bottles. Gilbert Ryle, ‘Improvisation’.

Foreword: After Afrofuturism

Welcome to our special issue on Technology and Black Music in the Americas. As guest editor, Id like to offer my personal thanks to all of our contributors, who are exploring relatively uncharted currents in the overall flow of black music technology. Id also like to thank JSAM editor Ellie M. Hisama and assistant editor Benjamin Piekut for their tireless efforts, as well as their extraordinary abilities as editors to navigate quickly between leaf- and forest-level views.

The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z

Pamela Z is an American composer-performer and audio artist whose use of extended vocal technique and live, body-controlled electronic processing takes place in events ranging in scale from solo events in galleries to large-scale works that combine video, audio, and live musicians, singers, and actors. Her work raises important issues regarding transnationalism, Afrodiasporicism, and identity; acoustic ecologies; the articulation of race and ethnicity; and the place of women in technological media. The essay discusses several of Zs works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, in articulation with cybertheory; the aesthetics of popular and avant-garde music, voice, language, and poetics; intermedia and performance art; and contemporary technological practices.

Purposive Patterning: Jeff Donaldson, Muhal Richard Abrams, and the Multidominance of Consciousness

Journal of Contemporary African Art 120•Nka T he painter Jeff Donaldson and the composer Muhal Richard Abrams have been associated since the mid-1960s, when both artists, then based in Chicago, took part in meetings of the Coalition of Black Revolutionary Artists (COBRA). Like many twentieth-century African American visual artists, Donaldson has always maintained that musical images have had amajor impact on his art. In turn, Abrams not only studied art, but also is a painter himself, and has encouraged other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), such as Roscoe Mitchell, to take up the brush as well. As with Richard Powell’s characterization of Donaldson’s 1977 painting Victory in Zimbabwe, one aspect of Abrams’s work may be viewed as having as its subject “black diasporal rhythm: a visual, oral, and performative factor,” where “black cultural subjectivity in art moves beyond a depicted black icon (or illustrative polemic) and, instead, becomes a design, word, [and] attitude.”1 In recognizing the importance to the African American expressive arts of integrating “design, word, act, and attitude,” I wish to advance a comparative, historically grounded interart analysis, focusing on a 1988 visual work by Donaldson, JamPact/JelliTite (for Jamila), and a 1980 unpublished, apparently completely improvised duo by Abrams and tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, an original member of the AACM. Beneath the shared surface of pattern, reading each work in terms of the other shows a wide range of possible links between timebased and space-based art. I want to illustrate not only formal convergence between visual art and music but parametric, phenomenological, and methodological links, as well as the convergence between sociocultural forms and formal principles that undergird both visuals and sound. Purposive Patterning Jeff Donaldson Muhal Richard Abrams and the Multidominance of Consciousness

Collaborative Improvisation as Critical Pedagogy

From “Black Collectivities: A Conference,” held May 3–4, 2013, at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator. This article discusses the work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) as an example of how collaboratives created by cultural practitioners of African descent have promulgated new perceptions, understandings, and forms of practice. From the context of experimental music, the article explores improvisation, concepts of phantasm and metaphor, and philosophical accounts of intentionality, social interaction, pedagogical listening, and ethics. It also describes the AACM as exemplifying a broader move by artist collectives from competition-based models of art making to more collaborative notions pursued in many segments of the African American community in ways that reflected and enacted larger societal institutional and political conceptions.Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, music school class, ca. 1968. Photo: Leonard E. Jones

IN SEARCH OF BENJAMIN PATTERSON An Improvised Journey

I wish I knew Ben Patterson. In a way, I’ve been searching for him all my life, even though he was always and already there. I’ll explain that in a moment, but I should say at the outset that the work being performed by this article somewhat exceeds my original intent to examine Patterson’s work in terms of contemporary ideas about improvisation. There’s a long tradition in jazz of referring to musicians by their first names, shortened first names, or nicknames. Insiders—musicians and listeners but not necessarily the general public—refer confidently to Miles and Duke and Hawk and Bud and Trane. Although Ben Patterson’s life and work did not have much to do with jazz, at least according to the standard portrayals, Fluxus narratives also asserted first-name familiarity with alacrity. The stories always seemed to invite you to imagine (or wish) that you yourself had been on the Fluxus scene. There was another Ben—Ben Vautier—whose e-mail listserv I was on for years. I have no idea who put me on his list, but as a longtime denizen of several experimental music scenes, I enjoyed being able, on an irregular basis, to keep up with the doings of George and Shigeko and Emmett and Alison and so on. These e-mails presented lots of stories, more than a few complaints, and a strong, celebratory sense of community. So many Fluxnarratives—like the narratives of its predecessor movement, the Beats—trade on the familiar: personal stories and histories, sometimes with a point or edge, sometimes not. During my early years in New York, the mid-1970s, I would sit placidly—by turns mystified, fascinated, nonplussed, and here and there a bit bored—as older artists who knew the principal players in the drama—or, as I found out later, were players themselves—told Fluxus stories that never made the books but that “everyone” somehow knew. I was flattered to be there since I’m considerably younger than the Fluxus originators, and I don’t think they’re taking on new members—or rather, we want our own clubs and our own names anyway. George Maciunas’s 1967 mapping of Fluxus and its relationship to the avant-garde presented the exoskeleton of a socio-artistic network concerned with the production of knowledge—oral, written, graphic—about itself.1 This epistemologically centered identityformation project is central to many art movements, but the degree to which Fluxus publicly