George E. Lewis: Minds in Flux (2021)

George E. Lewis (*1952)
Minds in Flux, for symphonic orchestra and interactive electronics (2021)

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov, conductor

Damon Holzborn, computer software design/realisation
Sound Intermedia, sound realisation

World Première, 26 August 2021, BBC Proms '21


Minds in Flux, composed at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and completed in June 2021, 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 musical logics of Minds in Flux include new imaginings of sonic kinship, offering both unfamiliar and familiar sounds in new combinations.

The live electronics in this work deploy real (human) transformations of the sounds of the orchestral instruments, including digital delays, altered and augmented timbres and pitches, and spatialization across eight channels of sound. The result, following sociologist of science Andrew Pickering, is a sonic dance of agency in sound, in which the electronics both blend and contrast with the instrumental forces. Audiences are immersed in the intersection of real and virtual space, while the sounds of the instruments are transformed into recombinant doppelgängers that follow diverse spatial trajectories around and across the hall. 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.

The “German” seating of the orchestra, in which first violins and cellos are on one side of the stage and second violins and violas on the other, combines with the digital electronics to enact the production of space. Digitally mediated entities emerge from the orchestra to mutate into recombinant doppelgängers that follow diverse spatial trajectories around the hall. The combined forces suggest an unstable interregnum, the soil that nurtures change – what Duke Ellington might call a “tone parallel” to an instinctive incredulity toward systems and individuals that comfortably countenance the devolution of the field of new music that has resulted from the consistent absences of the same ethnic, racial, and gendered voices from our stages, media, and music histories.

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. Decolonization is proving noisy, unpredictable, and conflictual, but as philosopher Arnold I. Davidson promises: “Multiplication of perspectives means multiplication of possibilities.” This becomes a touchstone for my sonic meditation on what processes of decolonization might sound like.


Photo by Chris Chistodoulou

Full Score
https://cutt.ly/GEL_minds-in-flux

Composer Information
https://cutt.ly/george-e-lewis


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