Improvisation as Birthright: An Interview with George Lewis

Hello,

and welcome to the latest

installment of the University of

Pittsburgh Humanities podcast.

A series devoted to

exploring the humanities, their

intersections with other

disciplines, and their value in the

public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

My guest today is George Lewis, a

groundbreaking trombonist, and

composer, as well as the Edwin

H. Case Professor of American Music

at Columbia University.

If there's one idea or practice that

has been with George Lewis the

longest, it's improvisation.

His career as a musician has been

closely tied to the Association for

the Advancement of Creative

Musicians, a group founded in

Chicago in 1965 to nurture

creative and experimental music.

Lewis is also well known for his

work with computers and electronic

music, including his software

Voyager, which listens to and

improvises with human performers.

Here's an example from that work

entitled Voyager Duo Four.

George Lewis is on the trombone.

Roscoe Mitchell is on the sax.

[music]

To

George Lewis, improvisation is more

than just the absence of a pre-set

musical plan and even more than

just a style of musical performance.

As he makes clear when he talks of

improvisation as a birthright,

Lewis regards improvisation as a

basic condition of human existence.

One with enormous untapped

potential in music, politics,

and all areas of social life on

earth.

Here's another example of his work

Homage to Charles Parker from the

album of the same name released in

1979.

[music]

Since the 1990s, George Lewis

has also achieved success as a

scholar, notably with his 2008

book, A Power Stronger Than Itself:

The AACM and American

Experimental Music, which won

an American Book Award in 2009.

In 1996, he published an important

essay titled Improvised Music After

1950.

Lewis wrote the essay in part to

demonstrate the value that musicians

outside a Eurocentric tradition had

made to the history of experimental

music in the 20th century.

In 2004, he wrote a follow-up

in which he argued that the gap

between Eurocentric and African

American musical traditions had

grown even wider.

I began our conversation by asking

about his thoughts on this topic now

12 years later.

I claim many

different traditions or a number

that as being central to

my identity as

a scholar [inaudible] person on the planet. So

in that sense, I don't want to see

these traditions and forms and

practices become

mired in meaningless

navel-gazing or become sidetracked

or to

spurious modes of thinking about

race or class or gender.

I want these communities, these

creative and

academic scholar communities, to thrive and to move

forward in progressive ways.

So my fear

was that the constructions

of musical experimentalism that were

on

offer from 96 and began in 2004 when

change was coming. We're

still looking at a relatively

narrow subset

of what

musical experimentalism was, and

what it actually was, and what it

could be.

So imposing an

alternate model for musical experimentalism

one of which in fact was actually

known to both the practitioners

and the scholars,

but which for some reason had

been kind of deemphasized or

otherwise pushed to the side.

I wanted to bring those people

from the margins back to the center.

And also, in a way, it was like a

historiographical intervention

with that piece.

So it's not that it's

a question of making progress

on that. It's

more of a question of saying that

what I've seen lately

is that I've seen a new group of

scholars take

out on those challenges

and reformulate

its structure of experimentalism

with people like Benjamin Piekut,

Ron [inaudible], Jason [inaudible]. Maybe those are

people I've worked with

in the academic environment, but

there are others as well.

So what they've done

is they really started to become

game changers in looking

at experimentalism more

as a social

construction, as a

historiological network that

constructs knowledge about itself,

about the world, and really

sort of comes together to construct

what really counts as knowledge as

well.

It's so recursive in that way.

So

what's happening with that

is that we start to see

many experimental conditions well

beyond a book like Ben Piekut's edited volume Tomorrow Is the Question.

There are things in there about-- there's a piece in there about the

Group Ongaku in Japan.

There's the Grupo de Experimentacion in Cuba. There's action in

Indonesia.

There are many different

experimental traditions

[inaudible]. And in fact, they were

never as separate as it was

supposed. But it seems that we need

another generation historians

coped with stories to point that

out.

Yeah.

One of the other things, along with

improvisation, one of the other kind

of big things I wanted to talk to

you about, and you mentioned it a

little bit already, is your work

with electronics and computers

and things like that.

I think, if I have this right, you

started-- was it the late seventies

was the first time that you started

working with electronics and...?

You know, I'd say 78 was my

first exposure to it.

Okay.

I mean to the computer.

Now,

exposure to electronics that was

much earlier because

Muhal Richard Abrams was always

a big-- had a strong interest in electronics. And

most

of his albums over the course

of his entire career included at

least one electronic piece,

including the very first which, one

side of the LP was actually an electronic piece.

It's not something that he's well

known for, though, even though

that's a persistent kind of--

Well, that's the problem with certain writings of history. And we've

already talked about that. [laughter]

[laughter] Yeah, right.

So you finished college

in 1974 at Yale and then

recorded a number of trombone

albums. But then once you started to

get interested in computers, you've

come into that-- that actually made

the trombone, you said, superfluous

for you.

I was interested in that.

Did I say superfluous? Maybe I was being provocative.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Can you talk a little bit about that

kind of something that you were

interested in? It seemed like what

you were saying was that you were

interested in a broader set

of issues than just playing the

trombone. If that's a less

provocative way to put it.

I'm not sure.

Well, I

see a number of artists

engaged in the pursuit

or practice of mobility.

My role model is someone

like

Stan Douglas.

Canadian, started out as a video artist, then

becoming a film artist.

Then now, he's writing plays, he's making

installations, he's

trying to get an opera going. So someone like

this--

this is not unknown

with artists. You got people that

are a printmaker and a sculptor and making installations and paints and

draws

and creates videos.

But for some reason,

in certain segments of the musical world, one is expected to channel all

of one's creative energy into one place, and I just can't do that.

Because I've had all these other role models that are doing things more

like what I liked to do..

Yeah.

I mean, it always seemed, to me,

when I've read you talking about

that and then also when I've read

you talking about Voyager too, these

seem like things that allow you-- I

mean, and you've talked about

Voyager this way, too.

That's something that allows

you and, you hope, your listeners

to reflect on musicality.

Oh yeah.

You're not interested in them at

just as tools or computers,

but as something that allows you to

think and be self-reflexive about

what you're doing when you're

creating music and what other humans

are doing when they're creating

music.

The Voyager software is a tool, but

it's not a tool for performing.

Because you can't do performing on

it.

You can't play a live instrument.

When you turn it on, it does what it likes.

[crosstalk]. It's going to listen to you, but, I mean, you can't control

it. So all you can really do is

turn it on and off.

And between those intervals, what

it becomes a tool for is the

question on where human

musical creativity

comes from and how it becomes

communicated in the

act of performance.

And once that happened, you start to

think about

how other modes of creativity that

cannot necessarily.

Musical and artistic also become

communicated

in the interaction with the requirement with other human beings. So

Voyager,

it turns out, was really

not about how you

do cool things with computers, but

it's really about how people do cool

things. Actually having the computer

there interacting

in the same space creates a kind of ironic commentary. A brilliant

commentary on the listeners

and the performers' sense of themselves and their identity. And

suddenly they often forget that

there was a computer performing

and they discuss kind of what they

would do anyway in music, which is

to concentrate on the environment.

Now, I've been

doing this work for a long time.

The first piece was 1976.

This is 2016, so I've been doing it for a while. It's been through a lot

of phases, and with the early

work, I would bring people in and

ask them,

"Play with this thing

and tell me what you think." And they would

say things. It was a like a little ethnography.

They would say things. "Well, it's not music

to me, and I can't get a connection with it."

They didn't say things I don't like about what this-- They

really talked about how

they felt interactionally. So

a lot of the effort

was geared toward making the

computer be able to operate in a

space where

it

would draw attention to itself by

not constructed computerness, but

by-- it, would sort of recede

into the background and

its musicality would be what

would attract attention rather than "Oh I'm

playing with a machine now,

isn't that cool or isn't that awful."

It

took me a long time to get there.

And it turns out part of the issue

is the early ones didn't play as

well as the newer ones do. And

I learned more about

music [inaudible] other theories of music

because the

program-- what it performs is a

reflection

the community of ideas about creativity and music

from which the program came.

So in a way, Voyager is a reflection

of the larger experimental ethos

about music-making.

Yeah.

I'll say for me when I listen to it

certainly, it was true, for me, what

you were mentioning that people

forget it's a computer.

I listened for it at first knowing

that, and then, just as you said, it

receded. And I began to listen to it

just as kind of as an environment

rather than as a computer.

Well, it goes back aways. I mean, you can think about models of

liveness.

For example, the old live vs.

recorded concerts

thing that Edgar Villchur, the AR, or Acoustic Research founder, did.

But they would take

a string quartet and put it on.

And then they'd take the speakers,

and they'd play a recording

of the string quartet. And after a while, which one can you tell? It's

kind of like that.

This is more that

you have-- especially with pianos

now. A

lot of people

can't really tell which ones do we

want. And it's not that important.

It's only

important at the point when people

past reflect

on why

the sound of the computer invited

empathy, for example.

Or invited reflection or

investigation of

its creative

path or justification of the

decisions that have been made.

Or how it was establishing

itself, how the parties to the

improvisation establish

themselves and their musicians.

So they use improvisation that

comes in musicality. A question of position-taking, negotiation,

perspective,

agency, intensity, trust.

So these things actually come

from the

work of the computers. They're theories that

arise or observations that arise out of doing work with computers.

And comparing that

in a way with the work

that's done without the computer,

with musicians.

So it's the old thing where you say,

"Oh, music is like life." Whatever.

It's not like, "Oh, life is like music." There's a directionality to the

conversation

so we can learn about music

through looking at

examples from everyday life, or you can hear about it in real life, or

you can hear music samples of how sociality is being formed in sound.

Yeah. Well, that was one of the

things-- I mean, I remember reading

in your work at one point written in

the late nineties, you were writing

about a kind of improvisation as it

exists even in the Chicago

Bulls offense and things like that.

And finding different places where--

Oh yeah the triangle offense. [laughter].

That's right.

I liked that.

[laughter] And how they weren't set

plays and how it was-- I mean, just

seeing kind of improvisation and how

it would appear in different forms

of human interactions,

you know?

I was particularly interested in

areas in which improvisation

would appear explicitly.

They would say we are improvising,

because

there's also

a sort of

pejorative use of the term.

The improvised explosive device.

Now, what I'm finding

recently is that there's certain

strains of military thinking

that talk about improvisation

everywhere in the military

in response to basically these kinds

of indeterminate devices that can really

kill people.

How do you survive and thrive

and win, which is what they're

supposed to do? And it seems

as though

there's a lot of military things

surrounding improvisation, as there

have been for quite

a long time. There are a number of small pamphlets of

military histories about improvisation during the Second World War by the

German staff, or by the Russians, or by the Americans.

So there were also pamphlets about-- they call them military

improvisations. So

now, the

new warfare thinking is

connected, and it leads to a couple

of directions toward armies

that have the capability and tools

to improvise in a situation and

also machines that have the

similar capabilities.

They're not only

aerial drones, land drones, or the [inaudible].

Yeah. I mean, this reminds

me of something at the panel you

were on last night. The idea came up

that improvisation does not always

have a kind of progressive or

any kind of moral

value attached to it.

Immediate improvisation can happen

all over. It can happen in military

places. It can happen in

a variety of different places.

There was a tendency for earlier

generations of

improvisation theorists to over-valorize

the practice in response

to the very real disapprobation of

improvisation that

was taking place

in academic environments or government environments or

generally in

various

socialities. That improvisation was

not prized but actually actively

denigrated. And so the response

they would say, "Oh, no.

In fact, improvisation is

really one of the highest

forms

of art-making or whatever.

I don't know if it is or not.

I don't know if [inaudible].

But that was an attempt to-- that

was a correction.

That was kind of an attempt at

making a correction about something

that had been devalued in the past

or something.

Right. It's a necessary way station.

It's kind of like when I heard

Gayatri Spivak call something strategic essentialism. It's a bit like

that. But

you have to move past that.

Sure. You began as a-- you have

a very long career as a musician

and a composer. You also, at this

point, have a long career as a

scholar. But that is something you

only started in, I think, in the

nineties, you started writing?

Yeah, that was the first article. The one we talked about. That was the

first article.

I was interested to read one

of the more recent pieces you've

been writing on Ben Patterson.

And I wanted to-- I had to bring up

Ben Patterson, too, because he's

from Pittsburgh.

That's right! [laughter]

[laughter] I had to get a Ben Patterson question in. Well, I was

interested in reading-- so he's one

of the founders of the Fluxus

movement. But you're writing about

him in part because he's not

credited as such.

Again, gets back to the history

writing that we've talked about once

or twice.

One comment, in the article

that I read

of you writing about him, as you

were speculating that one of the

reasons that he might have started

writing his own autobiographies is

because he knew he would need to

write himself into his own history.

The phrase is great.

And it

struck me that that might have

something to do with your decision

to begin writing as well.

I wonder if it did.

Well, maybe.

The 96 article

was spurred by

just the sense as I began to read

more widely

in the histories of musical

experimentalism.

I began to see that

these histories were not in sync

with my own experience of

some of the same people that were

being written about.

And in fact, the participation of people I knew with these same people was regularly being kept out of the pictures

that were deliberately written out or

erased. And so, part of that was to write those people back in. And it's become kind

of a principle. It's in the AACM book. If they write you out of history,

you can write yourself back in. You'll probably have to do that at some

point, particularly if you're from some marginalized group.

And that's something that we see over and over again, like from

the slave narratives in the US context, that is. There's certainly many

stories. But slave narratives is kind of an approximate form of American

historical writing on the personal narrative that could

serve as the partial model

for a kind of scholarship

that incorporates that mode of writing yourself back in

history.

And once again, it wasn't that

Ben Patterson was

not considered to be one of

the founders of the

movement. I mean, certainly, he was

considered by all the artists as

being a member of the inner circle.

It was the historians who continued to

marginalize for the most part. And

so, I can

read whole books about Fluxus where

he's never mentioned. Or even

standard sort of survey

books on African American art in which he wasn't mentioned. Although, new

books mention him.

And so, it wasn't just a matter of

Black versus White historians. There was some other

energy at work.

The only way to really counteract

that is by staying

in the same arena. You have to

bring the same medicine.

It's sort of like-- what is it [inaudible]. [crosstalk].

It is. I think it's the same.

You bring the same process. You work

the same processes to

achieve a certain kind of change.

And

the method is kind of the same.

You look at the

private transcript, but you compare

that with the public

transcript, and you try to square

the differences.

I want to ask you about one other--

a piece of yours, Changing

With the Times, your 1993

piece. You've talked about that

also-- I mean, I listened

to it. I loved listening to it.

I don't listen to experimental

music much. But I did

really love listening to that album.

My grandfather was always scheming

on how to get money.

At the height of the Depression, he

bought his girlfriend a full-length

fur coat.

Even the big White folks would

borrow money from him then.

And you'd never see him without a

suit and tie on. Not just

on Sunday.

Every day.

He said, "Look here, boy.

I've got a different suit of clothes

for every day of the week."

I didn't know where that money come

from. And one day, I went to

school hungry.

And when I got out of school,

somebody say, "Let's stop by

your granddaddy's wine shop."

I didn't know nothing about it.

I just thought it would be nice to

have a piece of

contemporary music that

[inaudible]. Even if they didn't necessarily like

or look out what

context allow the weird sounds, the story would take them in a tiny bit.

Because

I began to notice I was doing

pieces about

family. Early pieces

involving CD-Rom technology

and installations.

So the installation, someone

would be playing, and based on what

they played,

the system would chose different vignettes to play in the video. And the

vignettes were about family.

And one of them was my

grandmother, and this is in the

eighties.

So she was complaining

about George

Bush the first, and she was complaining,

also, about

Reagan and Iran-Contra. She

was in her late seventies.

And I noticed that in our

American media, we

don't usually hear anything

of a political nature from people

of that generation. Older African

American women aren't considered

people you need to listen to.

And so, that piece kind of countered

that.

So the Changing With the Times is

born out a similar spirit, although it is kind of intensely male. It's

about male comradery. It's about handing down

from one generation to another.

And the transmission route is from

his grandfather,

my dad's grandfather, to him to grow.

They still do it now. You buy

one of them expensive caskets, they

drop your butt in the ground and get

that casket and sell it to somebody

else.

You might have paid $5,000

for that casket.

He ain't got no use for it.

You come along, take that casket,

write him a check, and tell him,

"Use that when you get where you're

going."

Now that was just a joke.

The idea of it being a slave

narrative was mainly because it was

done at the behest--

the original piece of writing at the

beginning was done by

him in response to an adult education class, in

which he was asked--they gave

everyone a copy of the

autobiography of Frederick Douglass. And they read that.

They said, "Okay, now write your own

autobiography." They

all sat down and wrote their own

autobiographies. And

then I automated that. And with interviews

I made in that video driving around in cars and just talking. And I had a

video camera on. And that would be it.

So that's where the--

it's sort of like what I'm doing now

at the Afterword Opera.

The libretto comes from these real-life conversations rather than from me

trying to make up stuff or trying to be an actual writer.

Yeah.

Well, there's one or two other

things I want to ask you about.

One has to do with collaboration.

And in particular, your

idea of--this came up last night in

the panel that you were on, the

collaborative improvisation as

critical pedagogy?

Oh, yes. I think that's right.

Yeah.

I wonder about-- you've

talked about collaboration-- you've

written about collaboration and

talked about it in interviews and

things and talked about how you try

to incorporate that into

your work as a teacher.

And you've talked, too, about

the school that exists at the

AACM and how that kind of embodied

the ethos of the

AACM in a pedagogical

setting.

It was how we were all enculturated.

Oh, yeah.

As someone now who has

done as much writing as a

scholar as you have, and someone

who's also performed as

a musician, are the same

opportunities for collaborative

improvisation available to

people who are in the humanities

as or people who are, for example,

in music?

I mean, I'm only thinking of this in

terms of scholarship and humanities

being something

has traditionally been

solitary.

And so, I wonder if this is

something-- have you thought about

that? Have you tried to kind

of make your work as a scholar any

more collaborative? And if so, how?

People kind of felt-- when I was doing the

early work at

the-- Samuel Floyd at

the Center for Black Music Research

had a series of what he called

integrated studies practices.

And what they were looking

for, among other things, was a way

of doing collaborative scholarship.

Collaborative scholarship is-- and

there were new technological tools,

the forerunners of wikis,

for example. Or

what we have now with the Google

Docs that make certain kinds of

things.

You can write things collectively.

And the problem, of course, with

collective humanities scholarship is

that the regimes

that vet people for things

like tenure and promotion, don't

seem to value collaborative

scholarship as highly.

And I've been on both sides of the

aisle. I've been on the

side that writes the stuff and sends it to the people vetted for tenure.

And I've been on the side that evaluates people for tenure. And

so,

the major committees in university

that do this.

And so, one of the things you notice,

and standard questions is well,

what's the degree of effort?

And if the degree is 50%

or how much of this did this person

write as a co-opted piece or

team teaching?

It becomes very difficult. How do you get credit for that? You want to be

able to teach

the max

or teach at least enough so they don't want to get away with anything so

they're doing half the work when they're team

teaching...

So these are structural problems

that

impede the generation of collaborative scholarship. I don't think there's

any-- the edited volume has become

an acceptable substitute. But people

are starting to chafe under the restrictions. And

a lot of people really want to

cooperate in radical ways.

I haven't been able to do nearly as much of it as I would like to.

Probably

for that reason.

You've talked in some interviews

about the fact that writing about

music does not have the same

presence in the public sphere as

writing about plenty other kinds of

art. And you're thinking about the

Atlantic, you're thinking about the

New York Review of Books.

And I didn't realize

that that was the-- I'm a regular

reader of the New York Review of

Books and did not realize that that

was the case until you mentioned it

and then checked it out.

And sure enough,

just as you say, it's not really

there. Can you talk a bit about why

this gap exists?

Why is writing about other

kinds of arts more present

in those places?

You know, it's

interesting because lately,

I've been writing for Art Forum

about music and

I don't do a lot of it.

Right? I'm not really that kind of writer, but

I try to hang in there or something.

It just seems to me that

music is

heavily sold in American

society as largely

a form of entertainment.

And who do we go to

for serious commentary

on the human condition?

Well, we can go to

someone [for a retainer?], or we can

go to a philosopher,

or we can go to an art historian or

someone like that.

But I think it goes a little bit

deeper than that.

But for some reason, I-- maybe I

can't explain it. Music

isn't expected to teach us

anything about the

critical issue that affects us

all of course.

So that's going to be a question of

the musicians, the musicologists,

the ethnomusicologists, the musical

historians.

They have to fix that.

We have to fix

that. It's not our fault up to a point. But

we do have to recognize that it's

something that

something that needs addressing very much. And that

doesn't mean we address it by

writing about

"more accessible music." What we're

doing is we

try to

foreshorten or close up

that gap between the experience.

We teach people to hear differently,

to listen