George Lewis: the multi-talented composer predicting a revolution in classical music

Some creative figures really do “contain multitudes” as the poet Walt Whitman put it. They are so protean, it’s hard to get a handle on them. George Lewis is one of them. The 69-year-old African-American composer, whose brand-new piece for the Proms will be premiered this week, also plays jazz trombone well enough to have joined the Count Basie Orchestra in the 1970s. He’s collaborated with luminaries of improvised music such as Anthony Braxton, created his own computer programmes to drive improvising musical machines, and made numerous recordings himself as a performer. He’s a distinguished professor in the music faculty of Columbia University in New York, where he lives with his sound-artist wife Miya Masaoka and son Tadashi. He’s laden with honours, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and, increasingly, a composer of elaborate fully written-out “classical” scores, including an opera, and now the new Proms piece, intriguingly entitled Minds in Flux.

When I ask whose minds they are, and why they’re in flux, Lewis lets forth a rumbling laugh I hear a lot during our conversation. “Well, I guess it’s really all of us. That title comes from a sermon I heard from a black evangelical preacher about 40 years ago, where he said “we’re talking about minds in flux.” He was referring to the very turbulent political scene at that time.” Lewis is referring to the tail-end end of the Vietnam war when conservatives and radicals were at loggerheads over the liberal legacy of the 1960s. “Though it was nothing compared to what we are experiencing today. I suppose I’m trying to create a musical image of the way our identities are now in flux.

“A lot of ideas people took for granted are suddenly disappearing, norms that we believed in have turned out to be chimerical. We are ‘No Longer at Ease’,” he says, deliberately referencing the title of a novel by Chinua Achebe, the great Nigerian novelist.

That might sound somewhat scary, but at one level his new piece is quite traditional. “It’s scored for a fairly standard symphony orchestra for pairs of woodwinds and a reduced body of strings. I thought I would do that as I’m sharing the billing with Beethoven – not for the first time I might add!” he says. On another level the piece is radical, as it involves reconfiguring the sounds spatially. “This is my largest experiment in moving sound around in space yet,” he says. “There’ll be eight speakers in a ring around the audience, which will redistribute the orchestral sounds.”

It’s an extraordinarily long road Lewis has travelled since his childhood in a poor black area of Chicago. “I believe the polite term for it was ‘ghetto’,” he says. “I didn’t grow up in a family of musicians. although everyone was very interested in music. I started trombone at school where I had some very good teachers. I was raised on African-American popular music, jazz, and also country music was a big thing. My people had emigrated from the South of the United States, so they were really into country music.”

Lewis’s musical talent carried him all the way to Yale University, though he lived a dual life with constant returns to the black music scene in Chicago. At Yale, he switched from studying music to philosophy, which seems odd but actually was typical of an era when creative artists were as interested in concepts as much as craftsmanship – the great minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass also studied philosophy.

He then returned to Chicago where he found kindred spirits in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which had an experimental ethos and was not content to stay within the boundaries of “black music” as traditionally conceived.

“They were also into modern classical music,” says Lewis. “I used to hang out with the founder of the AACM Muhal Abrams, and he would ask me, “What are you listening to?” and I would say “Elliott Carter’s first string quartet” [Elliott Carter was an American composer of fearsomely complex modernist music], and he would say “Great, let’s take a look” and fetch the score from his library. But then the next day we would all be together playing something like Blues Forever on stage somewhere.”

By the late 1970s Lewis was playing trombone with the leading lights of free improvised music and was among the first musicians to explore ways of programming computers to improvise music, in collaboration with live musicians. I venture the obvious question – with so many underemployed musicians and composers in the world, why do we need computers to take on the job of improvising? “Well you might say, why do we need self-driving cars, when we have plenty of human drivers? It’s a relevant question, because a self-driving car is actually a wonderful kind of improvising machine.

“It’s not really about what machines can do, it’s about researching what people can do. It allowed me to discover things about myself.”

In recent years Lewis has moved in what seems a more “classical” direction, by composing written out pieces for classical ensembles like trios, sextets and orchestras. Does he agree with those who say classical music needs to become less “white?”. “Well, maybe it could have a more mosaic identity, where it conceives of itself not just as the music of the European diaspora, but as the music of the whole Earth. I do believe that is coming, but it’s going to take a while, and for some people the prospect arouses fear.

“Just saying, “don’t be fearful” won’t of itself change much, because many people have a vested interest in keeping things just as they are. But it might actually benefit them as well, to see classical music in this more global way. In fact the change is already happening; there are local variants of classical music arising beyond Europe [such as the incredible explosion of classical music in Asia], and the idea that people in these new places have to swear eternal fealty to classical music’s European provenance doesn’t seem plausible to me.”

Is he saying classical music has to divorce itself from its European heritage? “No, no, I’m not going to say that! It’s not a question of divorcing anything. Remember my Prom concert is called “George Lewis and Beethoven”. That doesn’t sound like divorce to me,” he says. “It’s all about adding things and opening up to diverse influences so one day classical music will become a true world music.”

George Lewis’s Minds in Flux is premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov at the Proms on August 26. Tickets: royalalberthall.com