A Recital by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble
Timothy Weiss, conductor

Tyshawn Sorey

For George Lewis

Emotion is at the heart of composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey’s work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer admits that it “took many years of doing that to arrive at a place where I could touch on these inner feelings that I may have, be they related to politics or be they related to people who have had a tremendous influence on me.” Tonight’s work, the chamber orchestra piece For George Lewis, allows Sorey to explore these “inner feelings,” to ground his music in his personal memories and relationships.

In recent years the composer has dedicated numerous works to influential musical mentors and colleagues. For Fred Lerdahl (2018) celebrates his principal advisor at Columbia University, while For Arthur Jafa (2022) is dedicated to the groundbreaking Black cinematographer and video artist. For Jamie Branch (2022) allowed Sorey to mourn a collaboration that never was after the unexpected passing of trumpeter Jamie Branch, whom Sorey had hoped to work with.

For George Lewis honors the avant-garde trombonist and composer George Lewis, whom Sorey studied with at Columbia. In discussing the work and its inspiration, Sorey recalls a family saying: Never forget the bridge that carries you through. For Sorey, the older composer was one of those bridges: “George Lewis was one of the key people who basically carried me over this body of water that I was drowning in.” Lewis encouraged him to “embrace myself and where I come from as a composer and as an improviser.” Lewis also encouraged Sorey to embrace a more personalized approach to composition, to develop “a greater understanding of what I want out of a given composition and to really address it in the notation—to have notation work for me.”

It is easy to imagine why Lewis served as such an inspiration for Sorey. From his pioneering work in computer music to his membership in the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to his genre-bursting performances as an improvising trombonist, George Lewis stands as one of the most groundbreaking figures in the past half-century of American music. Lewis—like Sorey—bridges diverse musical styles and challenges classical music’s centuries-long adherence to strict ideas of musical genre. A composer equally at home in Jazz and classical, Sorey’s music often bridges (or erases) the gap between the two. Sorey recounts his first encounter with genre expectations:

I was maybe about seven or eight years old when I first learned of these different genres, and I think that at one point I started to take a preference to certain genres, jazz being one of them. After a while, I thought to myself, “Well, wait a minute, I’m only limiting myself to this category. There’s way more music out there in the world that I’ve experienced up till that point and that I have yet to experience.” I wanted to do away with that whole notion of just thinking of becoming a purist of any sort, and just starting all over again and just listening to music without any kind of discrimination towards any style.

Sorey, like Lewis, is also deeply interested in the creative practices of the African diaspora. With a mission to “reformulate public perceptions of modern Black/Afrodiasporic creative practice,” Sorey has set Black spirituals, explored the life of Black singer-activist Josephine Baker, and consistently championed fellow BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) composers. He insists that composers of color “need to really support each other and each other’s art, now more than ever, and understand that we are not a monolith,” pointing to Lewis’s AACM as a model of how current organizations could learn to collaborate, to “talk shop” in the service of great music-making.

Sorey wrote For George Lewis in 2019 for the ensemble Alarm Will Sound. The work is inspired by Lewis’s piece for chamber orchestra, The Will to Adorn, which Sorey first heard in 2011. But whereas Lewis’s piece is dense and frenetic, Sorey’s composition invites its listeners to immerse themselves in a meditative, nearly hour-long sonic experience. The piece’s length challenges its musicians, too; in addition to the concentration required to perform the unbroken length of the piece, Sorey encourages his players to adhere to meticulously written rhythms and meters, all the while evoking the feeling of a pulse-less landscape.

Alarm Will Sound clarinetist Elisabeth Stimpert points to how the piece features “a lot of soft things happening subtly, but still needing to be extremely accurate,” adding that the piece’s length requires “a level of mental and physical endurance that is unusual even for a classically-trained orchestral musician.” Alarm Will Sound’s artistic director, Alan Pierson, further described the piece ahead of its premiere:

It is about these really beautiful but very still sonorities. It’s the kind of piece that immerses the audience in a space, in a feeling of atmosphere, and then out of that . . . these melodies begin to emerge. . . . These really beautiful long-lasting sonorities gradually just open up this room for lyricism to emerge.

Sorey invites the audience to let the sounds wash over them, to decide for themselves what to make of the music. The piece begins enigmatically—long tones from the alto flute that are interrupted by mysterious clusters in the piano and vibraphone. As the piece progresses, Sorey adds layer upon orchestral layer, until his sonorous stillness transforms into a dense field of dissonant tones. Deep into his meditation, he eventually returns to his opening texture, as the alto flute intones a single note while piano and vibraphone converse, imitating each other almost as if in a call and response. From here the music both relents and takes on new expressivity; pulses in the strings and winds allow for soaring brass melodies to emerge as Sorey rewards his musicians and his audience for their patience. The piece comes to a close with its final, yearning waves of sound.

For Sorey the success of a piece lies in “challenging an audience and really getting them to think and feel when they listen to any piece of music of mine.” He argues that “what I do is more art than entertainment, where art requires something more from the viewer or the listener to get something out of it—where they have to put themselves into it and they get more out of it than they put in.” For George Lewis’s greatest rewards lie in surrendering to its temporal uncertainties. In creating a piece that guides its listener and performers to focus on the now, Sorey brings us into a musical future in which his work’s dedicatee can take pride. — © Kamilla Arku