Boundaries

During this year’s Ojai Music Festival in Ojai, California (June 8-11), I met up with George Lewis, the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, to discuss his opera “Afterword,” which received its West Coast premiere at the festival on June 9. The theme of this year’s Ojai Music Festival, directed by Vijay Iyer, was community and empathy, and special attention was given to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective of African-American musicians founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Many of the festival’s featured artists and composers had either participated in or been influenced by the AACM, which—as a collective of musicians transcending genre boundaries—served as a model for the type of community envisioned by Iyer. Premiered in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, “Afterword” is a two-act chamber opera composed by Lewis to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the AACM. He also wrote the libretto, based on the final chapter of his 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, in which he depicts a fictional meeting between AACM members living and deceased who are reunited to discuss the organization’s history and hopes for the future. Drawing on recordings of past meetings and interviews that Lewis conducted, the opera presents this meeting as a series of episodes in which the same three singers serve as avatars of the organization’s thoughts and beliefs.