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George Lewis – Minds in Flux – Music Review

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George Lewis - Minds in Flux I was asked to listen to and possibly review George Lewis and his work  ‘Minds in Flux’.  I decided to listen to some of his other works:

  • “Interactive Trio “for Trombone, Two Pianos, and Interactive Music System, 2011
  • George Lewis: Voyager

George Lewis was born on the 14th July, 1952in Chicago, Illinois, USA.  He is an American composer, performer, and scholar of ‘experimental music’.

As a writer and listener, I have not heard George Lewis before, I do love listening to a wide variety of music, from Choral singing to Wagner, to Dave Brubeck, Bach, Beethoven, Morricone, John Williams to name a few, indeed I have also listened to an interpretation of 2000AD-year-old Greek music.

I would say that the overriding quality I feel for music is melodiousness; it needs to create a feeling of encompassing joy. And unfortunately, I do not find that George’s music does this for me.  At the beginning of the 20th century, classical music took a turn (for me) for the worse.   Composers like Schoenberg sought to free the dissonance completely so that dissonant intervals and chords are equal to those of consonant ones. (Dissonance on the rise! – https://alevelmusic.com/alevelcompositionhelp/3-composition-into-the-c20/dissonance-on-the-rise/ )

As I have mentioned, I listen widely to music, and this includes other cultures, Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian – they all have remarkable music, and often to our Western ear their tones and spacing do not seem quite right – here I beg to differ, for often the music is sublime.

I find George’s music to well crafted, but, I do not find it encompassing, it sets my nerves on edge, and it does not wrap me in comfort.  Minds in Flux is 27 mins and 25 seconds long and Lewis says about his piece, “Digitally mediated entities emerge from the orchestra, to mutate into recombinant doppelgangers that follow diverse spatial trajectories around the hall”. 

It is well-crafted piece of music as I have already said, and brilliantly played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Sounds Intermedia, Donald Runnicles (conductor) and Ilan Volkov (conductor), but compared to the other two pieces on the disc:

  • Ralph Vaughan Williams – Serenade to Music

and

  • Richard Wagner – Siegfried Idyll

I am left cold and without joy

 

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