Composing While Black

George Lewis in conversation with Peter Meanwell and Nina Sun Eidsheim.

Composer, improvisor, author and academic George Lewis is a leading thinker in the realm of Afrodiasporic tendencies in music. He and musicologist Harald Kisiedu are the editors of the recently published book Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today, including texts by musicians and writers such as Alejandro Madrid, Jessie Cox, Hannah Kendall, and Yvette Janine Jackson. In conversation with Heloisa Amaral (Director of Ultima), Peter Meanwell (journalist and Artistic Director of Borealis – a festival for experimental music) and Nina Sun Eidsheim (Musicology professor at University of California and author of The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music), Lewis presents the book and interrogates the absence of Afrodiasporic composers from histories of contemporary music, highlighting an intercultural artistic tradition of innovation that is often hidden from view by a white dominated scene. This talk follows the Ekmeles concert Time Lost featuring thematically related works by George Lewis and Hannah Kendall.

The event is in English.