“Whether it has a certain musical form, maybe no one cares, except for some people”: George E. Lewis, Sean Griffin, and Catherine Sullivan talk with Alexander K. Rothe about Afterword, an opera

Introduction to Afterword, an opera (2015)

Founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has long played an internationally recognized role in American experimental music. Over more than sixty years of work, AACM musicians developed new and influential ideas about sound, collectivity, extended technique and instrumentation, intermedia, form, computer music technologies, invented acoustic and electronic instruments, and more. The AACM’s unique combination of artistic communitarianism, personal and collective self-determination, and ardent experimentalism, animated the Afterword project.

The challenge for the creative team—me as composer, and Sean Griffin and Catherine Sullivan as co-directors—was to create an opera around a collective noted for its diversity of approaches to artmaking, while avoiding strategies of recreation, periodization, and simplistic depiction. The intent was to explore motivations and implications of historical action in ways that reaffirm the multiple, overlapping, and fundamentally human cultural perspectives and contestations that mark not only the AACM but also any human social formation.

The opera confronts experiences and themes related to the historical periods through which the AACM has lived—the Great Migration, the urbanization of American life, the civil rights struggle, and decolonization, to name just a few. Within these larger currents, recurring issues include personal, professional, and collective aspiration, political positions, self-determination and self-governance, race, gender, and sexuality, aesthetic innovation, identity and representation, building of alternative institutions and pedagogies, confrontations with traditional authority, economic and cultural shifts, tradition, change, and spiritual growth, death, and rebirth.

Afterword’s libretto is drawn in large part from audio recordings of formative AACM meetings made by Muhal Richard Abrams in 1965 and 1966, as well as the interviews I conducted for my 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press). In these sources, we encounter young black experimentalists interrogating issues of power, authority, identity, culture, aesthetics, self-fashioning, and representation. The libretto itself includes testimonials from the Migration, daily observations jotted down in diaries, and descriptions of Paris in the wake of the tumultuous events of 1968.

However, Afterword is not a history of the AACM, but a Bildungsoper—a coming-of-age opera of ideas, positionality, and testament. In eschewing direct character representation of AACM artists, we forgo what Michel Foucault calls “historical figure[s] at the crossroads of a certain number of events.” The singers become avatars that represent subject positions and metaphysical collectivities. In fact this approach to (non)-characterization is a feature of the operas of Anthony Braxton, in which a named actor can assume a different “character” and behavior in each opera. I liken this to a process described by Toni Morrison and others as the expression of a community voice. In some scenes in Afterword, that voice presents remembrances and testimony; in others, clashes between subject positions allow audiences to eavesdrop on history as it is being made in real, human time.

The following conversation between Sean Griffin, Catherine Sullivan, and myself, provocatively moderated by Alexander K. Rothe, provides context about the creative contention that led to the opera. It was conducted via Zoom in February 2023.

—George E. Lewis

Alexander Rothe: Did ethnography shape your conception of Afterword?

George Lewis: I did a lecture called “Composition as Ethnography,” and I use [Afterword] as an example, but that was well after the opera was over. I think that while we were doing it, I hadn't thought of that. Maybe Catherine had, or Sean had. I don't know. Had you guys thought of it?

Sean Griffin: Well, I remember thinking about it in terms of dramaturgy and building a kind of network of references. And George, you did give me a lot. You showed me pictures of African textiles and ancient things and talked about Egypt. And then I personally have met and talked about music with most of the people that are represented in the opera. I had been following the AACM for a long time.

Catherine Sullivan: For me, the concept of ethnography didn't really come up until I read this question. But I did try to think back about some of the dilemmas in ethnography, working with populations that are “sited,” and about gazes and looking. But the priority really was on getting over issues of proximity between my own cultural position and the material of the opera.

GL: Well, especially for you, Catherine, and you, Sean, making films the way you do, isn't there always an ethnographic component?

SG: I think a lot of the things that we've collaborated on through the decades, it comes from diving deeply into the material and pulling out movements and actions from that. An example from Afterword might be using the AACM photography and album covers for gestural material. And then, you know, also just meeting people and getting to know the AACM and its legacy, because that was the year of its 50th anniversary. At the DuSable Museum, there was this wonderful conference on the AACM.¹    

GL: Yeah, the Freedom Principle show was also 2015.²

I did a piece in 1991 or ’92 called Changing with the Times, where I took something that my dad had written for an adult education class. They had them write autobiographies. They gave everyone a copy of the autobiography of Frederick Douglass as a guide to what they could do. So my dad wrote his, and it was pretty interesting. And I thought, well, I could make a piece out of this. And so I got somebody, Bernard Mixon, who was an AACM member, to play my dad, and he did such a good job that when my dad's friends heard it, they said, is that you, George? It was all based on videos I'd made of him and places that we went. Or maybe this is not ethnography—maybe there's some other name for that. I don't know what you call it, but I was thinking of it in that way.

I also wrote a piece called Travelogue that was at the Studio Museum. It was an audio installation.³ I was going around making videos everywhere I went. A lot of people are on these videos. It's kind of an archive. I just took the audio off the videos and used it as an audio installation. I mean, the video was probably pretty uninteresting, but the audio was kind of fascinating—evangelistic street churches in Warsaw, or people marching in different parts of the world or whatever they were doing.

And the book itself, from which Afterword is taken. It's a combination of history and ethnography, I think.

SG: And the libretto?

GL: Well, the libretto is taken from the book, from the interviews, and also from newspaper articles in various languages. Like the scene, Ils sont noir, Ils sont noir, that's from a newspaper article about the Art Ensemble of Chicago. So I guess you could say that the piece is kind of shot through with ethnography.

AR: The talk you gave in the United Kingdom about composition as an ethnographic process is freely available on YouTube. You talk about how you systematically collect surveys, interviews, videos. At one point you even mentioned Lev Manovich in that there may even be an algorithmic component to your selection of particular interview material. So I was really curious, to what extent does some algorithmic component sneak into this project?

GL: I don't know how algorithmic it was. I don't think I'm organized enough to make a database like Lev—well, I am, but not like that. I didn't need to do it with Afterword, but we had a base of data, if you want to put it that way. Sean and Catherine collected dozens and dozens of images, clothing, scenes, environments. And I would imagine that that also informed the making of Catherine’s film Afterword via Fantasia,⁴ which was developed in parallel with the opera.

CS: Absolutely, the film draws from the same archive as the opera does. And the idea of the algorithm resonates in some ways with the choreography. There was a big archive of movement that was devised with the ensemble and then organized in terms of the scenes that the movement was derived from, and the initial document that we got from George, which was called “Scenes and Context.” Then, in many places in the opera, you see the ensemble deploying it. I don't know if it was algorithmic, but it was certainly some system of intention that was kind of generative of the movement.

SG: Maybe not an algorithm, but there certainly was a grid. You could see the movements relating to each other and the text. And that was the fun part of doing the project, really engaging the music and the libretto together with these people and finding these ways of working together because, you know, the opera singers are used to the “park and bark” standard. And then you sing your big aria, and you have dancers moving around in the back. Opera singers are sometimes restricted in their movement in order to deliver, you know, the angles and lines and intervals that this music has. But in this one, everybody's integrated, and everybody has different levels of physical movement that they can do.

GL: It's clear that we were devising things as we went along and there weren't any real models for some of it. I remember you saying at one point, Sean, that you had been working with operas for a pretty long time, but maybe not these kind of written-out operas where the music is all written and yet there's all this stuff around it which is kind of indeterminate or at least determined at the moment, including the movement, but also some of the vocalizing of the movement ensemble, which was pretty challenging in the audio mix, because it's not on the script. But I think we might have been able to do something that really no one had done before in quite the same way. I'd say there are some moments for which we could be credited, the three of us, with certain kinds of innovation along the lines that you just mentioned.

AR: How does the polyphony of voices of the artists of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians speak for itself? Is there a tension between the creative practice of your collaboration and the diverse musical practices of the AACM historical figures that you're depicting?

CS: The opera foregrounds the kind of contestations within the organization that were one of its defining features—the questions around what is creative music, what is original music. So it wouldn't necessarily be a matter of finding definitions through everyone being in agreement. Certainly, there was agreement on many points, from what I understand. But one of the features that could be defining was this issue of contestation and disagreement.

SG: I was just going to talk about the polyphony of voices. I think George called the instrumental approach “tutti obbligati.” Everyone is playing all the time, and if you know a lot of the music, you can hear fragments coming in and out. So there's all of this referential material going in there that gives it a feel of collectivity.

GL: Yeah, I'm still having a hard time giving people a rest in the music and in the writing. It’s a problem.

You know, when we did it in the Czech Republic the guy who was working on the Czech subtitles for the libretto was studying Toni Morrison for his doctoral degree. He said that it reminded him of the idea of a community voice in her novels. I think that there is that polyphony of voices—I think people are starting to use the word heterophony. There is a young scholar, Kwami Coleman, who is using this term now and redefining it to give it a much freer understanding.

When you talk about polyphony, people are kind of marching in lockstep and there’s a tempo, whereas heterophony is more like what's happening in the AACM at certain moments, where there's no tempo and people are coming in whenever they want and there's no central leader. And that also describes the way the AACM operates in terms of its organization. There's no one person that says, “here's what we're going to do now.” Everything is collectively determined, which can be very frustrating for certain people at times, because things move slowly and you have to take account of everyone.

But yes, like you said, everyone is playing all the time, there are all these components which are operating on very different bases—the music and the movement, the libretto and the other aspects, they all seem to be operating on different—not timescales, but different levels, or —

SG: I think they are different times. I'm thinking about the first half and the second half of the opera. The first half doesn’t have any clear names or identities. The first words are “my great-great-grandfather,” you know, somebody who wasn't there, and nobody is really given a name. And later, in the Claudine Myers scene, where she's reading a book and people are animated from her drawings in her head into the stage, you have a much more discrete location. You have Paris, New York, you have these different places that are really named. But in the beginning, it’s a collective consciousness that's being expressed. We're having these experiences coming from different voices.

GL: Yeah, that's the case. But also, I was trying to take it out of the particular narrative of the AACM. It's like what the book does. The book connects the testimony given in the interviews by the AACM people with historical occurrences. For example, someone talks about how they lived in “Coon Town.” Well, there are a lot of “Coontowns” in the southern United States, you know, and a lot of these “Coontowns” were flooded out, or their land was stolen. So someone who lived in Coon Town, that could be a lot of people. Later, there is a historical place called Oakwood Cemetery in the cemetery scene. And that's where you hear “Richard” [Abrams] and “Phil” [Cohran] coming out.⁵

But, you know, I tried to take the individuals out because otherwise you get the situation where people are “playing” these characters, you know, like someone “plays” Muhal. But I am doing a kind of odd chaining where each of the singers is singing different parts from what different people said in the interviews, so there's no way to have a single character that does it all. You'd have to have a lot more than three people to do all the characters. So the idea was to boil down and get a through line between a lot of things that people said. And again, talking about the polyphony of voices, the “Afterword” chapter in the book is the basis for that. That's where I take sections from all the interviews I did, like 90 interviews or however many there were, and I sort of taxonomized them by themes like “the future,” “survival,” “creativity,” whatever. Even the book itself was a theme. You know, people said, “Oh, you're writing a book now,” or, “I don't know about a book,” things like that. So there are a lot of points of view and you try to bring all those together to show differences and also commonalities at the same time. So that would be the basis for the whole thing. That's the reason why the opera’s called Afterword. I could have maybe had a better name for it, but I couldn't think of one.

AR: I really like act 2, scene 2, “Ariae,” in which you focus on Claudine Myers. You write in your program notes that you refer to “the unpublished auto-ethnographic journal narrative by pianist Claudine Myers.” Do you envision this scene as a metanarrative for the opera as a whole, as an auto-ethnographic opera? For me, that's the centerpiece that sort of opens up the whole story.

SG: I thought about this scene a lot. Directing-wise, it's the first time that we staged people. We get names more clearly and people are playing little characters briefly, as they open up from Claudine's mind as she's telling the story. But there's this other section where these casual things are going on—they're sweeping, they're going to get sandwiches. And then they go into this kind of mythical place where they discuss Africa and all the lights change. And Gwen [Gwendolyn Brown, contralto] has this moment where, I don't remember the exact words: Africa is not a location but [sings] “a mental return.”

CS: Yeah, I'll just come in about the question of gesture. Joelle [Lamarre, soprano] is the embodiment of Ariae in that scene. She doesn't move, yet she's co-present with a figure who's moving a lot. I had interpreted that character as being a consciousness that she is conjuring in that space. What she's sort of thinking, what she's subjectivizing, is outside of her. It's this funny thing that you can do in a theatrical situation—you can establish an anchor point of view, but then you can manifest it through a field of elements which are very disparate and transient. But I wouldn't call that a metanarrative or a kind of method that would define everything else in the opera, because I think each scene works with the elements in a very different way.

GL: I have to go along with leaning away from the metanarrative idea for that scene. Although someone might come along, maybe you, Alex, and you have different point of view on it.

AR: The idea of sonification of thoughts in real time also resonated with me. George, you had spoken to me about Brian Ferneyhough’s Shadowtime. That also has a central scene in which we have some sort of auto-reflection by one of the central characters.

GL: I invoked Shadowtime because I was using that as a model in some ways for what an opera could be. But mainly I thought that what Amina wrote was just so fascinating. And she said, well, I was writing it as it was happening, so that was the sense in which that's what was shown. And they even say at one point, be careful, Claudine’s writing everything down, you know? And not everyone would have been allowed to be in the office writing everything down.

Like with me, I said, well, can I be a part of this? And they said, no [laughs]. People were pretty suspicious. I mean, this was the age of COINTELPRO and the Red Squad and all those kinds of things. And in fact, when I was going through some of the archives in the AACM office, I ran across some files about a settlement with a number of groups, including the AACM, to stop the spying on them by the Chicago police.

AR: I'm really fascinated with applying this idea from John Cage of experimental music where the outcome cannot be determined in advance. How is the collaboration on Afterword an example of experimental opera as a process in which the outcome cannot be seen in advance? What other understandings of experimental opera shaped your collaboration on Afterword?

GL: I think that Sean and Catherine had a lot more experience in experimental opera than I did.

CS: I was a total novice.

SG: Okay, but our works can also be categorized as operatic.

CS: Sure.

GL: But it's extremely musical, what you guys were doing. That’s what led me to it. Even though there's often not even sound, the movement is musical, the flow is very musical in these video installations.

SG: Looking at contemporary experimental opera, the experimental work that we did looks more like traditional opera now. You know, Afterword is a fully composed, through composed piece that different ensembles wherever in the world can play. In that sense, it's like a document of the experimental process. Working with George, we taught a class together⁶ and became familiarized with each other's positions and creativity. Having the opportunity to develop things that way was the experimental part that I found extremely valuable. And so for me, that was experimental, although experimental operas right now are happening in grocery stores.

CS: Where I teach, at the University of Chicago, there were some people who were interested in putting together a center for experimental performance. So everybody got together to discuss this, and the problem was that nobody could agree on what experimental meant. I'll just add that my own education is much more in experimental practices in general rather than “experimental opera.” So for me, experimentalism is tradition.

SG: I think experimental is used optimistically sometimes. “New” is probably a better word for a lot of things that are called experimental.

GL: Catherine, that anecdote is very interesting because what I hear from that is that people wanted to see the outcome of that in advance—we “know” what experimentalism is, we just want to just do it.

Obviously we were all experimenting, and we didn't know what was going to happen. I mean, there are multiple levels around this. I'm not sure when I first came up with this notion of the Great Migration of African Americans as being exactly what Cage was talking about: an experimental action, the outcome of which couldn't be seen in advance, taking place over 50, 60 years. That notion of the Great Migration is fundamental to the AACM and how it came to be. So in that sense, we're already talking about experimental music from the AACM as exemplifying this.

Imagine if there was an opera about John Cage. What would that be about? Would it be experimental, with the outcome not seen in advance? How would you do this? Is there one?

SG: There is one. I forget what it is. But there is one that depicts him on stage. And then I've also depicted him in a mini opera called Buffalo 70, with versions of some of his compositions happening simultaneously.

GL: Maybe it could be about any composer, a contemporary composer, an opera about Feldman or something, you know? I mean, one of the critical commentaries said, “this opera about a group of experimental black musicians, I figured I’d have absolutely no interest in that.” I found that kind of odd, why a priori that wouldn’t be interesting. But to make an opera about these experimental people who are still around—It's about living musicians. So that was very complicated. You know, where the outcome is still in question or we've had a lot of outcome already, but there is more to come.

Sean, you have Opera Povera, right? You've been thinking about this for a pretty long time.

SG: Twelve years.

GL: So, I mean, maybe you're the person to say, you know, these are just other understandings of experimental opera.

SG: I feel like the area that is the richest and most engaging for me as an artist, aside from the music and conducting and staging events, is the dramaturgy. It really comes from my experience with Catherine, where she's bringing a lot of different things and then I'm bringing a lot of things and we put them together, not totally knowing what's going to happen. That's where the experiments happened. There are moments that are open where people can do things and there is improvisation. But there's also a lot of things built into the physical body of the performers through repetition and through working on movements.

GL: Well, the odd bit, I think, from the standpoint of some people who were looking at the piece, is that there isn’t any improvisation in the music. The music is a sort of fixed star, being conducted and performed pretty much as written. And then there are all these other elements around it which were much more contingent in the process. Maybe that’s an unusual way to work.

And some people maybe felt that, well, it's about the AACM, so there should be improvisation, some people who are really thinking in the most literal way possible—it should sound like the AACM. Well, what does the AACM sound like? I mean it sounds like 100 people. How do you get a single sound out of it? That was revealed as a kind of stereotype they had about the AACM, based on certain stereotypes of blackness. And so we had to experiment with that, too. People who knew the AACM didn't have any real issue with the musical language of the opera, but people who didn't seemed to feel that for some reason it should be more like, quote, “what the AACM is.”

I had this same problem with this curatorial project with Ensemble Modern, this concert of Afrodiasporic contemporary composers. And we got this weird review in this German paper where the guy started talking about how the festival we were part of was looking for the “black sound.” And I said, no one said anything about black sound. The journalist was saying, how is this music different from what “we” have been doing? But that’s a category error. These people are also part of the “we.” You can't say it's different from us because it “is” us. But he was used to bracketing these people off as being somehow different, somehow alien, somehow other. When you think that way, then it's natural that you can put certain people in a box.

The premieres of Afterword were in Chicago, an African American city. A lot of African Americans came to the concert. So when you see these movies about black people, about black American people in a black context, that's really part of what you're experimenting with too. I went to see The Woman King yesterday, and I went to see it at the Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem. Tadashi [Lewis’s son] and I went, and he said, why don't we go to this other theater? I said, because I want to see it in a black context, you know, where people are applauding and yelling back at the screen. Years ago I went to see Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing, also in a theater in a predominantly African American neighborhood. I mean, Wagner was using his own musical language to talk about medieval Germany. He wasn't using the language of medieval Germany. But I guess that might be the influence of biopics and film.

SG: I think everyone involved on the inside of this opera knew that it was important and very serious. A lot of experimental opera that I see, a lot of it ends up kind of being buffa, you know? There aren't a lot that take up this kind of social text of relations and ethnic considerations and political considerations. So for me, it was unique and important in that sense.

I remember when we were talking about it in Berkeley, I don't know why I came up with this, but I said you could stage this opera with nothing but two lightbulbs in an empty room, and you would have this tremendous impact still. The music is like an ocean. It's this nonstop, relentless activity and rich. It's generous, in a very complicated way.

AR: How did the three of you initially approach Afterword’s collaborative process? Did the collaborative process change over time and what do you think about it now?

GL: Didn't it start when, Catherine, you found a way to get money from the University of Chicago’s Gray Center?

CS: I think that's when I reached out to Sean and then he reached out to you, and opportunity came knocking.

SG: When we started developing the idea, I reached out to Charles Gaines to design interactive sets. At that time, I thought there would be much more live experimentation going on. And this would allow that to happen with lights and different kinds of technology embedded in these sets. I think there's like five of them that were never built. But the idea that it would have this kind of modular sense and it could engage different situations was originally my idea. And then I get this score of fully composed stuff, which is so great. But it changed the working methods for me in a very big way, banging out notes on the piano with the singers, things like this that I don't do very often in my operas. But it really fortified the whole process for the singers. I think with opera singers, a lot of times they want to know what's going on.

GL: What I recall was that we were talking about the possibilities of making an opera, and you sent me this packet of materials. And you said that you could use these materials to make an opera.

SG: It was like little plastic transparencies and there was a little stage or something that you kind of unfolded. It was like just colors and things, maybe like a very John Cage kind of a little theater. But what did you think about that?

GL: Well, you know what I thought because it's in the opera: “we can take anything and make anything out of it.” That also dovetails with the old African American adage, we've done so much with so little for so long, now we can make anything out of nothing. It changed my idea of what opera was, which I didn't really know much about, other than having been to Bayreuth and seeing the Ring. You know, going occasionally to things, but not having that much familiarity with it. So we did a workshop, Catherine set this up, and it turned out that it was lucky because David Levin was the director of the Gray Center—you know, the great opera scholar. He and Leslie Buxbaum Danzig. Between Leslie and Catherine and David, they managed to get some seed money. And then I got a Guggenheim and instead of doing what people do with the Guggenheim, give all the money to the university and go on sabbatical, I said, we're going to need this money to do the opera. So I just kept working, kept teaching while writing it.

So this was a working opera. Any time I go on a lecture tour and I just would beg for funds to pay for stuff. It wasn't that supported outside of those two sources and my own sort of funding, everybody bled a little bit to get this thing to work. But what do we think about the collaborative process now? Well, from my standpoint, it worked. One of the things that it did for Julian Otis [vocalist in Afterword] was that it put him in a much more experimental place as a performer himself, where he started to do things on Ben Patterson and think more about black experimentalism. I think it changed him in some ways, where before he was focused more on the sort of standard operatic career, like what you see on people's websites, you know, playing this role, that role. He sort of crept out of that.

CS: I saw him a few weeks ago and he was far out. And another one of our performers, Zachary Nicol, he was still a senior in the performance program at Northwestern and then he graduated and then did Afterword. He said at one point that he didn't know that that kind of art existed. Now he's making his own creative work, which is beautiful.

AR: In terms of the film, Afterword via Fantasia, did the film precede the opera, and if so, how did it in turn shape the opera?

CS: The film was forged from that document, “Scenes and context.” We shot two of the scenes with current members of the AACM before we cast the opera. We got access to the sets at Lyric Opera, Goodman Theater, Court Theater, and shot the film on sets for their existing productions. And George created a sort of adaptation for the screen. Then, once we cast the opera with the movement ensemble, it was an opportunity to develop a lot of choreography that would later appear in the opera. In the opera, the choreography is much more fully realized, there's much more material, much more information. But the film kind of speculates on the opera. That's how I kind of imagine them as connected, as really kind of coming out of the same source material, but manifesting before, but also in anticipation of the opera in many ways.

GL: I remember you had a drone flying around the Lyric Opera. I'd never seen that before.

Could I ask Catherine or Sean—“Afterword via Fantasia,” what does that mean as a title?

CS: I thought that in music terms, a fantasia would be like a departure from structure. So the film was like Afterword, but via fantasia, via speculation or via projection.

GL: When you said “speculation,” Catherine, I thought of the well-known Henry Louis Gates thing about signifying. You know, signifying on Afterword. And now you've given it this additional meaning, because signifying has a lot to do with improvisation. When you do a fantasia on something in classical music, that means you're kind of improvising on it, you know? Johann Georg Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts has a whole section called “Fantasieren.” He says, the fantasies of the great masters are sometimes even more fully engaging than their finished works, because the working out of art and taste is one thing, but what you're getting is more of the first fruits, the first flowering of creativity. There's also a kind of a mockumentary aspect to it at certain times. And sometimes it's like the school play with William Pope L. It's funny, it's whimsical. It's something that really should be seen as a companion piece to the opera.

AR: I have a question about Bildungsoper, the coming of age opera, and the pedagogical aspect of Afterword. What is it that you want the audience to learn, to walk away with? What is the Bildung? How are we being shaped as the audience?

GL: Maybe I'll take that first because I sort of made up that term, or I thought I'd made it up. And then someone told me that the Bildungsoper goes quite far back. I think Harald Kisiedu was the one who told me about Humboldt and Mozart having made up a similar idea about Bildungsoper. The only thing I ever found on it was an article by David Rosen in Cambridge Opera Journal about Verdi’s Don Carlos as a Bildungsoper.⁷ I wasn't in touch with this article when I made up my term. So when you look on Google you see this article, and [searching Google] here's what it says: “Bildungsoper: the practice in opera for characters to develop and become better people in the course of the story.” Die Zauberflöte. That's the example they use. Maybe that's an example of it, but I derived my term from the Bildungsroman. So those are the three big examples on Google: Verdi, Mozart and me.

And this is an opera about characters who are coming of age in the course of the opera. The organization comes of age, and the people do too. They start out in Coon Town and the Great Migration. They go to Chicago and they live on the South Side and, you know, do stuff like hustling people for money and pickpocketing and live in these horrible places and do what the migrants did. Then they decide to do something to better their lives. They learn as a result of all these trials and tribulations. They form an organization to better themselves. They go off to Paris and learn a lot there, they start to find out things about themselves and about the nature of the world.

So that's why I'm calling it a Bildungsoper. And another aspect of the pedagogy of a Bildungsoper for me is that I wrote the book so that people in the AACM who weren't around then would know what had happened, from someone who was writing about it as a historian, not someone who's writing about it because they were there, because I wasn't there at the beginning. And the audience gets a chance to experience this coming of age of these Black musicians, a very different coming of age story than what we normally find in stories about Black musicians, especially jazz-identified people, where it's often related to certain kinds of stereotypes and cliches like jam sessions and all that. So I wanted to show a different model of what pedagogy could be, especially autodidact pedagogy, because they were teaching themselves how to do all these things.

AR: So the last question that I have is about the opera Afterword as manifesting genre mobility, something that you have addressed on multiple occasions.

GL: Well, this is where I wanted to get into that Shadowtime thing. The New York Times reviewer is saying, is this really an opera? He says that Ferneyhough challenges the very notion of what opera could be. He calls it a thought opera that challenges the traditional role of words in opera. And I thought, well, this is an interesting touchstone. If you could challenge all that stuff, I guess I could, too. And Ferneyhough writes that listeners must let go of a fixed notion of what constitutes musical form to understand Shadowtime. I mean, I think a lot of us don't know or care about musical form. They just like to encounter something and deal with it, engage in and get something out of it and be immersed in it. Whether it has a certain musical form, maybe no one cares, except for some people. But I remember that at least a couple of the reviews were concerned as to whether Afterword really was an opera or not. And this whole thing about people using these bright lines to decide what an opera was, I thought had gone away. But it suddenly came back when this opera came out.

AR: But this term, “chamber opera”—three singers, a smaller chamber orchestra. Obviously you went into the project with some understanding of the genre of chamber opera.

GL: Well, I went into it with a sense of how much money we had to put on an opera. It's a chamber opera because that's the size of what we could do. It's sort of a resource-driven notion of genre in some ways. And chamber opera, there are more and more of them, because the grand opera thing, people can't afford that, it’s very expensive. Some people can still do it.

But what I read about it was that it wasn't a real opera, whatever a real opera is. A chamber opera is still a real opera, right? But this wasn't a real opera. Maybe it didn't have a plot. Well, Shadowtime didn't have a plot. Lots of operas don't have plots. I mean, the Europeras don't have plots. So there was an attempt made to kind of exceptionalize this particular work, and I'm not sure if it was the subject matter or the ethnicity of the composer or whatever that was. Maybe it's a musical, but it was not enough fun to be a musical. It was too dour, you know, it didn't have enough tonality. I think one review called it “bitter” and “no fun.”

I mean, I was encouraged in this by both of you, Sean and Catherine, that we could use the idea of opera and the trappings of opera. But some people felt, why have all this basically bel canto type singing. They felt it should be some other kind of singing, once again because of a certain kind of stereotype about what Black people do and how they should be singing. I didn't see the point in doing that. I wanted to engage that specifically. And then the musical language was just my musical language. Whatever I was writing would sound like me and it wasn't going to sound like, you know, here's the part that sounds like Threadgill, here’s the part that sounds like Amina—you can't do anything that way. It has to be your own voice. And that's what the AACM is about. It's making your own voice. And that's the larger idea of African American music—you get your own sound. You get your own voice. All that bebop that people were doing, they're all trying to find themselves and get their own voice and step out. You go on these concerts and the musicians would catch you with one of those Berklee “riff books,” they called them, where you had all these patterns and stuff, and they say, What are you doing with that? I think there's a part of the book where Chico Freeman and I went to Muhal and said, Could you show us how Giant Steps works? He said, Why do you want to know that? You know, like it's very suspicious. So I'll show you just this one time. But you have to promise that you will not use this in your own work as a musician.

I wanted to embrace the genre of opera. I wanted to have the mobility as an artist. And I wanted to have the AACM deploy that mobility, as a concept, as an organization, to take part in what it means to be a part of an opera. So maybe that was a lot for some people to absorb. It was very complicated somehow that the idea of opera and the idea of the AACM, as they understood it, didn't mix. The thing is, the AACM did its own opera. I'm still a member of the AACM. So the AACM does the opera. It's also the community voice—out of the AACM comes an opera. And it becomes a particular kind of opera, to establish the fact that that's something that could be done, that sense of possibility. A lot of Black people were for that and thought it was pretty cool, you know, against a lot of people who were defending certain kinds of genre boundaries. But genre is an unhealthy obsession of music.

CS: I would just follow that question with the question of which genre is being transgressed in Afterword. Where do you sort of fix yourself to make that comparison?

GL: Yeah, I think sometimes it's not about transgression. It's about getting on the inside of it and making it your own, rather than trying to sort of do some real or imagined transgression or extension or something like that. So we're going to adopt the idea of opera, the singing, the costumes, the score, all these elements. And we're going to see what we can make out of it—and whether what we can have are new subjects, what I've been writing about in terms of creolization and decolonization.

And now with my new job at ICE, I'm thinking about making a “New Experts” conference. While I was in Berlin at the Wissenschaftskolleg, one of the people I made friends with was the Kant scholar Christel Fricke. She sent me this article from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung where the guy was complaining that so many people were calling Kant a racist. For me, that wasn’t a great stretch because there's so much documentation out there. There’s thirty years of scholarship on this. So this guy, he's got a big headline, Those who claim that Kant was a racist have never read him. What are you talking about? Of course they’ve read him—“Alle Neger Stinken”—What do you do with that? This guy was the director of this big Kant archive, but I'm thinking, he's in a bubble, right? I mean, they only talk to themselves, the people inside the bubble and the people outside the bubble are saying, how do you deal with this? They just say, nah, nah, nah, we don't hear you.

So my fantasy is that after the Afrodiasporic concert with Ensemble Modern in Berlin, the Handys, the cellphones are burning up, everyone’s calling—so what did you think of that concert last night? That was such great music. Did you know about any of those composers? They call up a journalist or a professor and say, you didn't know about this? Maybe you're not the expert I thought you were. Maybe we need some new experts. We need to talk to somebody else, you know?

The AACM put out its own magazine called The New Regime. And Henry Threadgill wrote an article titled “Where Are Our Critics?” This is in 1967 or something. So that's what I'm trying to do now. The genre mobility is not in the opera, it's in the subject. The subject has mobility to engage with and be a part of what's known as opera.

SG: And the mobility does move directly into movement and staging and costumes and things like this, the mobility of the subject. You know, if we started Afterword now, I think a lot of these questions wouldn't really be hanging around. The idea of what opera is now, it's so expanded. There's a priority to innovate and bring in younger audiences. So you get operas that are more like soap operas and short films and dance pieces. They're doing Stimmung in a restaurant or something while people are eating.

GL: I could go with that.

SG: Stimmung while people are eating?

GL: Depends on what they're serving.

Notes