Invent a New We

Quotation
by George E. Lewis

«You and I need to invent a new, incarnative ‹we› that understands contemporary music not as a globalized, pan-European, white sonic diaspora, but more like the blues, practiced by the widest variety of people in many variations around the world.»

The quote is taken from the essay «New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps» by George E. Lewis, published 2021 in «Van Outernational». Last accessed on March 23, 2021.

The essay is inspired by the panel «Decolonizing the Curating Discourse in Europe» from the «Curating Diversity in Europe: Decolonizing Contemporary Music» symposium.

Biography

George E. Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians since 1971, Lewis’s compositions, published by Edition Peters, have been performed by ensembles worldwide, and he holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University. Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. Follow him on Youtube, Spotify, or SoundCloud.

Published on December 04, 2017

Last updated on June 27, 2022

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New Geographies
Power
Race
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