✨Afterword: An Opera in Two Acts✨ by George Lewis was released October 6th on New Focus Recordings/TUNDRA! Afterword is an opera by composer George Lewis, developed with directors Sean Griffin & Catherine Sullivan, and performed by Joelle Lamarre (soprano), Gwendolyn Brown (contralto), Julian Terrell Otis (tenor), Otis Harris, Zachary Nicol, Ninah Snipes, Ann E. Ward, Douglas R. Ewart, Discopoet Khari B., Coco Elysses, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. The work derives from Lewis’s book about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.”
Lewis describes Afterword as “an opera of ideas, positionality, and testament…exploring history to reaffirm fundamentally human perspectives that mark not only the AACM, but also any social formation.” The opera presents the AACM not as a set of fixed characters and plot lines, but as an avatar for experimental Blackness itself. As the action unfolds, we witness young Black experimentalists interrogating issues of power, authority, identity, representation, culture, economics, politics, and aesthetics; self-fashioning and self-determination; personal, professional, and collective aspiration; and tradition, innovation, change, spiritual growth, death, and rebirth.