Tuning In by George Lewis

The Bent Frequency Duo Project performing George Lewis' Tuning In at the 2023 National American Saxophone Alliance Conference opening night concert at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Reedwerk Media production
Videography - Chris Condon, Megan Ihnen
Audio Engineer - Doug O'Connor
George Lewis writes:
Tuning In (2022), for soprano saxophone and percussion
This work is in touch with at least three significant references. First, there is Shikasta (1979), the first of Doris Lessing's series of space opera novels, in which the natives of a planet allegorically reminiscent of Earth develop a degenerative disease and inevitable decline, due to a lack of a substance called SOWF, or “substance-of-we-feeling.”
Second, there is the Mexican linguist Carlos Lenkersdorf, who spent decades studying Tojolabal, a Mayan language spoken by the Tojolabʼal people of Chiapas. According to Lenkersdorf, the name of this people is a compound of ab’al, the word which is listened to and not spoken, and tojol, the right moment of listening. The crucial importance of listening to the identity of this ethnic group centrally implicates the we (nosotros in Spanish) in a process that Lenkersdorf and others have called nosotreidad, or nosotrification.
Third, we have “Making Music Together” (1964) by the sociologist Alfred Schutz, who identified music as a prime site of nosotrification avant la lettre. Central to the power of music, Schutz observed, was a “mutual tuning-in relationship…established by the reciprocal sharing of the Other's flux of experiences in inner time, by living through a vivid present together, by experiencing this togetherness as a "We."
Schutz maintained that a study of musical processes “may lead to some insights valid for many other forms of social intercourse.” Thus, Tuning In, one of my series of works exploring the sound of decoloniality, presents a sonic meditation on community. The music expresses the hope that you and I can invent a new, incarnative “we” that understands contemporary music, not as a globalized, pan-European, white sonic diaspora, but as an expression of the situation of a creole. In this way, we can experience our globalized, polyasporan, listening-rich tuning-in relationship.
This work was commissioned by and written for Bent Frequency.

[@machida5114]

quite delicious......