Lonnie and Lonie (2019)
(Los Angeles premiere)
Composed by
George Lewis
Featuring:
Glen Whitehead, trumpet
Susan Grace, piano
Neal Stulberg, conductor
Performed by the UCLA Philharmonia
Program Notes:
George Lewis (b. 1952): Lonnie and Lonie (2019), double concerto for trumpet, piano, and orchestra
Glen Whitehead, trumpet; Susan Grace, piano
This work was inspired by my twin uncles, Lonnie and Lonie Griffith, who as teenagers were frequently tasked with watching over me while my parents were at work on weekends. We would go to horror movies like Mr. Sardonicus, where the director himself calls for a vote on whether the title character should suffer or escape the consequences of his depredations. Later, at the now-defunct Illinois Slag and Ballast Company, where Lonnie and Lonie were supervisors, they got me a job cleaning out railroad cars during a particularly intense Chicago winter.
Lonnie and Lonie expressed both complementary and contrasting views of the world, a circumstance that, in line with my general understanding of the important trope of depiction in American music (Ives, Ellington, and Carter, for examples), is perfectly suited to the deployment of the concerto form, which has offered composers the opportunity to enact both agonistic and cooperative dramaturgical experiences of the dialogue among soloist(s) and orchestra. I’d like to provide this small hint to you automobile buffs out there as to which soloist represents “Lonnie” and which “Lonie”: I remember when both were driving “muscle cars”--a Dodge Charger (Lonnie) and an SS396 Chevrolet Chevelle (Lonie). In the concluding double cadenza, the soloists, driving fast and noisily through the narrower streets of Chicago’s Englewood district, head each other off at the pass before the work’s emphatic, but somehow pensive conclusion.
This work is dedicated to Lonnie Griffith (1947-) and the memory of Lonie Griffith (1947-2002). I would like to thank Glen Whitehead, Susan Grace, Maestro Thomas Wilson, and the Chamber Orchestra of the Springs for bringing this project to full fruition.
-George Lewis
Composer Bio:
George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University, and Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. 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, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work is presented by ensembles worldwide, published by Edition Peters. A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians.
His widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is the co-editor (with Harald Kisiedu) of the bilingual edited volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023), as well as (with Benjamin Piekut) the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College Of Florida, and Birmingham City University, among others