float, sting (2018)

In his prefatory remarks at its premiere at the Bang on a Can All-Stars' 2018 People's Commissioning Fund concert, George Lewis described his sextet float, sting as "nine minutes of noisy stuff." The title invokes Muhammad Ali's celebrated epigram, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee / His hands can't hit what his eyes can't see", and the playful violence of the exotic sonorities called for in the score allows the heterogeneous lineup of instruments (clarinet, electric guitar, piano, cello, contrabass, drum set) to spar on equal terms.

float, sting is part of the Peters Contemporary Chamber Series.

Composer note
Composing music is a matter of engaging with the behavior of human bodies and minds situated in historical time and sonic space. Methodologically, float, sting embodies my three tropes of compositional engage- ment: first, adornment, or what Zora Neale Hurston called “decorating a decoration,” as realized in The Will To Adorn (2011), my work for sixteen instruments from 2011; and second, creolization, in which new music brings new modes of subjectivity to the fore. The third trope is less methodological than affective. This piece deploys the classic American strategy of musical depiction, as with Blind Tom’s 1863 piano work The Battle of Manassas, in which thunder, lightning, and the sounds of cannons are recalled via cluster-like sounds that presage by more than half a century early Henry Cowell and the Futurists, as well as Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony, Ives’s The Housatonic at Stockbridge, and Duke Ellington’s tone parallels to Harlem. Affectively, this new work’s blend of depiction and abstraction alternatively floats and stings — like Muhammad Ali, whose remarks about facing the feared Sonny Liston in 1964 remind one the spirit in which we can welcome new musical ideas and the need for change: “This chump has got everybody scared. Scared of what? Nothing to be scared of.”

— George Lewis