Un petit brouillard cérébral (2020)

Composer Note

One of the frequent topics around composing under pandemic lockdown conditions involved a hopeful, optimistic gloss. People very confidently said, “Well, here you are, you’re at home, you can’t go anywhere. So you’re going to get all this work done.” Well, it turned out that many people didn’t get the work done. For some reason it was difficult to stay tuned in. A French colleague of mine called this simply “la maladie.”

There’s always somebody who can overcome these things relatively easily, but I wasn’t one of those. In fact, it was only in the last few weeks before the piece was due that I was able to even think about writing it. But you have to try to make something. So I made recourse to the age-old American trope of depiction, from Blind Tom to Amy Beach to Charles Ives to Duke Ellington. The piece itself is an example of Ellington’s “tone parallels,” providing a sense of what it was like to be swimming around in the brain fog, fighting for focus.

— George Lewis