Piano Trio No. 1 (2023)
("Music of Friends")

Composer Note

In his insightful book, Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works (2016), music theorist Edward Klorman advances a notion of “multiple agency,” which positions music notation as a means of mimetically portraying the inner motivations and agencies of performers as an aspect of social intercourse.

Exploring real-time social and sonic connections among performers has been a vital concern in my music, whether in improvisative acts between humans (or between humans and improvising musical AIs) or in a non-improvised context, as with this piano trio. A live musical performance involves not only the expression of both group and collective personalities among the performers, but also the expression of personality by each and every listener (including the musicians), through how and what they choose to hear.

In 1968, Frederic Rzewski declared in his "Parma Manifesto" that the music of Musica Elettronica Viva was "based on friendship. This element of friendship is communicated in the music; it cannot be concealed…Any unfriendly act on the part of some individual threatens the strength of the music we are all trying to create.” Thus, in the music of friends, there are also opportunities for empathy for both audience and musicians through what the sociologist Alfred Schutz has referred to as “the partaking in common of different dimensions of time simultaneously lived through by the participant.” The result is the achievement of community.

The composition was created expressly for the amazing Merz Trio. I would also like to thank Debra Kinzler for creating the opportunity for me to create in a new medium.

— George Lewis