H. narrans (2020)
(for voice and chamber ensemble)

Composer note
The vocalist and performer Elaine Mitchener chose the title of an influential collection of essays by and about the Jamaican-British cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter (b.1928), "On Being Human as Praxis," as the theme for her project for Donaueschingen 2020. Mitchener asked me and the other composers in this project to work with texts by Wynter. Incidentally, this was the first time in the festival's hundred-year history in which Afrodiasporic composers were programmed. Rather than drawing from a single text, I concatenated a libretto from Wynter's massively interdisciplinary corpus of critical essays and interviews. For both the libretto and the sonic affect of the piece, I centered on one of Wynter's overarching concerns-the promise and potential of the human. I borrow Wynter's term for the modern human, Homo narrans, as the title of my composition. In H. narrans, the vocal performer acts as the herald: "We crossed a threshold / through the Word."

The Lascaux cave paintings had long marked Europe as the origin point of modern abstract symbolic thought in humans. In 1999, however, an abstract drawing discovered in Blombos Cave in South Africa, reliably dated at around 73,000 years old, or about the time that the most recent wave of modern humans began migrating out of Africa, provided the scientific basis for the decentering of Europe from the origin of the "human symbolic revolution." My libretto uses Wynter's celebration of the Blombos Cave discoveries to dramaturgically herald this paradigm shift. To develop "a science of being human," Wynter believes, is the crucial project of our age, the successful pursuit of which could finally free the human to be truly human – "Thank God Almighty, we're free at last."

George Lewis