...ohne festen Wohnsitz (2026)

Composer note

For the 2020-21 academic year, I was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), working on what became the opera The Comet/Poppea (2024). In Berlin, I visited SAVVY Contemporary, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2009 by the scientist and curator Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, a major cultural figure in Germany who now directs the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. I discovered that SAVVY had an ongoing project on the 18th century Afro-German philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759), of whom I had never heard. Indentured as a child and brought to Germany from a region in present-day Ghana, the noble family that Amo served supported him in completing law school training at the University of Halle in 1729. After completing a magister in philosophy from the University of Wittenberg, Amo taught philosophy there, as well as at the universities of Halle and Jena, before returning to Africa in 1747. Amo’s work was almost certainly known to his younger German colleagues, including Immanuel Kant.

The German comparative literature scholar Ottmar Ette has described Amo’s work as “eine Philosophie ohne festen Wohnsitz,” a philosophy without a fixed abode. This early understanding of Germany, Europe, and indeed the world, in terms of new modes of mobile relation seems relevant to our contemporary situation, in which we all suddenly find ourselves ohne festen Wohnsitz. The recognition of this psychological and physical fact of contemporary life animates this new work, as well as the earlier works in what has now become my Amo Series: Amo (2021), for five voices and spatialized electronics; Disputatio (2023) for sixteen players; The Faculty of Sensing (2024), for woodwind quintet; and …and other spirits (2025), for thirteen instruments.

Survival often presents us with the imperative of migration—for example, the Great Migration of African Americans, the largest and longest internal migration in U.S. history, an Occupy-the-North-style improvisation of distributed intelligence pursued over half a century by ordinary working-class African Americans. The Great Migration transformed African Americans into mobile subjects who become reconfigured in novel and enduring ways, in the wake of a collective experimental action, the outcome of which couldn't be seen in advance, taking place over more than half a century.

I always ask people, “If we get what we want, what will it sound like?” While Chinua Achebe confronts the consequences of social conflict and human aspiration under the colonial yoke, the Amo series represents my own contemporary experience with the struggles over decolonization and creolization in contemporary music and culture more generally. I aim to remind listeners of our endemic condition of instability, to foster not only a subliminal psychological discouragement of complacency, but also a celebration of mobility. The Amo series asks listeners to consider the consequences of being “no longer at ease” in an ever-unstable world.

— George Lewis