America, the changing same (2021)
(A variation on “America, The Beautiful”)

Composer note
This piece deploys one of American music’s most enduring tropes — that of depiction, centrally represented by Charles Ives, Blind Tom, Elliott Carter, Florence Price, and so many others. The single obsessive motif that dominates the arrangement constitutes what Duke Ellington might call a "tone parallel" to Amiri Baraka's influential 1966 essay, "The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)," which argues for a transhistorical essence of Afrodiasporic musical creativity. While I am suspicious of essentialisms, the George Floyd murder and the copycat responses by law enforcement that immediately followed the perpetrator’s conviction fueled a certain Afro-pessimism regarding the possibility of real change in America. This wariness is reflected in the piece, which converts the melody of "America, The Beautiful" into a kind of Schenkerian Ursatz; some notes are missing, but they can be redeemed when the country proves itself worthy of their return.

— George Lewis