This past summer composer George Lewis wrote a fascinating New York Times article called “Lifting the Cone of Silence From Black Composers.” In the article he wrote of composer/performer Nathalie Joachim’s wonderful Grammy-nominated album Fanm d’Ayiti (“Women of Haiti,” 2019 New Amsterdam Records) that she brings “musical Minimalism home to the African diaspora from which it has drawn so much” (Ibid). Musical minimalism (or probably more accurately post-minimalism), while only a part of my overall compositional voice and inspiration, is also probably my ur-language. Dr. Lewis’s framing of Joachim’s music could also be said about a lot my own music beginning in the late 1990’s and the beginning of my ensemble Numinous in 2000, to my albums The Music of Joseph C Phillips Jr (2003, Numen Records), Vipassana (2009, Innova Recordings), Changing Same (2015, New Amsterdam Records), and into today with my latest album, my monoopera called The Grey Land (2020, New Amsterdam Records). Much has been made of the earliest adherents of musical minimalism being drawn to and inspired by jazz music and musicians. It is well known that composers Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass have all discussed drawing inspiration from many jazz figures such as John Coltrane, Kenny Clarke, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis (even the later post-minimalist composer John Adams, has mentioned how the music of Duke Ellington and jazz influenced his early musical development). And many of those early minimalists also were drawn to music from various cultures from around the world. Whether from India or Indonesia or Ghana, the early minimalists often gleaned musical ideas and concepts from those cultures into their own music and philosophies. The broader expressions of musical colonialism and questions of power dynamics and control have also always been in the histories of those earliest minimalists: the fine line between inspiration, influence, and theft; what are the appropriate ways to acknowledge and attribute cultural source materials; what limited resources are being consumed in musical circles and who is let in and who is left out of those circles. And these are the difficult questions in new music, and classical music in general, that are often veiled from more public attention and scrutiny (the recent controversy about Steve Reich has brought many of these questions to the surface—the classical music industry, like the country writ large, has begun a reckoning which may bear a long-delayed fruit of inclusion and acceptance of music from the many diverse and powerful voices which have been ignored by the establishment for far too long).((Will Robin, https://soundexpertise.org/steve-reich-and-the-politics-of-race-with-sumanth-gopinath/)) So when I arrived in New York City in the late 1990s to become a composer, some of these questions and thoughts were in my mind as I was developing what kind of music I wanted to compose and how I was going to have it heard. While I was always more interested in and influenced by classical music, I was also always interested in jazz and/or improvised music, as well as popular and film music and sought to bring together those worlds in my music. I love John Adams (both of them); I love Maria Schneider; I love Gustav Mahler; I love Prince, and much more. To me there were clear musical connections between minimalism and jazz, and some popular music as well, but I did not want to compose music that was a pastiche or “third stream,” as most compositions in those veins struck me as a sort of Frankenstein. Although the concept of fusing influences into one style I did find intriguing, that music’s ‘otherness’—neither fully “classical” nor fully “jazz”—while sometimes interesting, I found was also never fully satisfying, musically or aesthetically. So in those early years of my composing, in my mind at least, I thought tongue-and-cheekily if producers Gamble and Huff and their “Philly Sound” of the 1970s sought to “put a bow tie on the funk” and to make it “elegant” ((“Make it Funky” episode (Chapter 8) of the David Espar, Rock and Roll documentary, https://vimeo.com/399998317)) then somehow I was going to try to ‘bring the funk to minimalism, to make it turn home again to its African diasporaic roots (this was long before I had heard of composer Julius Eastman who was in the same circles as those early minimalists). Author Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” So I was always seeking something different within my compositions, but back in those early days starting in the late 1990s, I still couldn’t quite articulate or fully realize what that different or something was actually going to be. Nevertheless I continued searching, writing and finding parts of my vision, continually looking for my own way and my own voice, and modifying the above quote to, ‘if there’s music that I want to hear, but it hasn’t been written yet, then I must write it.’ And I do! My philosophy has changed over the years and has both broadened and become more specific; I now described what I write as mixed music. For my Master’s thesis, The Music Composition Miscēre, the Historicity of Mixed Music and New Amsterdam Records in the Contemporary New York City Mixed Music Scene, I wrote: “…a disparate group…composers and musicians eschewing easy classification in their quest to create music that organically fuses elements of many different styles into something completely personal, different, and new. While terms such as alt-classical or indie classical are used to identify a narrow sub-section of this aesthetic, I created the term, mixed music, as an umbrella term that more broadly describes any type of music that transcends the rigid definition of a singular genre. This openness between genres seems to be de rigueur over much contemporary music: classical composers and ensembles openly flirt with popular music (Nico Muhly, Signal, Alarm Will Sound); jazz musicians either influenced by soul/hip-hop artists (Roy Hargrove, Robert Glasper, Vijay Iyer) or contemporary pop and rock music (The Bad Plus, Brad Mehldau, Darcy …
