Mellon fellows George Lewis, Catherine Sullivan, and Sean Griffin have joined forces with the trail-blazing new music group, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), to fashion a multimedia opera that functions not as a history of the AACM, but as a “Bildungsoper”--a coming-of age opera of ideas, positionality, and testament.  

Composer George Lewis reflects on Afterword, an Opera as a “Bildungsoper”—a coming-of-age opera of ideas and testament—whose libretto he drew from his 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press). 

The Gray Center inaugurates its new streaming series Gray Sound Sessions with a singular event: Opera Povera's production of FULL PINK MOON: Opera Povera in Quarantine, a livestream fundraising opera performance of visionary composer Pauline Oliveros’s open-form people’s opera entitled “The Lunar Opera; Deep Listening For_Tunes.”

A durational virtual opera featuring vocalists, instrumentalists, noise practitioners, and performers of all kinds, FULL PINK MOON will feature a collective virtual performance by 250+ artists from around the world, and a pre-opera virtual discussion co-hosted by former Gray Center fellows George Lewis and Sean Griffin, artist Ron Athey, and additional guest curators and artists. Featuring an inclusive and collaborative score by Oliveros, FULL PINK MOON allows each performer to actively determine all creative choices: when and how to perform, choose cues, characters, costumes, and props, and harness creative performance power to reach out and share with each other in a time of separation and quarantine with a collective structure that Oliveros defined as “dedicated to tolerance and freedom.”