Composer and musicologist George E. Lewis discusses the late African American composer Julius Eastman, whose work is featured in The Otolith Group’s video installation, The Third Part of the Third Measure. Eastman’s aesthetic of militant minimalism places Afrodiasporic tropes at the center of classical music, challenging its identity as a celebration of the European sonic diaspora and proposing a creolized musical subject that proclaims that black queer liveness matters.

Lewis is Professor of American Music at Columbia University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. He authored A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida and Harvard University.