Amina Claudine Myers composing at the piano, New York, 1977. All photos courtesy of George Lewis.

Amina Claudine Myers is one of the major first-wave members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an experimental music collective that included Leo Smith, Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Thurman Barker, Henry Threadgill, and the future members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This group of young working-class artists of the 1960s barged into standard music histories by creating a hybrid of improvisation and composition that redefined the premises of experimental music-making. A virtuoso pianist and organist whose work is presented internationally and appears on scores of recordings, Myers draws upon her backgrounds in classical music and the music of the black church of her native rural South to create a recombinant sensibility within improvisation-imbued extended compositions. Her work is insistently post-genre at a moment when reinscriptive collage pretends to postmodern transgression.

A number of younger scholars working on new music have noted that widely accepted historicizations appear to premise the very identity of American experimental music upon the erasure of African-American forms, histories, and aesthetics, despite the ongoing centrality of blackness to the international identity of American music. As it happens, the form most often assumed as the “invisible man” of American experimentalism is that of a black woman. Among the 90+ oral histories I compiled for my forthcoming book on the AACM, Myers’s observations numbered among the most trenchant and vivid, and in this interview I wanted to explore the articulations between sound, history, and place that are central to her work. Along the way, I learned something about the limitations of standard interviewing practice as a tool for investigating complex issues that are difficult to verbalize—the questions with which thinkers have engaged throughout the centuries without identifying even provisionally satisfying answers. Equally unsatisfying, however, is the Armstrong-Wittgenstein Evasion, i.e., “If you have to ask, you’ll never know,” or “What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.” So this interview was an experiment in speaking past the silence, with a creative musician whose modesty and generosity always precedes her formidable reputation.

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Issue 97 Fall 2006