Biography

George E. LEWIS

© Eileen Barroso

George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist and trombonist. He is Professor of American Music at Columbia University and Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a corresponding member of the British Academy.

Other honors for George Lewis include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), and fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. 

Published by Edition Peters, his music is performed worldwide.  Lewis’s central areas of research include the history and criticism of experimental music, computer music, interactive media, and improvisation, particularly as these areas become entangled with the dynamics of race, gender, and decolonization. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of interactive computer music who develops programs that improvise together with human musicians. His books include A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volumes 1 & 2 (2016, co-edited with Benjamin Piekut), and Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023, co-edited with Harald Kisiedu). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College Of Florida, Birmingham City University, and Curtis Institute of Music, among others (https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis).

Work(s)

" Disputatio for sixteen players "

For ensemble

Ed. Wise Music Classical

2024 SELECTION

Disputatio continues my fascination with the classic American trope of depiction found in Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony, Charles Ives’s The Housatonic at Stockbridge (and many other works), the compositions of Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, Elliott Carter’s early string quartets, and Duke Ellington’s “tone parallels.”  Slightly revising an evocative concept from Kodwo Eshun, Disputatio is a kind of sonic speculative fiction that portrays a public philosophical disputation presented by the 18th century philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759).  Brought to Germany from a region in present-day Ghana, the noble family that Amo served allowed him to be educated. He completed his law school training at the University of Halle in 1729, and after further studies in philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, taught philosophy at the universities of Halle and Jena, before returning to Africa in 1747.

 

For my work Amo (2021), for five singers and live electronics, I created a multi-lingual text drawn from Amo’s Disputatio philosophica continens ideam distinctam eorum quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico (A Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body).  This work was composed for a defense by a Wittenberg philosophy student at which Amo himself presided.  Disputatio imagines what that defense might have been like— in my musical retelling, quite a lively, contentious, and perhaps even controversial one, as I imagine Amo’s philosophical disputations were.

George E. Lewis