George E. Lewis

George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, where he serves as Area Chair in Composition and Faculty in Historical Musicology. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work in chamber music, orchestral, operatic, and improvisative forms, as well as electronic and computer music and interactive multimedia installations, is documented on more than 150 recordings.

His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Musikfabrik, Mivos Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Spektral Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, JACK Quartet, and others, with commissions from American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, Ensemble Either/Or, Turning Point Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, IRCAM, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and others.  Lewis’s music is published by Edition Peters.

Currently a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study), Lewis has served as Fromm Visiting Professor of Music, Harvard University; Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley; Paul Fromm Composer in Residence, American Academy in Rome; Resident Scholar, and Center for Disciplinary Innovation, University of Chicago. His book, A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award; Lewis was elected to Honorary Membership in the Society in 2016. Lewis is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), and his opera Afterword (2015) has been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic.  Lewis holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University.  

(https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis)