George Lewis

George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and Area Chair in Composition. 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, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015).

A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvised forms has been presented by ensembles worldwide, and he is widely regarded as a pioneer of interactive computer music, creating programs that improvise in concert with human musicians. His music is published by Edition Peters.

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 (with Benjamin Piekut) is the co-editor of the two-volume “Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies” (2016). He holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Birmingham City University, among others

music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis

As of March 2022