The Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble George Lewis will present a lecture with Oberlin's Composition, TIMARA and Musicology departments in Clonick Hall.
This event is free and open to the public. It is part of a series of residency events with George Lewis during Black History Month.
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George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case
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. 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). His opera The
Comet (2024) was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize. 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, Birmingham
City University, and Curtis Institute of Music, among others
