George Lewis

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 is a corresponding member of the British Academy. Other honors 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, Lewis’s music is performed worldwide, and his opera The Comet (2024) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer of interactive computer music, having developed programs that improvise in collaboration with human musicians. 

Lewis’s central areas of scholarship 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. 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 the Curtis Institute of Music, among others.