Edition Peters, part of Wise Music Group, is pleased to announce a new long-term publishing relationship with composer George Lewis. Lewis has been affiliated with Edition Peters for several years and is now exclusively published out of Wise Music Group’s New York office. A composer of audacious works, a widely influential musicologist, and a pioneer of artificial intelligence in musical improvisation, Lewis is a MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Doris Duke Artist, a Yamaha Artist, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In addition to his prolific output as a composer, Lewis serves as Professor of Music at Columbia University and Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

“We are thrilled and extremely honored to be entering this new phase of our publishing relationship with the incomparable George Lewis,” says Vice President Peggy Monastra. “As a creator and advocate, George is an influential thinker and inspiring artist in the international musical community. We look forward to supporting his future commissions, furthering worldwide performances of his genre-defying compositions, and altogether supporting his rich and evolving catalog of music.”

“Since my first moments with Edition Peters, the visibility (and audibility!) of my music has been greatly enhanced,” says George Lewis. “I see an amazing future in this new development with the Wise team.”

Recently, Lewis' opera with librettist Douglas Kearney, The Comet, was presented at Lincoln Center’s Running AMOC* Festival to sold-out audiences after being named a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Integrated with excerpts from Monteverdi and Busenello’s L'incoronazione di Poppea on a rotating stage in Yuval Sharon and AMOC*’s production of “Comet/Poppea”, The Comet is “a gem of brooding melancholy […] it is moving to see Lewis’ work in effect demand a place next to Monteverdi, and earn it” (The New York Times).

Lewis has written prolifically for the concert hall over the past several seasons, with premieres by the Grossman Ensemble (...and other spirits for sinfonietta), the SWR Symphony (The Reincarnation of Blind Tom, a double concerto for AI pianist and improvising human soloist), and the ORF Radio Vienna Symphony Orchestra (Your Network is Unstable, a symphonic evocation of “our endemic condition of instability”) showcasing the intellectual breadth and depth of Lewis’ music.

Upcoming highlights include a quartet concerto for Yarn/Wire and orchestra, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and the Philharmonie Luxembourg’s rainy days Festival, which premieres in New York April 8-10, 2026 under the baton of Kwamé Ryan; the UK premiere of ...and other spirits by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in June 2026; a new work for keyboards and live electronics for Royal Holloway, University of London’s Cyborg Soloists project that draws on Lewis’ decades of trailblazing experience in improvising AI systems; and the world premiere of Différance, a duet commissioned by cellist Anssi Karttunen and organist Olivier Latry, and composed in honor of Kaija Saariaho, whom Lewis befriended at IRCAM in the 1980s.

A sampling of George Lewis’ extensive catalog of music follows.

Orchestra

Weathering (17’)

Minds in Flux (27’)

The Reincarnation of Blind Tom (20’)

Your Network is Unstable (14’)

Ensemble

The Will to Adorn (15’)

Disputatio (17’)

Opera

Afterword (1h 50’)

Lewis’ central areas of scholarship include the history and criticism of experimental music, computer music, interactive media, and improvisation, particularly as these areas intersect with the dynamics of race, gender, and decolonization. His most frequently cited articles on these topics include “New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps” (VAN Outernational, 2020) and “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” (Black Music Research Journal, 1996). His widely acclaimed 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 is the co-editor (with Harald Kisiedu) of the bilingual edited volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023), as well as (with Benjamin Piekut) the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis' many publications on technology include “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager” (Leonardo Music Journal, 2000) and “Why Do We Want Our Computers To Improvise?” (Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music, 2018). 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, and Birmingham City University, among others.

For more information, please contact your local Wise Music Promotion Team; Contact Us.

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