George Lewis

George Lewis grew up in a racially segregated Chicago neighborhood. Able to read college-level texts from the age of five, a teacher at his public school exhorted his parents to send him to the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where he took classical trombone lessons and played in the school orchestra and concert band, and the jazz band, where he took improvisation lessons.

In 1969, Lewis entered Yale, but in 1971 he took a gap year in Chicago, joining the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In 1974, Lewis graduated from Yale with a degree in philosophy, and moved back to Chicago. During these early years, Lewis forged lasting collaborative and personal relationships with AACM composers Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and Douglas R. Ewart, as well as Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Musica Elettronica Viva, Irene Schweizer, John Zorn, Misha Mengelberg, Joëlle Léandre, Steve Lacy, and the Globe Unity Orchestra. In 1976 he toured Europe with Anthony Braxton, and in 1977, he released his first recording, The George Lewis Solo Trombone Record.

Inspired by encounters with the League of Automatic Music Composers, David Behrman, and Richard Teitelbaum, in 1979 Lewis premiered his first computer piece, The Kim and I, at The Kitchen in New York. From 1982 to 1985 he was at IRCAM, where in 1984 he composed and programmed Rainbow Family, one of the first works of rule-based artificial intelligence created at IRCAM. The system analyzed human performance in real time, generating complex responses and creating independent behaviors.

In 1986 at the Studio voor Elektro-Instrumentale Muziek in Amsterdam Lewis developed the Voyager system, in which human improvisors interacted with a computer-synthesized improvising orchestra. In 2004 Voyager made its Carnegie Hall debut on a Yamaha Disklavier in Lewis’s Virtual Concerto, for orchestra and soloist. From 2022 to 2025 Lewis worked with hybrids of rule-based and machine-learning strategies in Forager (2022) for quintet and a Voyager pianist, and SoVo (2025), created with Damon Holzborn and IRCAM researchers Gérard Assayag and Marco Fiorini.

Lewis’s installations include Algorithme et Kalimba, created in 1985 for the Musée des Sciences et des Industries La Villette, where visitors played on a physical mbira which elicited computer-generated musical and video responses; Rio Negro I (1992) and Rio Negro II (2007), for robotically controlled bamboo soundmakers, created with Douglas R. Ewart (and later, Douglas Repetto); Information Station No. 1 (2000), a digital documentary on the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant in San Diego, California, where visitor gestures affected sound and image; Ikons (2010), commissioned by the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, an interactive sculpture with artist Eric Metcalfe, in tandem with a work for eight instruments by Lewis; Whispering Bayou (2015), an interactive video and sound installation created with Carroll Parrott Blue and Jean-Baptiste Barriere for the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; and Remains of the Sky (2018) for James Turrell’s Twilight Epiphany installation at Rice University, in which daily weather data from Houston, Texas was translated into forty minutes of shifting colors, rhythms, and multi-channel sound.

The most frequently performed of Lewis’s instrumental works include String Quartet 4.5, “Partial Truth” (2022), for the JACK Quartet; Mnemosis (2012) for septet, and Born Obbligato (2013), a dialogue with the Beethoven Septet Op. 20; North Star Boogaloo (1996) for percussionist Steven Schick and fixed media, Anthem (2011), for voice, electronics, and Ensemble Wet Ink, and The Recombinant Trilogy, three works for solo instrument and spatialized electronics written between 2014 and 2017. His large ensemble works include The Will to Adorn (2011), for the International Contemporary Ensemble, The Deformation of Mastery (2022), for the London Sinfonietta, and Disputatio (2023), for Klangforum Wien.

His orchestral works include Minds in Flux, for orchestra and interactive electronics, for the BBC Proms 2021, and The Reincarnation of Blind Tom (2024), double concerto for human and AI for the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024, with saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and a Voyager AI pianist as soloists. Lewis’s works for improvisors include Shadowgraph, 5 (1977), Artificial Life 2007 (2007), and Creative Construction SetTM (2015). His vocal-dramatic works include Afterword, an opera (2015), on the AACM, for the International Contemporary Ensemble, and Comet/Poppea (2024), directed by Yuval Sharon, combining Lewis’s chamber opera The Comet (2024), a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize, and Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea.

Since 2004, Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and since 2023 he is Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. From 1991 to 2003, Lewis was a tenured professor in Music at the University of California, San Diego. Between 1994 and 2017 Lewis served as Fromm Visiting Professor of Music, Harvard University; Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor, University of California, Berkeley; Professor of Music/Sound, Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College; Darius Milhaud Professor in Composition, Mills College, and other positions.

Lewis is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the British Academy, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), and the Alpert Award in the Arts (1999). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and others.