June in Buffalo 2025: George Lewis

The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music is excited to welcome George Lewis as a senior faculty member at June in Buffalo 2025.

Few figures embody the restless spirit of experimental music quite like George Lewis. A towering presence in contemporary composition, interactive electronics, and improvisation, Lewis continually pushes at the boundaries of what music can be. His work spans orchestral writing, computer music, and spontaneous performance, all underpinned by a deep engagement with technology and its creative possibilities.

A longtime faculty member at Columbia University, Lewis has mentored generations of composers, many of whom have gone on to shape the landscape of new music themselves. His 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself is a landmark study of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), of which he has been a key figure since the 1970s. More recently, Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today (2023, Volke Verlages) “presents unique new perspectives on Afrodiasporic contemporary composers active between 1960 and the present… [engaging] with opera, orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and electroacoustic music, as well as sound art, conceptual art, and digital intermedia, revealing Afrodiasporic new music as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation that offers new subjects, histories, and identities.” For more on his contributions to music, see his MacArthur Foundation page here.

But Lewis is not just a historian of experimentalism—he is one of its most vital practitioners. Recent works such as Minds in Flux (2021), premiered at the BBC Proms, exemplify his continued fascination with real-time electronics, spatialized sound, and improvisatory structures. His collaborations with cutting-edge ensembles—from Ensemble Dal Niente to the International Contemporary Ensemble—reflect his ever-expanding sonic palette. We are excited to have him bring his multifaceted expertise to masterclasses and lecture this summer.!

The Recombinant Trilogy, on New Focus Recordings

Minds in Flux, BBC Proms

 

A Visit to Ciminelli Hall with Tomás Henriques

 🎵Meet Me in Ciminelli, Meet Me at the Hall… 🎶

The Center is pleased to announce a fruitful collaboration has begun through a co-sponsored event, our first of the new academic year. The graduate composers of the UB Music Department made a trip to Ciminelli Hall at UB’s fellow SUNY school, Buffalo State, to hear two presentations by Buffalo State professor Tomás Henriques (PhD in Music Composition, UB ‘97), one about his own musical practice and composition, and the other a talk on spatialized audio focused on its realization in Ciminelli Hall. Dr. Henriques specializes in electronic-human musical interfaces, most notably musical instruments which while electronic in nature provide haptic (physical) feedback to performers similar to videogame controllers or a buzzing cell phone.  Not only does he fabricate internationally acclaimed new hardware (2010 Guthman Award), Dr. Henriques has a unique technological skillset, allowing him to match his excellent hardware with his own excellent software, writing programs to take advantage of his invented instruments or which are themselves instruments, as well as writing CIM, a software system which allows the integration of Ciminelli Hall’s three different speaker systems.

Ordinarily, speaker systems which are themselves controlled by proprietary software, such as the Yamaha AFC (“Active Field Control”) system, cannot exchange information or be controlled by third parties. Yet, through his own communication skills, persistence, and technological wizardry, Dr. Henriques has managed to integrate the three speaker systems, controlling them through bespoke software. The graphical, intuitive interface he fashioned fascinated the UB composers. CIM is able to move a sound’s source anywhere in the concert hall, from a far back corner to the stage, at almost any speed. Multiple spatial effects, including bouncing a sound source off a wall, the Doppler effect, and even a sonic game of Pong, are all possible.

“Ciminelli Hall is one of Buffalo’s best-kept secrets,” he said.

“But, you don’t want it to be?” this author asked.

“No – tell everyone!” Henriques replied.

After the presentations, two fifth-year PhD candidates were persuaded to consider bringing their dissertation works to the hall in the next year – Lihuen Sirvent (title TBD for chamber ensemble, electronics, spatialized sound, video) and Jonathan Rainous (Meeting Place, ca. 50 minutes, for solo sax and electronics, performance in late spring or early summer). Stay tuned for performance details and other collaborative efforts!

 Double Slide Controller, Song of Solomon

 

 Sonik Spring Demonstration