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