GEORGE E. LEWIS is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and presented by Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Mivos Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Spektral Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, and others. His 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 was elected to Honorary Membership in the Society in 2016.  Lewis is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016), and his opera Afterword (2015), commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, has been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic.

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All lectures and the public conversation are free and open to the public.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5 — 1pm - 2:30pm
Upson Room in Walter Library

with
GEORGE E. LEWIS
ZENZELE ISOKE (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies)
NAIMAH PETIGNY (Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies) &
ELLIOTT POWELL (American Studies)

The work of the African American minimalist composer- performer Julius Eastman, who passed away in untimely fashion in 1990, has recently come to renewed prominence. The work presents a trenchant example of how queer aesthetic of music can be self-fashioned in engagement with race, sexuality, and the political. This work will serve as one touchstone for our conversation.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5 — 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Upson Room in Walter Library

with
GEORGE E. LEWIS
DIYAH LARASATI (Theatre Arts & Dance) &
SCOTT CURRIE (School of Music)

This conversation questions assumptions of a bright line separating creative work from academic research, exploring how art making can be developed through combinations of ethnographic method, historical and archival work, analysis of practice, and critical examination. The results of these explorations can serve in turn as the impetus for new modes of academic writing.

Presented as part of IAS THURSDAYS with reception to follow

THURSDAY, APRIL 6 — 3:30pm - 5pm
Crosby Seminar Room, Northrop Auditorium

In 1920 the Czech writer Karel Čapek experienced an early success with the play R.U.R., which posed interaction and conflict between human capitalists and a new source of labor, the “robota,” which has come down to us in various languages as “robot.” Most English- language critics have been content with a translation of the Czech word as “forced labor,” but parallels to the condition of slaves under the US chattel system stand out at various points in the play. Fred Moten points out that the commodity status assigned to slaves is transcended when the “object, the commodity, sounds.” Thus, juxtaposing the famous slave composer-pianist Blind Tom with Rossum’s Universal Robots provides the basis for a complex critical assemblage comprising technology, blackness, liveness, and the sounding subject.

THURSDAY, APRIL 6 – 8:00pm - 9:00pm
Room 225 of Ferguson Hall

with
GEORGE E. LEWIS
DOUGLAS EWART (Composer & Improviser) &
MANKWE NDOSI (Songmaker & Culture Weaver)

FRIDAY, APRIL 7 — 1:00pm - 2:30pm
710 Social Sciences Building

with
GEORGE E. LEWIS
DOUGLAS EWART (Composer & Improviser)
MICHAEL GALLOPE (Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature)
GUERINO MAZZOLA (School of Music) &
MANKWE NDOSI (Songmaker & Culture Weaver)

Important new scholarly discussions of improvisation are now taking place not only in music, but across a large range of fields in the humanities, arts, and the social and natural sciences. This conversation will provide both an introduction to the field of critical improvisation studies, and a view of the cross-disciplinary relation that marks scholarly engagement with improvisation today.

FRIDAY, APRIL 7 — 3:00pm - 4:30pm
710 Social Sciences Building

with
GEORGE E. LEWIS
SUMANTH GOPINATH (School of Music) &
DIANE WILLOW (Art)

Three artist-scholars discuss the impact of recent digital technologies for sound production and dissemination on the relation of sound not only to new aesthetics but to new imaginings of the social, cultural, and political world.

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This event is made possible with the generous support of The Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts (z.umn.edu/WintonChair & facebook.com/WintonChair). The Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts was established in October 1987 to encourage innovative, distinctive research in the liberal arts that questions established patterns of thought by bringing  diverse, innovative, and engaged scholars, artists, and performers to campus to engage our community in conversation around their work for periods ranging from a few days to a year. Please direct additional inquiries, requests, and comments to the Faculty Committee for the Winton Chair at winton@umn.edu.