This week Pitt welcomes distinguished composer, musician, scholar, and MacArthur genius George E. Lewis, Professor of Music at Columbia University. I've posted some videos below to familiarize you with his dynamic work, which centers around questions of improvisation, collaboration, and technology. Our class will attend the "Sounding New Socialities" panel on Tues, Feb 23. See his full itinerary below!
The University of Pittsburgh Jazz Program in the Department of Music and Music on the Edge are pleased to welcome George Lewis as our Artist in Residence for a week of events as part of the university's Year of the Humanities, with support from the Humanities Center, College of Arts and Sciences, A&S Faculty Research and Scholarship Program, and Yamaha Pianos. George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, where he is head of the Music Composition Area and a member of the faculty in Historical Musicology. A recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, Lewis is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2015 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lewis is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and he has been widely recognized for his work in electronic music and computer-based multimedia installations.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Panel Discussion: Sounding New Socialities
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 6 p.m., Free
Find out more…
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Lecture: “A Power Stronger Than Itself”
with book signing to follow
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 7:30 p.m., Free
Find out more…
Friday, February 26, 2016
“Spooky Interaction”
Bellefield Hall Auditorium, 8 p.m., Free
Spooky Interaction is a live, transcontinental performance over Internet2 utilizing Lewis’ Voyager interactive improvisation software.
Find out more…
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Music on the Edge: The Chamber Music of George Lewis
The Andy Warhol Museum, 8 p.m.
Lecture: "Improvisation as a Way of Life"
George E. Lewis and the brilliant pianist Vijay Ayer in Concert
George E. Lewis ant Marina Rosenfeld play "Sour Mash" on computer and turntables
I enjoyed seeing George Lewis explain his thoughts in person. He has a very gentle demeanor and is an intriguing character. The panel left me ruminating on a lot of ideas I hadn’t thought before about music. I was struck by the idea of “spine-tingling moments” in music and these moments’ implications for the learning and pedagogical process. This image was a good manifestation in my mind of an “ah-ha” moment in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteFurther, this panel hammered on threads I began to see in the readings. It showed me how these theories in pedagogy and music are important to “life” in a broader since. I was struck by George Lewis’s words at the end of Collaborative Improvisation as Critical Pedagogy: “In this view, improvisation becomes a critical practice as well as a means to aesthetic statement—a space where discontinuity, disruption, support, and struggle become audible pathways to new experience”(46). What would it look life if struggle and disruption were valued and seen as production in early stages of education? I worked in a middle school last year, and when there are so many testing-based standards at that level, struggle is often feared and avoided by teachers and students alike.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSo I've been musing on the idea behind George Lewis's work with Voyager with regards to AfroFuturism. Lewis says that "Afro-Sonic Modernity has been where the liberal citizen subject meets the cyborg, where technology intersects with art, where commerce and culture collide, and where memories of ancestors pervade contacts with strangers.”
ReplyDeleteA few weeks ago I was watching a TED Talk about a computer installed with a program capable of creating poetry (http://www.ted.com/talks/oscar_schwartz_can_a_computer_write_poetry?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2016-01-20). The presenter performs a test to the audience where he provides samples from actual famous poets and poems created by the machine. Time after time, the audience guesses incorrectly. After reading Lewis’ comments I wonder how would this work with music where we the cyborg with human qualities. Could a computer compose it’s own music? How does this play into our ideologies of improvisation versus our expectations of performance?
I was unfamiliar with George Lewis before this week in class, in general, this course has exposed me to alternative modes of thinking as well as innovative scholars that resonate in a variety of field, but especially within sociology. The inclusion of Dr. Blee was awkward among the other ways in which the panel interacts with music, but she made solid points about understanding the way sound influences our interactions, even with something as simple as the bus. The conversation left me thinking about how to continue to make my work interdisciplinary to ensure that I am speaking to as many fields as possible and to acknowledge the ways that sounds or music may alter my work and influence my research participants. The discussion also left me thinking about the use of autotune and the massive backlash it had towards the end of the 00s. There was a suggestion that autotune was not an authentic form of music, especially for black hip hop artists, as opposed to seeing the way that we are able to use those alternative sounds to inform our more authentic selves. Also, I thought about the sounds that are included in beats that are considered sounds of a city to make an artist more authentic (Kendrick Lamar employs a lot of these sounds in Good Kid Maad City). To me, the inclusion of these sounds mean something significant about the way people in the African diaspora understand the world around them.
ReplyDelete-Candice C. Robinson
Thanks for the blog post buddy! Keep them coming...
ReplyDeletedaintree residence