ISSUE Member Event: Conversation with Christian Wolff & George Lewis / “What If?” Open Rehearsal

Friday, March 8th at 8pm, ISSUE invites members, students, and special guests to experience an open rehearsal of the newly commissioned work “What If?” by String Noise Sounds, composed specifically for this occasion by Christian Wolff in advance of his 90th birthday celebration at Judson Memorial Church the following evening. This special Member Event–which also marks the day of Christian’s birthday–will include an exclusive interview between Wolff and visionary scholar and composer, George Lewis. 

Lewis, who wrote the foreword to Occasional Pieces: Writings and Interviews, 1952-2013 (a comprehensive collection of Wolff’s writings published by Oxford University Press), will guide us through what rehearsing and preparing a world premiere entails through the lens of one composer to another.

Christian Wolff (born 1934, Nice, France) is a composer, teacher and sometime performer. Since 1941 he has lived in the United States. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition briefly with John Cage, in whose company, along with Morton Feldman, then David Tudor and Earle Brown, his work found encouragement and support, as it did subsequently from association with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, and with Merce Cunningham and his dance company. As an improviser he has played with the English group AMM, Christian Marclay, Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe, Steve Lacy, Larry Polansky and Kui Dong. From 1971 to 1999 he taught classics, comparative literature and music at Dartmouth College.

George E. Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University, Area Chair in Composition, and member of the faculty in Historical Musicology, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society. Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019). 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 notated and improvisative forms is documented on more than 150 recordings. His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Musikfabrik, Mivos Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Spektral Quartet, and others; his opera Afterword (2015) has been performed in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic. He is the author of the award-winning book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press 2008), and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). An Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University. Lewis’s music is published by Edition Peters.

All participating artist bios can be found here.