Ensemble Connect shares classical music with Skidmore, Saratoga Springs
New Class of Ensemble Connect Fellows Debuts First Virtual Performance
Ensemble Connect February 2025 Program
Friday, February 13, 2026
7:30 PM Performance
Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall
Arthur Zankel Music Center
CONCERT PROGRAM
GEORGE LEWIS | Broke (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)
VALERIE COLEMAN | Portraits of Langston
BARBER | Adagio for Strings
IVES | String Quartet No. 1, “From the Salvation Army” Suite
JOPLIN | The Entertainer, arr. Franz Beyer
JOPLIN | Paragon Rag, arr. William Zinn
Carnegie Hall’s versatile Ensemble Connect is celebrated for “fresh, exciting performances
charged with creativity, energy, and daring” (New York Classical Review). This program highlights the work of notable American composers, including the world
premiere of George Lewis’s Carnegie Hall–commissioned piece. The program also features
Valerie Coleman’s Portraits of Langston, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, selected rags by Joplin arranged for string quartet,
and Ives’s String Quartet No. 1, “From the Salvation Army,” offering a thoughtful
survey of American chamber music.
This event is free and open to the public; tickets required
Presented by the Department of Music and the Office of Special Programs
The biannual residency is made possible by the generous support of Skidmore alumna Beverly Sanders Payne, Class of 1959, and her late husband David B. Payne (October residency) and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation (February residency).
George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, and trombonist. He is the Edwin
H. Case Professor of American Music and Area Chair in Composition at Columbia University.
In 2020-21 he was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced
Study), and he currently serves as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary
Ensemble. He 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, a member
of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological
Society.
Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship
(2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis's work is presented by ensembles worldwide,
published by Edition Peters. A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer
in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians.
Lewis’s central areas of scholarship include the history and criticism of experimental music, computer music, interactive media, and improvisation, particularly as these areas become entangled with the dynamics of race, gender, and decolonization. His most frequently cited articles on these topics include “New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps” (VAN Outernational, 2020) and “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives” (Black Music Research Journal, 1996). His widely acclaimed 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 is the co-editor (with Harald Kisiedu) of the bilingual edited volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023), as well as (with Benjamin Piekut) the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis's many publications on technology include “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager” (Leonardo Music Journal, 2000) and “Why Do We Want Our Computers To Improvise?” (Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music, 2018). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College of Florida, and Birmingham City University, among others.
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