Barwick Colloquium: George Lewis

"The Reincarnation of Blind Tom: Music, Machines, and Subjectivity"

Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. [Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920] portrays conflict between human capitalists and a new source of labor, the “robota,” a term that has come down to us as “robot.” Čapek’s model for the play, the robota system of Bohemian serfdom, was similar to the later American “sharecropping.” While Čapek does not directly refer to US chattel slavery, his play presents the robotic equivalent of “house” slaves, robots who do the cooking and cleaning, and “field” slaves, robots who work the farms and factories.

On occasion, US slave musicians would somehow break out from these restrictions. Perhaps the most celebrated 19th century example was composer-pianist Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins. Born under slavery in 1849, Wiggins performed at the White House at the age of ten, and became one of the most famous American composer-pianists of his time--probably the first Black American composer to achieve that status. His most famous piece, The Battle of Manassas, which he wrote at the age of 14 in 1863, uses notated piano clusters to evoke the sounds of bombs and battles, more than 50 years before Henry Cowell and the Futurists.

For both robots and slaves there is a denial of subjecthood and the capability for free expression. But critical theorist Fred Moten's important insight is that subjecthood can be heard. In R.U.R., the robots that could play music were considered more advanced, closest to being human. As a slave, Blind Tom was a mere commodity, but as a musician, as Moten says, "If the commodity could speak, it would be imbued with a certain spirit." Thus, for both Moten and Čapek, sound becomes a basis for subjectivity itself. This relationship between human and non-human subjectivities will be examined in this talk, with reference to musical and other artistic examples, including my 2024 composition, The Reincarnation of Blind Tom, a double concerto for symphonic orchestra, saxophone, and artificially intelligent pianist.

About the Speaker

George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an International Member of the British Academy, and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, the Society’s highest honor. Other honors for George Lewis include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), and fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A Yamaha Artist, Lewis is widely regarded as a pioneer of musical artificial intelligence for creating programs that improvise together with human musicians. His opera The Comet (2024) was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize.

Lewis’s central areas of research include the history and criticism of experimental music, computer music, artificial intelligence, interactive media, and improvisation, particularly as these areas become entangled with the dynamics of race, gender, and decolonization. His books include A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volumes 1 & 2 (2016, co-edited with Benjamin Piekut), and Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute (2023, co-edited with Harald Kisiedu). 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, Birmingham City University, and Curtis Institute of Music, among others.

Photo credit: Maurice Weiss