04/23 @ 8:00pm - George Lewis and Damon Holzborn duo + Anne La Berge

George E. Lewis serves as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work as composer and improvisor includes electronic and computer music, computer-based installations, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 130 recordings. His published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes, and his widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), is a recipient of the American Book Award, the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award, and an Award for Excellence in Recorded Sound Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.

Professor Lewis came to Columbia in 2004, having previously taught at the University of California, San Diego, Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. He has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in the “Interarts Inquiry” and “Integrative Studies Roundtable” at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago).

Lewis has worked closely with film/video artists Stan Douglas and Don Ritter, as well as with contemporary musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, Bertram Turetzky, Count Basie, David Behrman, David Murray, Derek Bailey, Douglas Ewart, Evan Parker, Fred Anderson, Frederic Rzewski, Gil Evans, Han Bennink, Irene Schweizer, J.D. Parran, James Newton, Joel Ryan, Joelle Leandre, John Zorn, Leroy Jenkins, Michel Portal, Misha Mengelberg, Miya Masaoka, Muhal Richard Abrams, Richard Teitelbaum, Roscoe Mitchell, Sam Rivers, Steve Lacy and Wadada Leo Smith. His oral history is archived in Yale University’s collection of “Major Figures in American Music.”

Damon Holzborn

Damon Holzborn is a Brooklyn based improviser and composer who works primarily with electronics. In performance, he uses custom software and hardware, traditional effects and interactive processes to manipulate sound sources such as guitar and field recordings.
Holzborn is a founding member of the Trummerflora collective and has presented his work in the US, Mexico, Europe, Japan and South Africa.  He has performed as a solo artist and with several ensembles, including Donkey (more than a decade long collaboration with musician/filmmaker Hans Fjellestad), Quibble, and Titicacaman (with Nathan Hubbard and Marcelo Radulovich). He has performed and/or recorded with Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Miya Masaoka, Lê Quan Ninh, Eugene Chadbourne, Matt Ingalls, Andrea Polli, Mike Keneally, and the Nortec Collective. Holzborn also has often created music for dance, producing both custom compositions and improvised performances. Holzborn holds a BA in music from UCSD, where he studied composition and improvisation with George Lewis, and an MA in music composition from Columbia University, where he is currently pursuing his doctoral degree.

Anne La Berge

(b. Palo Alto, California, 1955)

Anne La Berge’s career as flutist/improviser/composer stretches across international and stylistic boundaries. Her most recent performances bring together the elements on which her international reputation is based: a ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, a penchant for improvising delicately spun microtonal textures and melodies, and her wholly unique array of powerfully percussive flute effects, all combined with electronic processing. Many of her compositions involve her own participation, though she has produced works intended solely for other performers, usually involving guided improvisation.The last few years have seen a new addition to her work: enigmatic texts which slide seamlessly in and out of her compositions and improvisations.

In addition to creating her own work she regularly performs in other artists’ projects in a range of settings from modern chamber music to improvised electronic music.While pursuing PhD research at the University of California, San Diego in the mid-1980s, she formed a duo with flutist John Fonville, commissioning new works and exploring extended techniques on flute, particularly with regard to microtonal scales. She moved to Amsterdam in 1989, where she has lived ever since.

In 1999, together with Steve Heather and Cor Fuhler, she founded Kraakgeluiden, a improvisation series based in Amsterdam, exploring combinations of acoustic instruments, electronic instruments and computers, and using real-time interactive performance systems. Many of the musical collaborations that have resulted have taken on a life beyond the Kraakgeluiden series, which ceased in 2006. La Berge’s own music has evolved in parallel, and the flute has become only one element in a sound world that includes computer samples, the use of spoken text and electronic processing.

She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec. and Data labels which include recordings as a soloist and with Ensemble Modern, United Noise Toys, Fonville/La Berge duo, Rasp/Hasp, Bievre/La Berge duo, Apricot My Lady and the Corkestra. Her music is published by Frog Peak Music and by Donemus.

Anne La Berge has regularly received funding from the Dutch Funds for Composers, the Funds for the Amateur and Podium Arts and the Amsterdam Funds for the Arts. She is currently on the board of directors of the Women in Music, the Trio Scordatura, the Royal Improvisers Orchestra and the Bewegende Kamer (The moving room) Foundations and is the co-director, with her husband David Dramm, of the voLsap Foundation. In 2009 she was invited to be one of the three jury members at the Gaudeamus International Music Week in The Netherlands.