The Studio Museum in Harlem

George E. Lewis

StudioSound invites musicians, producers and musical innovators to create original compositions inspired by the works on view. Travelogue, the latest iteration of StudioSound, presents at least eight hours of sonic environments, but was nearly twenty years in the making, according to George E. Lewis, its creator. Lewis’s career provided many opportunities for him to travel, and handheld cameras documented his voyages to places such as the Great Wall of China. On further reflection, Lewis says, “I pointed my camera at things that sounded good.” Nearly twenty years of that reflex produced Travelogue.

Lewis’s Travelogue is designed to create an environment that is influenced by the Studio Museum’s native sounds. It is not music so much as a sound composition. The sonic scenes do not impose, but blend and harmonize with the listener’s space. Travelogue is the work of an artist whose most famous creation was powered by programming and ideas of digital subjectivity turning his creative eye to simplicity, and producing something of wondrous complexity.

From Daniel Bernard Roumain’s classically inspired interpretation of Chris Ofili’s watercolors to DJ Scientific’s remix and reinvention of Harlem sounds, StudioSound activates the Museum’s lobby and adds a parallel dimension to the art and artists on view.

George E. Lewis serves as the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia. The recipient of a MacArthur “genius” 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, improvisor, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 120 recordings.