{"id":166393,"date":"2026-10-07T15:28:31","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T19:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/interviews-panm360\/george-lewis-interview-entrevue-quatuors-quartets-montreal\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T15:31:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T19:31:56","slug":"george-lewis-interview-entrevue-quatuors-quartets-montreal","status":"publish","type":"interviews","link":"https:\/\/panm360.com\/en\/interviews-panm360\/george-lewis-interview-entrevue-quatuors-quartets-montreal\/","title":{"rendered":"George Lewis: Scores of Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Montreal welcomed composer George Lewis last week, on the occasion of the Quebec Musiques Parall\u00e8les festival. The Bozzini Quartet invited us to listen actively (as no other way of listening is possible in the case of George Lewis) to two of the string quartets by the 74-year-old Afro-American. Exciting as well as demanding music, and which my report might interest you, here:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

READ MY REVIEW OF THE CONCERT DEDICATED TO GEORGE LEWIS’S QUARTETS <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the occasion, I had the pleasure of conversing with George Lewis, specifically on the subject of his quartets. Here is the summarised content of this interview.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PanM360 : You have written a work in 1988, Signifying Riffs, for string quartet and percussion. But yo don\u2019t consider it your first quartet, thus the \u2018\u20190.5\u2019\u2019 numbering, and the following ones who bear decimal numbers (1.5, 2.5, etc.). Why don\u2019t you consider this first attempt, even if it has accompanying percussion, not a \u2018\u2019full\u2019\u2019 quartet?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Lewis :  Well, it’s not a real quartet, it’s a quartet plus. So I didn’t think about it as being \u2018\u2019half a quartet\u2019\u2019, although that’s the joke really, but when I wrote the first proper string quartet, which was about 17 years later, that was the 1.5. So I thought, well, maybe this would be a string quartet plus, so I started calling them 1.5. And then just the nomenclatures continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PanM360 : You’ve written 1.5, 2.5 and then 4.5, but no 3.5. This one came afterwards. The reason? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Lewis : Pandemic. As simple as that. It delayed it for a few years. I started working on it before the 4.5, so\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PanM360 : The quartets are all written-through. No improvisation\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Lewis : Yes, well, most of my compositions are written out. That’s it. The vast majority of them, the ones for orchestra, the ones for chamber music, the ones for different forces, solo forces, they’re just written. You don’t have improvisation on everything. So I mean, it just happened that way. I wasn’t trying to, because Quartet 3.5 (recently premiered) does have improvisation, but that’s because they asked for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Normally these days when someone asks me to write a piece, I generally think of it as being a non-improvised piece, unless they specifically request it. But for the most part, nobody seems to be that concerned whether it’s improvised or not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PanM360 : All the quartets have titles. Are these titles related to the structure of the pieces in some way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George Lewis : People who know me a little bit, they know that I’m kind of a philosophy fanboy. I spend a lot of my time thinking about it, I am particularly influenced by the phenomenological tradition, continental philosophy, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Experiments in Living, the title of Quartet no 1.5, that’s a John Stuart Mill reference. But I don\u2019t really relate to this influencing the form or the structure of the piece. Sometimes it\u2019s just intuitive. Maybe 2.5 is more related to the structure. It is called Playing with Seeds and that does have a reference to improvisation, although there isn’t improvising in the piece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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