“In fact, improvisation is everywhere—but it’s very hard to see.” - George Lewis

Dal Niente recorded the music of George Lewis to wide acclaim in 2017, and in George the ensemble has found a fellow traveler: a composer whose music is indescribably fun to listen to and perform, in part because our ears and minds can interpret the same collection of musical materials so differently every time.

At the Phillips Collection, the group presents a wide-ranging portrait of Lewis, including a work written for the Ensemble, Assemblage, and earlier works Mnemosis (2012) and Hexis (2013). The program will showcase Lewis’s vast compositional ideas and deft synthesis of influences from different fields, from the collage techniques of 20th-century visual art to the rhetorical traditions of ancient Rome, and concepts drawn from recent philosophy and social theory. Part of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition.