Wendy Evans Joseph & Jeffrey Ravetch
and
CALL//City as Living Laboratory
Invite you to a dinner and conversation with
Richard Sennett, Sociologist
and
George Lewis, Composer & Musicologist
Reflecting on how collaboration, co-production, and improvisation are essential to addressing the complex challenges of our time – including climate change – and how creative artists are essential to envision and implement resilient and sustainable cities. They will discuss how the collaborative and responsive skills of artists can help open up new and powerful strategies for living and working cross-disciplines and cultures – racial, ethnic, religious, and economic.
6PM Wednesday, December 4, 2019
Park Avenue
Exact address provided with ticket purchase.
Tickets $350 per person
Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago. At an early age he became engaged with music, particularly the cello, attending the Juilliard School in New York, where he worked with Claus Adam, cellist of the Juilliard Quartet. A hand injury put an end to his musical career. He briefly attended the University of Chicago, then entered Harvard, studying history with Oscar Handlin, sociology with David Riesman, and philosophy with John Rawls.
Over the course of the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labor, and social theory. His books include The Fall of Public Man, Together, The Craftsman, Building and Dwelling, Families Against the City, The Hidden Injuries of Class, Authority, The Corrosion of Character, Respect, and The Culture of the New Capitalism.
He has had a public career, first as founder of the New York Institute for the Humanities, then as President of the American Council on Work. For the last three decades, he has served as a consultant to various bodies within the United Nations; most recently, he wrote the mission statement for Habitat III, the United Nation's environmental congress. Seven years ago, he created Theatrum Mundi, a research foundation for urban culture, whose board of trustees he now chairs.
Among other awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, George Lewis graduated from Yale University in 1974 with a BA in philosophy. Since 2004, he has served as Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University in New York City, where he is part of the faculty in Composition and Historical Musicology. Lewis is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019). Lewis's work in chamber music, opera, and symphonic forms, as well as computer-based multimedia installations and improvisative musics, is documented on more than 150 recordings, presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain, London Philharmonia Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, and others. He has collaborated with many exploratory musicians, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Derek Bailey, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, Gil Evans, Douglas R. Ewart, Steve Lacy, Joëlle Léandre, Misha Mengelberg, Roscoe Mitchell, Evan Parker, Irene Schweizer, and John Zorn, and is considered a pioneer of interactive computer music with his Voyager series of virtual improvisors. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis is the author of the award-winning A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press 2008), and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh (2015), New College of Florida, (2017) and Harvard University (2018).New York City Public Design Commission