"A glimpse of infinity: time and stillness in the music of Jeffrey Lewis"

Night fantasy, Care-charmer sleep, Dreams, dances and lullabies -
titles suggestive of a world created in the recesses of the unconscious
mind, a world of darkness and of suspended reality. I can think of no
living composer who more skilfully evokes that twilight world between
waking and sleeping than Jeffrey Lewis. His music catches the sometimes
vivid but more often elusive sense of the half-remembered dream; his trance-
like musical ideas create a landscape in which our very perception of the
passage of time is altered.
Jeffrey Lewis was born in South Wales in 1942 and studied music at the
University of Wales, Cardiff. Whilst he was still a student, his Chamber
Concerto and Fanfares with variations were performed by the BBC Welsh
Orchestra in Musica Viva concerts conducted by John Carewe. In 1966 he
was instrumental in forming the 66 Group which, with the composer as
pianist, gave the first performance of his Epitaphium - children of the sun,
broadcast from the 1967 Cheltenham International Festival of Music. On
completion of his postgraduate study in 1967, Lewis was awarded First Prize
in the Welsh Arts Council Young Composers Competition for his Trio for
flute, oboe and piano. On the recommendation of Sir Michael Tippett he was
awarded a Welsh Arts Council bursary to study composition with Ligeti and
Stockhausen at Darmstadt, with Boguslaw Schiffer in Krakow and with Don
Banks in London. He also undertook three periods of residence at the Paris
Centre de Musique as pianist with the Paris Chamber Ensemble. Lewis then
returned to the UK, first as lecturer in Composition and Experimental Music
at Leeds College of Music (1969-72) and then as Lecturer (later Senior
Lecturer) in Composition and Twentieth Century Music at the University of
Wales, Bangor (1973-93). He was awarded Second Prize in the International
Organist/ Composer Competition held in Zwolle, Holland, for Mutations II,
and First Prize in the Stroud Festival International Composers Competition
with his Tritoma for horn, violin and piano. Since then he has been com-
missioned by, amongst others, Gillian Weir, Thea King, Westminster Abbey
Choir and the Hilliard Ensemble.
Like a thread running through 40 years of composition are the themes of
night, sleep and dreams, and the workings of memory. Lewis's approach to
creating a language that articulates such themes is based on a deep under-
standing of our altered psychological experience of clock time when listening to music. Much of his music is concerned with creating a landscape
out of simple elements in which his ideas can evolve, free from
preconceptions of form. Indeed, those simple elements often appear initially
not only as a concentrated exposition of his musical materials but also as cells
which determine the structural direction of his compositions.