David Lewiston - Biography

Biography

He earned a graduate degree in 1953 from Trinity College of Music in London, where he studied piano, conducting, orchestration, harmony, and counterpoint. He later studied composition in New York with Thomas de Hartmann, who had been a devotee of G. I. Gurdjieff. For more than a decade he served as one of the musicians at the Gurdjieff Foundation, New York. Finding it difficult to make a living as a musician he worked as a journalist for more than a decade but abandoned it to return to music, traveling widely to record traditional music.

His first recordings were made in Bali in 1966, and the initial album from these recordings, Music from the Morning of the World, was released in 1967. He has made extensive recordings of Tibetan Buddhist rituals, most notably of the chordal chanting of Gyuto Tantric University (one of the great colleges of the Gelugpa, the Established Church of Tibetan Buddhism), and the Drukpa Kagyu rituals of Khampagar Gompa, as well as music from many other countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, India, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Lahul, Himachal Pradesh in India's West Himalaya, Gilgit and Hunza in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, Darjeeling and Sikkim in the East Himalaya, the Republic of Georgia, and Morocco.

His recordings of the '60s and '70s were made at a significant juncture, when lightweight portable recording equipment had matured sufficiently to allow excellent recordings to be made in remote places, and just before the traditional music of these places suffered the ravages of globalization.

He lives in Maui, Hawaii, where he is currently working on archiving his recordings and other materials collected during his life's work.