4720-120 Hargrove Road. Raleigh
NC 27616
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Performer Bios
Dorothy Lewis-Griffith, pianist
Dorothy Lewis-Griffith was born in High Point, North Carolina. She began her musical studies when she was four in both piano and accordion. At ten, she studied intensively at the Pietro Deiro Accordion Conservatory in New York City’s Greenwich Village for eight weeks. After that experience she concentrated on the more challenging piano, and when she was fourteen, she made her orchestral debut with the North Carolina Symphony. Between junior and senior years in high school, Ms. Lewis-Griffith won a scholarship with James Friskin at the Chautauqua Institution.
With Beveridge Webster she earned undergraduate and master’s degrees at The Juilliard School. She continued studies under a Fulbright-Hays Grant, first at the Conservatoire Nationale de Paris with Marcel Ciampi and later at the École Normale de Musique with Jules Gentil. During that time, she competed and won a prize in the Geneva International Piano Competition. As a result, Ms. Lewis-Griffith was a sponsored candidate to the first Rio de Janeiro International Piano Competition the following year.
Later she earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano performance from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. There she worked with Elizabeth Katzenellenbogen, Konrad Wolff, and Leon Fleisher.
Ms. Lewis-Griffith has served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin-Superior and the Peabody Conservatory. The University of Georgia Board of Regents awarded her the Associate Professor Emerita title after she retired from Valdosta State University. Then, for sixteen years Ms. Lewis-Griffith was Artist-in-Residence at the Adrian L. and Dorothy L. Shuford School of Performing Arts of Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina.
She has been an adjudicator for the Fulbright Screening Committee, North Carolina School of the Arts auditions, Governor’s Honors Program in Georgia, Cincinnati Conservatory auditions, Chattanooga Symphony auditions, and many years for the North Carolina Federation of Music Clubs.
Ms. Lewis-Griffith premiered several works by American composer Robert Starer, the subject of her doctoral dissertation, and wrote articles about him for Grove’s Dictionary of American Music and Musicians and The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. She is also a fine interpreter of George Gershwin’s opus, having published two CDs of his music.
“A sensitive and attentive musician” according to Edward Rothstein of The New York Times, Ms. Lewis-Griffith has given recitals and soloed with orchestras in major U.S. cities as well as in Europe, South America and Asia. Dorothy’s music can be heard on Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube as well as on her website Dorothy Lewis-Griffith.com.
Edward L. Lewis
Experience:
2016- Writing books
2000-2016 Attorney, private practice and indigent defense, working in areas of criminal and juvenile law.
1984-1996 Vice President and Dean of Student Development, Lenoir-Rhyne College (now University), instructor of Great Books
1980-1984 Director of Student Development, Georgia Southern College (now University)
1973-1980 Instructor, Rockingham Community College: philosophy, world Religions, western civilization and psychology
Education:
1996-1999 Juris Doctor, UNC School of Law
1977-1980 Ph.D. Social Studies Education, dissertation, Affective Issues in
1967-1972 M. Div. Duke Divinity School, Duke University
1971-72 Foreign exchange, New College, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
1968-1970 Peace Corps Iran
1963-1967 B.S. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Special Interests:
Running (50 marathons), history, writing, photography, rose gardening
Program Notes
Welcome to the Great Hall of Camelot Dorothy Lewis-Griffith invites you to go on a magical, musical journey in time. Should you wish to go, her original compositions will transport you back to the Dark Ages. Merlin (THE Merlin) has found five twenty-first-century kids who he thinks, or hopes, are the ones to fulfill a prophecy and save the future. They can do so by saving the life of a young lad—and future great wizard—threatened by an evil shamaness. You will accompany these time travelers to the kingdom of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. You will meet Arthur, Guinevere, Sir Launcelot, and the very evil shamaness, among others. Most of all, however, you will meet the greatest wizard of myth or history, Merlin.
Inspired by a series of novels, Stars in the Future Skies by Ed Lewis, depicting an epic struggle in the Dark Ages, Lewis-Griffith draws on historical references—Gregorian chants, medieval celebratory music, the Mass for the Dead, as well as more contemporary themes—to create musical pictures to carry us and our imaginations to a time and place far away, shrouded in the murky mists of the past.
You will hear the darkness of assassinations and mortal combat, march with Knights of the Round Table into the Great Hall of Camelot, explore the ferocity and personality of the greatest yet flawed knight, Sir Launcelot, feel the struggles of the boys as they serve as squires to the knights who quest and find, the Holy Grail. You will sink to the bottom of the sea in one of Merlin’s educational interventions to form a mystical, learning friendship with a community of highly sensitive mermaids.
Join us for a remarkable, original musical odyssey, journeys of growth and change, adventures as violent as a Dark Age joust, as lofty as the noble goals of chivalry, as lowly as murder, as magic as the Holy Grail. Go with these kids as they grow in self-awareness, mature into knighthood, and more. All this, in the musical compositions of Dorothy Lewis-Griffith.
Founded in June, 2003, the Fourth Friday Concert Series, formerly know as the 4th Friday Mix, stands as one of our area’s longest-running concert series. We remain committed to providing free and inclusive concerts that welcome musicians with a passion for sharing their talents. All attendees, including children capable of listening attentively, are warmly welcomed. Fourth Friday Concerts typically feature 2-4 performers or performance groups, although special occasions may showcase a single performer or group for the entire concert.