A winner of the prestigious Grand Prix International du Disque  and a leading contributor to the seminal Nonesuch Explorer series of releases in the 1960s and ’70s, David Lewiston is highly acclaimed both as a collector of traditional music, and as a photographer documenting traditional music and dance. His recordings 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. Often cited as the father of modern field recording, David Lewiston spent more than four decades documenting the traditional music of many of the world’s cultures – often alone and usually at his own expense.  Motivated primarily by a strong personal interest (at a time when few if any recordings existed), he brought to his groundbreaking work an artist’s love of great music well played.

“This cherished and valuable collection has a quality and rarity that makes the recordings extraordinary audio windows into other cultures,” says Daniel Sheehy, director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways. “The published recordings were created with first-hand authority, the highest professional expertise, and great care. The unpublished material left out of the limited space of the long-play record and liner notes is surely of similar quality and value to the future of humankind.”

Distinguished composer Osvaldo Golijov points out: “David Lewiston's recordings are among the great testimonies in sound of our time. Anyone who hears them will be struck by the mysterious yearnings, the transcendental manifestations of joy, and the fragility and impermanence that unite wildly diverse cultures in our planet: ultimately, they give us a sense of how much and how little we humans are as a species. These records continue to inspire me as much as those by Stravinsky, Miles Davis and any of the other masters of the past century. They are a treasure: life as it is truly lived and dreamed.”

Lewiston is best known for his extensive series of recordings of Tibetan Buddhist rituals, made in collaboration with the Dalai Lama's Council for Religious and Cultural Affairs over a period of sixteen years.  These were the first full-length recordings of Tibetan ritual chants and dances ever undertaken.  They played a significant role in creating for the Tibetan community in exile a resource library for their own use and at the same time helped Tibetan culture at large to gain the attention of a wider world audience at a time when it was under severe threat at home. Selected excerpts from these recordings have been honored with the prestigious Grand Prix du Disque by the Académie Charles Cros.

Similarly, in Bali, Lewiston’s landmark 1966 recordings were the first full-length stereo recordings of Balinese gamelan and ritual chant, made at a time before the island  became an international tourist destination.  When excepts from these recordings were released in the celebrated Nonesuch Explorer series as Music from the Morning of the World, (the first of his twenty-eight albums for the Nonesuch Explorer Series), these excerpts helped awaken an interest in gamelan around the globe that continues to build. In Spring 2008 this recording was honored by induction into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry of Historic Recordings.

Less well known are Lewiston’s full archives of more than 400 hours of recorded music, which in addition to Tibetan and Balinese recordings also include traditional music and photographs collected on field trips to Mexico, Central America, South America, India, Pakistan, the high valleys of the Himalaya and Karakoram, Turkey, North Africa and most recently the Republic of Georgia.  He has also made some of the first Western studio recordings of noted Japanese, Korean, and Chinese masters.

Lewiston's recordings have been widely praised and utilized by ethnographic communities throughout the world. They have also served as inspiration for leading musicians in a variety of genres, including the Kronos Quartet, jazz musician Kenny Garrett,  and world music advocate Mickey Hart. Most importantly, these recordings provide a lasting legacy for the cultures that they document so lovingly and for the world at large.

Now 80, Lewiston lives on Maui, where he is very actively engaged in his archiving and preservation work.