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 City 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, travelling 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 globalisation. He lived in
Maui, Hawaii, where he was working on archiving his recordings and other materials collected during his life's work. Lewiston died 29 May 2017, aged 88 at a hospice centre in
Wailuku, Hawaii. ==Recordings==