Ed Green

Edward Green is an award-winning composer and educator. He is included in Who's Who Among America's Teachers, was named a Fulbright Senior Specialist by CIES (Council for International Exchange of Scholars), and is on the faculties of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York and the Manhattan School of Music, where he has been a professor since 1984, teaching courses in composition, jazz history, and world music. Among his numerous awards as a composer was the 1995 Zoltan Kodaly International Composer's Prize, and his Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra was nominated for a 2010 Grammy Award in the category "Best Classical Contemporary Composition."

From 1974 to 1978, Edward Green had the honor to study with the great philosopher and critic of the arts Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism. Earlier he attended Oberlin College, and his graduate degrees, in both composition and historical musicology, are from New York University. He was awarded a Ph.D. from NYU in 2008, and his thesis was entitled "Chromatic Completion in the Late Vocal Music of Haydn and Mozart—A Technical, Philosophic, and Historical Study."

His music has been performed by orchestras across the United States as well as in several countries overseas—including Russia, the Czech Republic, Argentina, and England. And in 2004 he was awarded a prestigious Music Alive! grant from the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer. Through this grant he was Composer-in-Residence for the InterSchool Orchestras of New York for their 2004-2005 season.

Dr. Green has been a guest composer and lecturer at Tanglewood, the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), the University of Montréal, Baltimore's Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute, the Pontifical Catholic University in Buenos Aires, Ithaca College, Dartmouth University and other important educational institutions here and overseas. In 2003, he gave a Convocation Address at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music, and in 2004 participated in the First International Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, held at the University of Graz, Austria. His presentation, co-authored with anthropologist Arnold Perey, was entitled “Aesthetic Realism: A New Foundation for Interdisciplinary Musicology.” The conference was sponsored by the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music.

His compositions include works for chamber ensembles, chorus, and symphony orchestra, as well as solo music for piano, guitar, and other instruments. He is also an active composer for the theatre and for film, and is staff composer for Imagery Films, whose director is the Emmy award-winning filmmaker Ken Kimmelman. Two of their recent films are What Does a Person Deserve?, which received a Silver CINDY award, and was sponsored by the National Coalition for the Homeless, and Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana—based on Eli Siegel’s Nation prize-winning poem. Edward Green is also Composer-in-Residence for the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company.

Dr. Green has given papers at conventions of the American Society of University Composers, the American Musicology Society, the New York School Music Teachers Association, the North American British Music Studies Association, the Society for American Music, and many other academic organizations. He spoke on the music of Richard Rodgers at the 28th annual Comparative Drama Conference, sponsored by Ohio State. He was a panelist discussing “Innovative Teaching Methods” for the November 2004 Annual Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, held in Tucson, Arizona, where he spoke about the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. In 1991 with the sponsorship of the Smithsonian Institution Prof. Green addressed the International Association of Jazz Educators' convention in Washington, DC on the subject "The Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel Explains the Beauty of Jazz and of Duke Ellington." Among the academic gatherings at which he spoke in 2005 was the conference of the Répertoire International de Litérature Musicale, sponsored by the City University of New York, and that summer he delivered papers at several conferences in Europe—on subjects ranging from the music of the troubadour Marcabru to the writings of the Victorian music critic H.R. Haweis. For the academic year 2005-6, Edward Green spoke on the music of Scelsi (the Society for Composers), the teaching of harmony (College Music Society), Ellington as a Motivic Composer (Society for American Music), and—for the Mozart Society—on the subject: “The Saturation of Chromatic Space as a Structural Principle in Mozart’s Late Choral Music.” Since then, he has given many other scholarly talks and masterclasses, here and abroad, including, in April, 2007, at several educational institutions in Argentina, during a visit which which culminated in a festival, sponsored by the Ensemble Rosario, of his orchestral music.

Essays by Dr. Green have appeared in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Choral Music, The International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Composer (England), The Journal of Music and Meaning (Denmark/Internet), Onagakugaku (the journal of the Musicological Society of Japan), The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, The Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, Chinese Music Journal, ComposerUSA, and School Music News, among other academic journals.

Articles by Edward Green dealing with the ethics of current social matters, including the fight to end racism, have appeared in newspapers and journals here and abroad, including Black College Magazine, The African Observer, and Christian Social Action. For several years he was a featured columnist for the Nigerian journal U.S. African Eye. He also is the author of a biographical essay on Eli Siegel, published as a Google Knol.

Dr. Green was the editor of a special double issue, in 2007, of Contemporary Music Review which was titled "China and the West—the Birth of a New Music," to which he also contributed an article on the music of Zhou Long. This collection was published, in Chinese translation, in 2009 by Shanghai Conservatory Press. In 2006, a chapter he co-authored with Alan Shapiro on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method appeared in Teaching Music in the Urban Classroom (Rowman & Littlefield), and Dr. Green is also the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington.

Edward Green’s music is published by Frederick Harris Ltd. (Canada) and Frank Warren Music Service (MA). Recordings of his music have appeared on Tintangel Records (Piano Concertino) and VP Media of Italy (Song for Guitar), Arizona University Recordings (Sextet for Alto Saxophone and Brass and Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings), and Albany Records (Concerto in C for Trumpet and Orchestra). His Zhou (for erhu and pipa) was released on Traditional Crossroads in an album of works by several composers entitled World Tour—an album which Dr. Green produced, and his Piano Concertino, in a revised form, will soon be appearing in a new recording on North/South Consonance Recordings.

Edward Green is married to actress and mezzo-soprano Carrie Wilson, who is also a consultant on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and appears with the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company in both dramatic and musical events.
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