Judd Greenstein (born 1979) is an American composer of contemporary classical music, and an avid promoter of new music in New York City. He is also a co-director of
New Amsterdam Records
New Amsterdam Records is a record label in New York City that was formed in 2008 by Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and William Brittelle to promote classically trained musicians who fall between traditional genre boundaries. Often abbrev ...
.
Life and career
Judd Greenstein was born and raised in Manhattan, and attended
Hunter College Elementary School
Hunter College Elementary School is a New York City elementary school for select students who reside in New York City, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Administered by Hunter College, a senior college of the City University of New York or C ...
and
Hunter College High School
Hunter College High School is a secondary school located in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is administered by Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Hunter is publicly funded, and there i ...
. He received his undergraduate degree from
Williams College
Williams College is a Private college, private liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a col ...
, and his masters in music composition from the
Yale School of Music
The Yale School of Music (often abbreviated to YSM) is one of the 12 professional schools at Yale University. It offers three graduate degrees: Master of Music (MM), Master of Musical Arts (MMA), and Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA), as well as a joi ...
where he studied with
Martin Bresnick
Martin Bresnick (born 1946) is a composer of contemporary classical music, film scores and experimental music.
Education and early career
Bresnick grew up in the Bronx, and is a graduate of New York City's specialized High School of Music and A ...
,
Aaron Jay Kernis
Aaron Jay Kernis (born January 15, 1960) is a Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning American composer serving as a member of the Yale School of Music faculty. Kernis spent 15 years as the music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra and as Direct ...
, and
Ezra Laderman
Ezra Laderman (29 June 1924 – 28 February 2015) was an American composer of classical music. He was born in Brooklyn.
Biography
Laderman was of Jewish heritage. His parents, Isidor and Leah, both emigrated to the United States from Poland. Thou ...
.
Shortly after Yale, Greenstein began to draw attention in the New York classical scene for the pulse-driven quality and "impressive confidence" of his music, which was being performed at
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall ( ) is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue (Manhattan), Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street (Manhattan), 56th and 57th Street (Manhatta ...
,
Tanglewood Music Center
The Tanglewood Music Center is an annual summer music academy in Lenox, Massachusetts, United States, in which emerging professional musicians participate in performances, master classes and workshops. The center operates as a part of the Tanglew ...
, and the Tribeca New Music Festival.
''The New Yorker'' critic
Alex Ross
Nelson Alexander Ross (born January 22, 1970) is an American comic book writer and artist known primarily for his painted interiors, covers, and design work. He first became known with the 1994 miniseries ''Marvels'', on which he collaborated wi ...
also regularly lauded the exciting freshness of Greenstein's work as early as 2005.
Since then he has received dozens of commissions, and has had his music performed at leading classical music festivals including
Bang on a Can
Bang on a Can is a multi-faceted contemporary classical music organization based in New York City. It was founded in 1987 by three American composers who remain its artistic directors: Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon. Called "the cou ...
Marathon Concerts,
Tanglewood
Tanglewood is a music venue in the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. It has been the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937. Tanglewood is also home to three music schools: the T ...
, the Carlsbad Music Festival, and the
MATA Festival
The MATA Festival is a New York-based annual contemporary classical music festival devoted to championing the works of young composers. It was founded in 1996 by Philip Glass, Lisa Bielawa and Eleonor Sandresky and is currently under the leaders ...
.
In addition to his work as a composer, Greenstein has tirelessly demonstrated his support for new music and young composers through various forms of curation and community organization. Since 2008, he has served as co-director of the non-profit label New Amsterdam Records along with
William Brittelle William Brittelle (born 1977) is a North Carolina-born, Brooklyn-based composer of genre-fluid electro-acoustic music. Also active as a producer and curator, Brittelle is co-founder/co-artistic director of New Amsterdam Records with composers Sarah ...
and
Sarah Kirkland Snider.
He describes the label as being dedicated to supporting artists "whose work is a reflection of truly integrated music influences," which has subsequently placed it at the forefront of the indie-classical music scene.
In 2011, Greenstein curated the Ecstatic Music Festival at
Merkin Concert Hall
Merkin Hall is a 449-seat concert hall in Manhattan, New York City. The hall, named in honor of Hermann and Ursula Merkin, is part of the Kaufman Music Center, a complex that includes the Lucy Moses School, a community arts school, and the Spec ...
, giving indie-classical and indie-pop artists like
Owen Pallett
Michael James Owen Pallett (born September 7, 1979) is a Canadian composer, violinist, keyboardist, and vocalist. Under their erstwhile moniker of Final Fantasy, Pallett won the 2006 Polaris Music Prize for the album ''He Poos Clouds''. Pallet ...
,
Shara Nova
Shara Nova (previously Worden) is the lead singer and songwriter for My Brightest Diamond. As a composer she is most recognized for her choral compositions and the baroque chamber opera "You Us We All". New music composers Sarah Kirkland Snide ...
,
Julianna Barwick
Julianna Barwick is an American musician who composes using electronic loops. Her first album, '' The Magic Place'', was released in 2011.
Music career
Barwick has said that her music is influenced by her participation in church choir while gro ...
, and Victoire an "uptown" arena to showcase their sophisticated endeavors. The festival has been compared to the genre-indifferent Bang on a Can, but with less of the latter's highbrow intimidation and intellectualized atmosphere.
In 2014, Greenstein, together with Michi Wiancko, composed the score for the feature film
The Mend, which premiered at the
SXSW Film Festival
South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Te ...
in March 2014.
Musical style
Critics have frequently commented on Greenstein's idiosyncratic style, which maintains a pulse-driven poppish sensibility while employing a sophisticated harmonic language.
He is often identified with a group of young New York-based composers like
Nico Muhly
Nico Asher Muhly (; born August 26, 1981) is an American contemporary classical music composer and arranger who has worked and recorded with both classical and pop musicians. A prolific composer, he has composed for many notable symphony orchestras ...
,
Missy Mazzoli
Missy Mazzoli (born October 27, 1980) is an American composer and pianist who is a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music. She has received critical acclaim for her chamber, orchestral and operatic work. In 2018 she becam ...
, and
Corey Dargel, who fuse the accessibility of minimalist classical music with popular vernaculars to create genre-indifferent works, commonly labeled "indie-classical".
In a detailed analysis, musicologist
Kyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann (born November 21, 1955, in Dallas, Texas) is an American professor of music, critic, analyst, and composer who has worked primarily in the New York City area. As a music critic for ''The Village Voice'' (from 1986 to 2005) and ...
remarked on Greenstein's typically
polymetric compositional structures, giving his music a "foot-tapping pop surface in front of a background rhythmic complexity", akin to the 1980s advent of
totalism
Totalism is a style of art music that arose in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to minimalism. It paralleled postminimalism but involved a younger generation of creators, born in the 1950s. This term, invented by writer and composer Kyle Gann, h ...
.
Works
Central to Greenstein's compositional career has been his work with the NOW Ensemble, for which he is the co-artistic director and has composed six pieces.
The ensemble has performed his music along with the chamber music of other young, emerging composers in a wide range of settings, including
(Le) Poisson Rouge,
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall ( ) is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue (Manhattan), Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street (Manhattan), 56th and 57th Street (Manhatta ...
, and the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
. Greenstein has also closely collaborated with a number of New York's young solo musicians and ensembles, including violist Nadia Sirota, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, percussionist Samuel Solomon, the political chamber ensemble Newspeak, and others.
Greenstein's most recent project is ''The Yehudim''—an ensemble of vintage keyboards, mixed voices, electric guitars, and percussion that "explores characters from the Hebrew Bible, using the strange stories of their lives and the ancient writings around their characters to weave contemporary narratives."
''The Yehudim'' had its concert debut in March 2011 at Merkin Concert Hall premiering Greenstein's piece "Sh'lomo", and was called "an epiphany" by Steve Smith of ''The New York Times''.
He has also recently been commissioned to write works for
ETHEL
Ethel (also '' æthel'') is an Old English word meaning "noble", today often used as a feminine given name.
Etymology and historic usage
The word means ''æthel'' "noble".
It is frequently attested as the first element in Anglo-Saxon names, b ...
, Gibbs & Main, and a large-scale work for the
Minnesota Orchestra
The Minnesota Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Founded originally as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1903, the Minnesota Orchestra plays most of its concerts at Minneapolis's Orchestra Hall.
History
Em ...
.
See also
* ''
A Marvelous Order''
References
External links
Judd Greenstein's websiteNew Amsterdam presents*
NewMusicBox interview with Molly Sheridan
{{DEFAULTSORT:Greenstein, Judd
American male composers
21st-century American composers
Living people
People from Manhattan
Musicians from New York City
Williams College alumni
Yale School of Music alumni
1979 births
21st-century American male musicians
Hunter College High School alumni