Edward Green

Faculty Emeritus

In 2024, Edward Green retired from Manhattan School of Music after 40 years in which he taught a wide range of courses in music history, jazz composition, ethnomusicology, and the humanities.

He received his PhD from New York University with a musicological thesis on the late vocal music of Haydn and Mozart. In composition, he is largely self-taught; in the field of aesthetics his most important teacher was the renowned philosopher Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism. It was Dr. Green’s honor to study with him from 1974-1978.

With publications on subjects as diverse as the medieval troubadour Marcabru; Beethoven and “elliptical tonality;” the Broadway musical South Pacific; the philosophic implications of the music criticism of Sir Donald Tovey; and the works of such contemporary figures as Zhou Long, Harry Partch, Robert Simpson, John Lennon, and Giacinto Scelsi, Edward Green is a musicologist who is recognized for the depth and richness of his thought about music. A sign of this was receiving in 2011 the signal honor of being named a Senior Specialist in American Music by the Fulbright Foundation, an honor renewed in 2017.

As a guest lecturer in musicology, Dr. Green has done scholarly residencies at many notable academic institutions here and abroad, including in Buenos Aires (at the Pontifical University of Argentina), Zagreb (the Academy of Music), and Melbourne (Monash University). Editor of China and the West: The Birth of a New Music (Shanghai Conservatory Press) and The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, he has also guest edited and contributed to special numbers of the Journal of Musicological Research  (on Haydn) and the Journal of Popular Music History (on Bernard Herrmann).

Edward Green’s own music is available on several labels, including Albany Records (Concerto in C for Trumpet and Orchestra), Arizona University Recordings (Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings), and North/South Consonance Records (Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra). Among his compositional honors are first prize in the International Kodály Composers Competition for his Brass Quintet, and a Delius award for his Genesis Variations for solo guitar. In 2017 the Orquesta del Congreso Nacional in Paraguay awarded him the Carlos Lara Bareiro Prize for Instrumental Symphonic Composition for his Symphony in C. Recent commissions include his Symphony in E-flat for Wind Ensemble (a consortium of several leading American university bands). In 2023 it received its Australian premiere with the Heidelberg Winds under the direction of Stephen Carpenter.

Active also in the worlds of theater and film, Dr. Green is staff composer for the Aesthetic Realism Theater Company as well as for Imagery Films, whose director is the Emmy award-winning filmmaker Ken Kimmelman. He is likewise an active accompanist, including for flutist Barbara Allen, and for soprano Carrie Wilson, who is his wife. Ms. Wilson and Dr. Green have performed in France, Argentina, England, as well as many venues in the United States.