Edward Green, Ph.D.

Website: Edward Green—Composer, Music Educator

Edward Green, PH.D, studied with Eli Siegel from 1974 to 1978, and has been on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation since 1980, where, with his colleagues Barbara Allen and Anne Fielding, he teaches the course "The Opposites in Music."

A Fulbright Senior Specialist with the CIES (Council for International Exchange of Scholars, he is also a prize-winning composer, 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. He received first place in the International Kodaly Composers Competition for his Brass Quintet and a Delius award for his Genesis Variations for solo guitar.

His music is available on several labels. Among these are Albany Records, which released his Concerto in C for Trumpet and Orchestra, Arizona University Recordings, his Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings and Sextet for Alto Saxophone and Brass), and North/South Consonance Records, which will shortly release a CD including his Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra.  Dr. Green is also Staff Composer at Imagery Films where he has collaborated with the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ken Kimmelman on several films, including What Does a Person Deserve? and Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana"- a film based on Eli Siegel's Nation prize-winning poem. He has also composed incidental music for several productions of the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company.

In 2008, Edward Green received his Ph.D. from New York University with a dissertation based on the methodology of Aesthetic Realism and dealing with the late vocal music of Haydn and Mozart. Since 1984, he has been a professor at Manhattan School of Music, teaching courses in Composition, Ethnomusicology, Jazz History, and the Humanities. Earlier he was on the faculties of St. John's University, Pace University, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and the School of Visual Arts. For his work as a scholar and as a composer, Dr. Green is included in Who's Who among America's Teachers and in the International Who's Who in Music-both in their Classical and Popular volumes.     

Dr. Green has been a guest composer and lecturer at Tanglewood, the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), the University of Montreal, Baltimore's Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute, Ithaca College, Dartmouth University and other important educational institutions here and abroad, including the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires. Among the national scholarly conventions at which he has delivered papers are those of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the Mozart Society of America, the German Studies Association, the Society of Composers, Inc., the Modern Language Association, and the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Dr. Green has also delivered papers-on subjects ranging from the life of Felix Mendelssohn to the music of the medieval troubadour Marcabru-at international conferences in England, France, Austria, Canada, and Ireland.

His essays have appeared in such journals as Onagakugaku—the journal of the Musicological Society of Japan, the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Music Educator's Journal, Ars Lyrica, the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, Three Oranges—the journal of the Sergei Prokofiev Foundation, Choral Journal, the Journal of the Elgar Society, and Composer: USA. He was also guest editor, in 2007, of a special double edition of Contemporary Music Review entitled "China and the West: the Birth of a New Music," to which he contributed both an introduction and an essay on the music of Zhou Long. This volume will shortly appear in Chinese translation, published by Shanghai Conservatory Press.

Articles by him dealing with the ethics of current social matters, including the fight to end racism, have appeared in many newspapers and journals here and abroad, including Black College Magazine, The African Observer, and Christian Social Action. For several years he was also a featured columnist for the Nigerian journal U.S. African Eye. He is also a contributor to the book Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism (Orange Angle Press: 2004).

Edward Green has given many presentations directly on the value of Aesthetic Realism as a scholarly method. Among these are the following: in 2004, he participated in the First International Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, held at the University of Graz, Austria, with a presentation, co-authored with anthropologist Arnold Perey, entitled "Aesthetic Realism: A New Foundation for Interdisciplinary Musicology." The conference was sponsored by the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Later that year, as part of a panel discussing "Innovative Teaching Methods," he spoke about the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method at the Annual Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology. His essay "Donald Francis Tovey, Aesthetic Realism, and the Need for a Philosophic Musicology" was published in 2005 in the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (Vol. 36/2) and his "A Note on Two Conceptions of Aesthetic Realism," appeared that same year in the British Journal of Aesthetics (Vol.45/4). And in 2006, he contributed a chapter in Teaching Music in the Urban Classroom (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) entitled "Music of Every Culture Has Something in Common and Can Teach Us about Ourselves: Using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method"-co-authored with Alan Shapiro. This book was published in partnership with the National Association for Music Education. In 2007, his essay "Aesthetic Realism and Mahler's Sixth Symphony—Some Philosophic Light on a Symphonic Masterpiece" appeared in the Journal of Music and Meaning   (Vol. 5): an on-line scholarly journal published in Denmark .

Dr. Green is also well-known for his contributions to the field of Ellington scholarship. Along with essays in major scholarly journals, he has also been a frequent public speaker on the subject. In 1991 under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian Institution, he 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," in 2003 gave a Convocation Address at the University of Denver's Lamont School of Music about Ellington, and has addressed Duke Ellington Societies both here and abroad.

Since the mid-1980's, Edward Green has actively participated in seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, and among his talks have been papers on the lives and music of Johannes Brahms, Franz Joseph Haydn, Glenn Gould, Irving Berlin, John Lennon, Hector Berlioz, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Herbert von Karajan and Franz Liszt. Several of these papers are posted on his website:  http://www.edgreenmusic.org

He has also co-authored several papers with Barbara Allen on the masterpieces of the flute literature-by Handel, Bach, Mozart, and others. These papers explore the relation of art and life and what technically makes for the beauty of these compositions-with each paper culminating in a live performance by Ms. Allen on flute and Dr. Green on piano.

Edward Green continues his study of Aesthetic Realism in classes taught by Ellen Reiss. He is married to Carrie Wilson, singer, actress, and Aesthetic Realism Consultant, and they make their home in Manhattan's Lower East Side.