Matthew Greenbaum


Matthew Jonathan Greenbaum is an American composer. He studied privately with Stefan Wolpe, and with Mario Davidovsky at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in Composition from the City University of NY Graduate Center, and has served as a professor of music composition at Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance since 1998. Since 1999 Greenbaum has worked with computer animation to create hybrid works of visual music, as well as chamber music with a video component. Greenbaum has also written on Debussy, Schoenberg and Varèse in relation to Wolpe's dialectical and "cubist" approach to musical structure. He is the curator of Amphibian, a new music and video series in the Hiart Gallery in New York.

Music

Greenbaum's work shares elements not only with Wolpe but Webern and late Stravinsky. Greenbaum inherited from Wolpe the idea of the limited pitch field, as well as his technique of "cubist polyphony". It describes a process where motivic units are fractured into their component parts and projected into musical space, so that the same event becomes perceivable from different soundpoints. Greenbaum's work is thus linked to the Austro-German musical tradition through Wolpe, who himself was a student of Anton Webern. Greenbaum's most significant work is Nameless, a 25-minute wordless psalm for three sopranos and two chamber ensembles. It was composed for the Momenta Quartet and the Cygnus Ensemble, and bears a quotation from the Medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides.

Awards

Greenbaum's awards include the following:

Solo instrument

Greenbaum is the author of the following articles: