Biography
- BA, Lehman College
- MA, City College, NY
- PhD, City University of New York
Dr. Greenbaum studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky. Greenbaum’s awards, fellowships and commissions include the Serge Koussevitzky Music Fund/Library of Congress, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Meet the Composer, the Fromm Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund and the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Penn Council on the Arts.
Performances of his works include the Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Leningrad Spring Festival, the Jakart Festival (Indonesia), Hallische Musiktage, Ensemble SurPlus (Freiburg), Nuova Consonanza (Rome), Ensemble 21 (Odense), the Da Capo Chamber Players, Cygnus, Parnassus, Fred Sherry, Marc-André Hamelin, David Holzman, Stephanie Griffin, the Momenta Quartet, Network for New Music, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music, Orchestra 2001, Christopher Taylor and the Riverside Symphony, and the Houston Symphony. His works are published by Tunbridge Music and the American Composers Alliance. Recordings are available from Antes, CRI and Furious Artisans; and an all-Greenbaum CD has been released on Centaur Records. Greenbaum is also a video artist whose video and animation accompany theater pieces with solo voice. These include Rope and Chasm, an hour-long setting of excerpts from Nietszche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra; America this is Quite Serious on poems of Allen Ginsberg, and In der Zeit, on a poem of Paul Fleming.
He also writes on the aesthetics of musical structure and is the author of numerous articles under the rubric “musical dialectic.”
Works and Publications
American Composers Alliance: https://composers.com/matthew-greenbaum
“Dialectic in Miniature: Schoenberg’s ‘Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19.’” Ex Tempore Summer 2010
“The Music of the Critique of Pure Reason.” Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities 2008
"Surrealism in New York." New Music Jukebox (American Music Center) Fall 2009.
“Debussy, Wolpe and Dialectical Form.”Contemporary Music Review: Stefan Wolpe Issue (Spring 2008)
“Jews and the Dada Movement: Tristan Tzara and Stefan Wolpe.” Congress Monthly March/April 2006.
“Debussy, Wolpe and Dialectical Form.” Ex Tempore 10/2 2005.
“Debussy, Wolpe and Dialectical Form.” Society of Music Theory: Seattle, Nov. 11-14, 2004
”The Proportions of Density 21.5: Wolpean Symmetries in the Music of Edgard Varèse” in On the Music of Stefan Wolpe, Austin Clarkson, ed. Pendragon (Hillsdale, New York: 2003)
“Questions of Musical Meaning,” Novus et Antiquus: Ball State U: Oct. 11 2002
“Stefan Wolpe’s Dialectical Logic: A Look at the ‘Second Piece for Violin Alone.’” Perspectives of New Music Vol. 40/2 (2002)