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Judd Greenstein was born and raised in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, where he began his compositional life by writing hip hop beats as a teenager. His concert works reflect those origins, as well as his traditional piano background, combining an urban, beat-oriented sensibility with a late Romantic classical harmonic language. A passionate advocate for the indie classical community in New York, much of Judd's work is written for the virtuosic ensembles and solo performers who make up that community, and is tailored to their specific talents and abilities.
Judd has attracted attention through his close collaboration with many of the best young solo musicians in New York and beyond, including violist Nadia Sirota (heard on 2009's first things first), soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, percussionist Samuel Solomon, violinist Colin Jacobsen, pianist Michael Mizrahi, flutist Alex Sopp, clarinetist Sara Budde, saxophonists Argeo Ascani and Brian Sacawa, and cellist/vocalist Jody Redhage. He has also received performances by and commissions from a wide array of ensembles around the country, including Present Music, the Seattle Chamber Players, the University of Texas at Austin New Music Ensemble, and the Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, as well as many prominent ensembles in New York, including Carnegie Hall, Newspeak, the Da Capo Chamber Players, the New Millennium Ensemble, the Knights, and the New York Youth Symphony. Central to his output is his work for NOW Ensemble, the composer/performer collective that has quickly established itself as one of the most prominent and promising sounds in 21st century chamber music. Judd has written over an hour of music for the quintet, two pieces of which can be heard on 2008's NOW.
Judd's work has been heard at festivals such as the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, the Bang on a Can Marathon (both in New York and at Mass MoCA), MATA, the Carlsbad Music Festival, Wordless Music, Bumbershoot, Music on the Edge (Pittsburgh), Icebreaker (Seattle), and the Look & Listen Festival. International performances of Judd's music have taken place at the Musiekgebouw in Amsterdam, Holland, by Guitar Quartet Catch; in Rome, by the Williams College Concert Choir; at the Tel Aviv Art Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel, by the Israel Contemporary String Quartet; and in the Kyiv Music Festival in the Ukraine, by the Seattle Chamber Players. He is also the composer-in-residence for Sympho, a collaborative orchestral project conceived and directed by renowned conductor Paul Haas.
In addition to his work as a composer, Judd is active as a promoter of new music in New York and around the country. He is the managing director of NOW Ensemble, and is co-director of New Amsterdam Records, the record label and artists' service organization that Newsweek writer Seth Colter Walls called "an upstart label that's been releasing one quality disc after another since its founding", and which New York magazine critic Justin Davidson placed "at the center" of New York's burgeoning indie classical scene. New Amsterdam has received major media coverage from outlets around the country, including NPR's All Things Considered and two glowing end-of-year mentions in the Sunday New York Times, as well as dozens of positive album reviews for their ever-growing roster of talented young composers and performers.
Judd has received degrees from Williams College and the Yale School of Music, has been a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute of Music, and is completing his PhD dissertation on hip hop music at Princeton University.
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Some things (and excerpts of things) people have said:
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Kyle Gann wrore a very substantive and personally meaningful description of my music for Chamber Music magazine. It's not linked online, but they gave me a scanned PDF, which you can find here. An excerpt:
"...a generation was bound to come along for which the reduced status of modern classical music was no tragedy, simply a fact of life; pop music no corporate hegemon, but a fellow traveler; aesthetics no life-or-death agon, but a shopping mall of viable brands. That generation has arrived. And Greenstein is emerging as one of its chief spokespersons...his access to lots of fine young, new-music-minded virtuosos has brought him a ton of performances. He deserves them. His music is bright, clever, inventive, playful. Blessedly absent is the academic conceit that We Live in Troubled, Anxious Times and need to reflect that in every piece to show how Serious we are." - Chamber Music, January/February 2010
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Lots of good reviews for Nadia's album, first things first, including some very nice words for my own Escape and The Night Gatherers:
"...the disc's most compelling work is its finale, a rich, haunting performance of 'The Night Gatherers,' a dark-hued work for viola and string quartet by Mr. Greenstein." - Allan Kozinn, Holiday Gift Guide, The New York Times, November 27, 2009
"Greenstein's beautiful, dream-like 'The Night Gatherers' is the album's most lush setting - not surprisingly, given that Sirota's accompanied by The Chiara String Quartet - and its most romantic and elegiac. Listening to the thirteen-minute setting, it's hard not to think of it as Greenstein's own "Transfigured Night." - textura.org, July 2009
"Greenstein's fluid and elegiac 'The Night Gatherers' is the only arrangement to feature a string section, the Chiara String Quartet, on an otherwise strictly solo album, yet the composer's 'Escape' is the album's outstanding 14-minute centerpiece. Repetitive motifs are gradually scattered like leaves thrown up by a buoyant gust of wind." - Mia Clarke, Time Out Chicago, May 28, 2009
"Greenstein is also the composer of the most successful works on the album, the solo piece 'Escape' and the concluding work for viola accompanied by the Chiara String Quartet, 'The Night Gatherers.' The latter piece, which brings the album to a rich and satisfying conclusion, is a lyric and romantic minor key ballade full of beautiful, lush sounds, exquisitely crafted and performed. 'Escape' is the literal and aesthetic centerpiece of the album and demonstrates the craft of composition at its best. Greenstein starts with minimal melodic, harmonic and rhythmic material; a repeated, accented descending minor third, then he composes. He moves the interval around, pairs it, adds a transitional note and rhythm, expands it, takes it apart, develops a range of dynamics and textures. He turns a fragment into an involved, and involving, solo work, full of emotional and intellectual intensity. The connection between where the music began and where it is and is going is always in our ears. It's a tour-de-force work and a tour-de-force performance by Sirota." - George Grella, The Big City, May 21, 2009
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Some cool tidings from the great state of Oregon, where Scott Ordway put on a show of NOW Ensemble works by his Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. The Eugene Weekly reports and stamps me with the dreaded but meant-here-in-a-good-way "A-word".
May, 2008
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More NOW Ensemble press is available on the NOW website. Richard Allen says some nice things over at The Silent Ballet, including this really nice description: "The beauty of this piece is that it is always changing; at each turn, an equally pleasing transition waits. Despite multiple meters and lush countermelodies, the composition never loses track of its central theme. Ten minutes later, it's all over, but because of the song's many nuances, each repeated play feels like the first time."
April, 2008
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Seattle wrap-up from the Icebreaker festival: my piece "breezily hop-scotched from modal, folk-like tunes to catchy hip-hop twitterings" (lots of creative language, there! That's from Thomas May's review in Crosscut). My music was also heard to demonstrate "craftsmanship and ear-friendliness" (according to Gavin Borchert in his Seattle Weekly review). And, finally, my work "wove notes like a tapestry, gentle, syncopated and vivid" (which is nicely said, by Philippa Kiraly, in her Seattle Post-Ingtelligencer review). Thanks to everyone who came out in Seattle - that was an awesome crowd and a fun festival!
January, 2008
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Marc Geelhoed reviews NOW in Time Out Chicago, giving it (like Steve Smith in Time Out New York) five stars, and also a really nice writeup (again), which you can read here.
January, 2008
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Steve Smith reviews NOW in Time Out New York, giving it five stars and a really nice writeup, which you can read here.
January, 2008
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Sequenza 21's Rodney Lister has some great things to say about Sam Solomon, who gave an amazing recital in Lenox, and included the piece he commissioned from me.
July, 2007
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The ever-supportive Steve Smith writes a nice review, in the New York Times, of the Bang on a Can Marathon, in which he says something nice about NOW Ensemble and the pieces we played, including my own Rock Me Samuels.
June, 2007
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Steve Smith gives a very great and thorough review, on the Time Out New York Blog, of Anne-Carolyn Bird's recital, which featured the (incomplete) premiere of my new piece for her, Hillula.
May, 2007
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Alex Ross gives an extensive roundup of the New York "contemporary-classical scene", and makes nice mention of me and Nico, along with plenty of other cool folks.
April, 2007
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In case you think I only share the good stuff on this space, please check out this nasty pan I received in Milwaukee. This is, after all, a "fair and balanced" page.
Update: More good tidings from the great city of Milwaukee, including this Schoenberg-esque gem: "...more like a meandering jam session than a shapely, efficient composition. It is both overwritten in its indiscernible layers and underwritten in real content."
Update #2: The pros may hate me, but the students seem to get what I'm doing. This points to a new definition of "avant-garde".
September, 2006
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More on the Rewind Orchestra concert from Symphony magazine, where Symphony editors Jayson Greene and Chester Lane exchange e-mails about the show. Greene writes about one of my transitions:
One thing I thought this concert did rather well was that when they did perform familiar works, like Mozart's Divertimento for Strings, they approached them from unorthodox angles...the music that filled the interstices between the Schoenberg and the Mozart was so impish, and playful, that by the time the Mozart Divertimento started, it was like something was flowering. (Gushy, I know.) Everyone in the room - or at least, myself and everyone around me - seemed to be smiling involuntarily.
September, 2006
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The Rewind Orchestra concert got some interesting press. Steve Smith writes in Time Out New York about the show and kindly gives me and Paul extensive opportunities to air our thoughts. Fiction writer Tom Dolby writes in the San Francisco Chronicle with a very nice first-person perspective. And the New York Times chimed in.
June, 2006
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Time Out New York critic Steve Smith, on his blog, writes about a concert in which my Sonata for Cello and Piano was performed. I especially like his complements to Jody and David.
April, 2006
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I was recently part of a profile of young composers in the January/February issue of Symphony magazine. Some nice things were said about my music and there is actually a picture of my website (?!) on one of the pages.
January, 2006
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"Judd Greenstein, a young composer based in Princeton who's beginning to draw notice in New York, wrote hip-hop beats as a teen-ager, and his concert works weave together multiple pulses in an easy, bouncing motion. "Folk Music," which Greenstein wrote in the summer of 2004, is one of the freshest pieces I've heard so far this year...In May, the New York Youth Symphony premièred Greenstein's "Today and Everyday," which was written with September 11th in mind...In the opening and closing parts of the work, Greenstein tries out grand, populist gestures; the striking middle section is a slow-moving crowd of chorales."
June 27, 2005
Read the article by New Yorker critic Alex Ross
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"A second example is Judd Greenstein, a graduate school-bound composer whose jaunty work "Today and Everyday" was given its premiere. Inspired by the restless pulse of Mr. Greenstein's native New York City, the piece had jazzy Bernsteinian syncopations, a Coplandesque brass chorale, and above all, an impressive confidence that will serve him well as he develops a more distinctive voice."
May 31, 2005
Read the article by New York Times critic Jeremy Eichler
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New Yorker critic (and friend of New Music) Alex Ross says some nice things about my piece, Folk Music, on his blog.
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"The films and images by Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler of Chicago's New Catalogue are amusing and unsettling, and so is the music...Judd Samuels Greenstein found for them."
Read the article by Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer
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"Electronic and conventional instruments merge to create tapestries of gradually shifting patterns slowly guiding the ear into new and surprising places."
Read the article by composer John Halle
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"Greenstein, whose work might loosely be called post-minimalist, has both a tonal beauty and a pulsing energy that appeals to listeners from numerous musical backgrounds."
Read the article by composer Lainie Fefferman
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