| Date of birth | 2 February 1950 |
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| Occupation | Composer, Teacher |
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| Categories | Classical, Contemporary, Electronic, Other |
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MATTHEW GREENBAUM was born in New York City in 1950. He studied composition with Stefan Wolpe and Mario Davidovsky and holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center.
His music is widely performed. Most recently, the chamber piece ES IST ZUM LACHEN, commissioned by the Serge Koussevitzky Music Funds/Library of Congress for Ensemble SurPlus (Freiburg), was premiered in October 08.
Greenbaum has received awards and fellowships from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund and the New York Foundation of the Arts. His works have been presented/ performed/commissioned by the Darmstadt Summer Festival, the Leningrad Spring Festival, the Jakart Festival (Indonesia), the Hallische Musiktage, the Fromm Foundation, the Meet the Composer/ Readers Digest Commissioning Fund, 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 String Quartet, Network for New Music/Penn Council on the Arts, 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. They have been recorded for Antes, Centaur and CRI. An all-Greenbaum CD has been released on Centaur Records. The American Academy of Arts and Letters has sponsored the release of five works on the Furious Artisans label via downloads. Furious Artisans has also released NAMELESS, for three wordless soprani, the Cygnus Ensemble and the Momenta Quartet as a download.
Greenbaum is also a video artist. He is currently at work on a pair of chamber operas for soprano and video. The first is a setting of four poems of Allen Ginsberg; the second is an evening-length treatment of Also Sprach Zarathustra.
He also writes on the aesthetics of musical structure and is the author of numerous articles under the rubric “musical dialectic.”
Greenbaum is a professor of composition at Temple University (Philadelphia).
