Biography
Edward Green is an award-winning composer whose orchestral music has been performed across the United States as well as many other countries worldwide, including Australia, Russia, Argentina, Romania, England, and the Czech Republic. The performances this weekend by Paul Neebe and the Orquestra Câmara Cascais e Oeriorasof his Concerto in C for Trumpet and Orchestramark the work's Portuguese premiere.
Concerti are a favorite form for Edward Green: along with this Trumpet Concerto, he has written concerti for clarinet, alto sax, as well as two for piano, one of which was nominated in 2010 for a Grammy Award as "Best Classical Contemporary Composition." His Trumpet Concerto was first performed in 2001 in a two movement design.Expanded to three movements---Allegro, Andante, and Allegro--Paul Neebe premiered the revised concerto in 2004 at Virginia Tech University. Two years later, accompanied by the Slovak Radio Symphony, he released the concerto on an Albany Records CD.
Dr. Green is a professor at Manhattan School of Music,where he teaches composition and music history, and he is on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. He had the honor to be a student of the founder of Aesthetic Realism, the renowned philosopher Eli Siegel, and he continues his study of this great philosophic education in classes taught by the distinguished poet and scholar Ellen Reiss. Dr. Green's own scholarly work is wide-ranging: he is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington; his doctoral thesis dealt with the late vocal music of Haydn and Mozart; and he is published by Shanghai Conservatory Press in the field of contemporary Chinese music. Other topics on which he has published musicological essays include the songs of the troubadourMarcabru, the music of Bach, Mendelssohn, andProkofiev, the film scores of Bernard Herrmann, Richard Rodgers'1949 musical South Pacific, and the writings of the great medieval theorist Guido d'Arrezo.
The Trumpet Concerto performed for you at this concert was inspired by a grand statement Eli Siegel madeabout the relation of art and life:
“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Over the course of its three movements,the concerto deals, in musical terms,with the human drama of confidence and self-doubt, which are opposites in every person's life. The concerto culminates with a triumphant assertion of joy in the bright key of C major—(a key, incidentally, not heard since the very opening of the first movement)—reaffirming, through the symbolic power of music, the clear and happy source of life itself.
