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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. He 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 currently a fourth-year doctoral Fellow and Taplin Scholar at Princeton University, where he is writing a dissertation on hip hop music.  In addition to his many compositions for NOW Ensemble, in which he is a composer and founding member, Judd writes music for a wide variety of ensembles and performers around the country. Recent commissions include those from Present Music, the Seattle Chamber Players, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, flutist Alex Sopp, violist Nadia Sirota, percussionist Sam Solomon, cellist/vocalist Jody Redhage, and the Williams College Concert Choir. Judd is also active as a promoter of new music in New York City, directing New Amsterdam Records, an independent record label serving the emerging new music community of New York City; the Ico Music (formerly VIM: TriBeCa) concert series, a weekly series offering new approaches to concert programming in TriBeCa's Gallerie Icosahedron; and Free Speech Zone Productions, a presenting organization focused on music related to issues of social justice and political concerns. He also serves on the board of NYC Performing Arts Spaces, an organization dedicated to addressing performing artists' needs for performance and rehearsal space, and is Composer-in-Residence of Sympho, a new, conceptual orchestra project directed by Paul Haas and featuring the Knights. Increasingly active as a performer, Judd has performed in a variety of collaborative projects around New York, including City of Gold, his band that debuted at the 2006 Bushwick Arts Project B.A.P. Lab at the Third Ward, and Dancigers, a dance-rock duo.
Click here to send me (Judd, now speaking in the first person, having left biography-abstraction world) an e-mail, or here to join the mailing list. If you are a Myspace person, you can also check out my Myspace page, though it doesn't have much to offer that you can't find here on this site.
Some things (and excerpts of things) people have said:
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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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