Adam Greene is a composer of instrumental works intended to re-explore the nature of engagement between composer and performer. His compositions have been commissioned and presented by performers and institutions committed to the promotion of new and innovative musical experiences, including SONOR, Ensemble Resonanz, the Daedalus Quartet, János Négyesy, and Speculum Musicae. His collaborations with Négyesy, Shannon Wettstein, Terry Longshore, and Urara Mogi have been vital in forging an approach towards the musical score that places extreme physical and technical demands in a meaningful dramatic and expressive context. Central to this approach is an interest in metaphor, both in the poetic sense and in its larger implications as explicated by cognitive scientists and linguists (such as George Lakoff), where modes of understanding are reinterpreted in an alternate domain. Consider, for example, Greene’s work for violin duo To Look Within where the two performers represent different aspects of a single personality or in the double concerto A Breath Between where the flute inhabits the role of critic, and leaves the concert stage to “comment” on the violin soloist and the ensemble from the audience.

While several of his compositions are extended from concepts where no particular text exists, many works have emerged from an encounter with writings, such as those by Calvino, Beckett, Joyce, and Carroll. His orchestral work In Winter takes, as a point of departure, a haiku from Basho. Recently he has been engrossed in Classical texts, which have formed the basis for several ongoing projects. An occasional poet, his own words have found their way into musical projects as well, often as a means of offering an alternate, poetic commentary to musical figures that simultaneously aids and complicates the performer’s interpretation.

Adam Greene’s music has been performed in cities around the United States, including New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, as well as in Europe and Asia. He has participated in several festivals and residency programs that have featured his works, such as the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the International Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (Darmstadt), the Composers Conference at Wellesley, the Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (at the New England Conservatory of Music), and the Long Beach Summer Arts program. As a student of Franco Donatoni in the mid-1990’s he was enrolled in courses in composition and contemporary music at the Civica Scuola, Milan. His awards include a commission grant from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, as well as prizes from ASCAP and NACUSA. Recordings of his music can be found on Aucourant Records.

Born in Chicago in 1970, Adam Greene took degrees in Music and Anthropology at Connecticut College, and earned a Master’s in Composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. After his studies in Italy he moved to California, where, at UCSD, he received the Ph.D. Greene’s principal mentor in composition was Roger Reynolds, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Whispers Out of Time made a strong impact on the young composer upon first hearing it in college. Greene took additional studies with Brian Ferneyhough, Arthur Berger, and Donatoni, and he had important encounters with Ligeti, Carter, Martino, Babbitt, and Davidovsky.

Also active as a scholar, his work is oriented primarily toward contemporary music. He has written and presented work on compositional technique as well as music perception. The confluence between language and music, both as a creative stimulus and as an interpretive resource has proven a useful model in addressing issues of drama and musical expression that reach beyond the traditional purview of music theory. Currently, Greene is preparing for publication a series of interviews with the Cambodian-born composer Chinary Ung.

Adam Greene has taught courses in composition and theory at the University of Minnesota School of Music, UCSD, and the New England Conservatory of Music.