The creative output of Anthony R. Green (b. 1984; composer, performer, social justice artist) includes musical and visual creations, interpretations of original works or works in the repertoire, collaborations, educational outreach, and more. Behind all of his artistic endeavors are the ideals of equality and freedom, which manifest themselves in diverse ways in a composition, a performance, a collaboration, or social justice work.

As a composer, his works have been presented in over 25 countries across six continents by various internationally acclaimed soloists and ensembles, including : vocalists Anthony P. McGlaun, Julian Otis, Anna Elder, and Amanda DeBoer Bartlett; violists Ashleigh Gordon, Gregory Williams, Carrie Frey, and Wendy Richman; pianists Stephen Drury, Kathleen Supové, Jason Hardink, Kimi Kawashima, Lewis Warren Jr., Clare Longendyke, Hayk Melikyan, and Eunmi Ko; cellists Matthieu D’Ordine, Patricia Ryan, and Ifetayo Ali-Landing; percussionists Bill Solomon, Michael Skillern, and Dame Evelyn Glennie; saxophonists Neal Postma, Benjamin Sorrell, and Kendra Williams; and ensembles Tenth Intervention (Hajnal Pivnick – violin, and Adam Tendler – piano), ALEA III (with Gunther Schuller, conductor), the Thalea String Quartet, counter)induction, Ensemble Dal Niente, Dinosaur Annex, andPlay, NorthStar Duo, fivebyfive, Transient Canvas, the McCormick Percussion Group, the Icarus Quartet, Opera Kansas (as winner of the 2018 Zepick Modern Opera Contest), the American Composers Orchestra, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, the Minnesota Philharmonic, the String Archestra, the Playground Ensemble, Ossia New Music Ensemble, and Alarm Will Sound, to name a few. He has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation (a 2021 commissioned composer), Community MusicWorks, Make Music Boston, Celebrity Series Boston, Chamber Music Tulsa, Access Contemporary Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Boston University (for the 2023 Richmond Piano Competition), the Texas Flute Society (for the 2021 Myrna Brown Competition), NOISE-BRIDGE duo, Ghetto Classics (for the 2022 Kenya International Cello Festival), and various other soloists and ensembles. In 2021, three portrait concerts featuring his music were presented digitally by Boston University, and in live concerts at UMKC - presented by the saxophone studio, and in St. Paul, Minnesota - presented by the 113 Composers Collective. A fourth portrait concert featuring vocal works will be presented in December 2022 at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA. He has been a resident artist at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Escape to Create (Florida), Visby International Centre for Composers (Sweden), Space/Time (Scotland), atelier:performance (Germany), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Nebraska), Gettysburg National Military Park (through the National Parks Arts Foundation), and the perfocraZe International Artist Residency (Ghana). Upcoming residencies include the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida) and Loghaven (Tennessee).

As a performer, he has appeared at venues in the US, Cyprus, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Israel, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, South Korea, and Ghana, premiering original works and working with student, emerging, and established composers such as David Liptak, Renée C. Baker, and George Crumb for various performance presentations. Green has participated in consortium commissions organized by Neal Postma (saxophone), Meraki (clarinet and piano duo), and New Works Project (solo percussion). His music has been performed at Symphony Space (New York), Marian Anderson Theater at Aaron Davis Hall (New York), the DiMenna Center (New York), Jordan Hall (Boston), Tivoli Vredenburg (Utrecht), Kunstraum (Stuttgart), Cité de la Musique et de la Danse (Strasbourg), the Shoe Factory (Nicosia), the TWA Hotel (New York), the Edward A. Hatch Memorial Shell on the Charles River Esplanade (Boston), and the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), amongst many others. Selections of Green’s music and performances are on CDs and DVDs on the Navona, Ravello, Stone, and Innova labels. His recent engagement in performance art and divergent theater has yielded presentations of such works in Berlin (Spike Gallery), New York City (Union Square for the Art in Odd Places Normal Project, 2021; JACK in Brooklyn for the 2021 Radical Acts Festival), Oslo (Kulturkirken Jakob for the Periferien “SITES AND SOUNDS” project), and in Kumasi, Ghana. Other visual and sonic art projects have been presented at Galerie Wedding (Berlin), Federation Square (Melbourne), Monkey Bar (Hannover), Alliance Francaise Kumasi, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and venues in Malaysia, Venezuela, Spain, and more.

Through music, text, and entrepreneurship, Green comments on many issues related to social justice. Such issues have included: immigration (Earned - narrator & double string quartet), civil rights (Dona Nobis Veritatem - soprano, viola, & piano), the historical links between slavery and current racial injustice in the US (Oh, Freedom! - spoken word, voice, flute, viola, cello), the contributions of targeted and/or minority groups to humanity (A Single Voice: Solitary, Unified - solo alto sax & fixed media), and more. His ongoing opera-project Alex in Transition highlights the life of Alex - a trans woman - and her journey to truth and authentic living. This opera has been featured in the Ft. Worth Opera Frontiers Festival, presented by New Fangled Opera and One Ounce Opera, and performed in a concert production at the Israel Conservatory of Music in Tel Aviv. For the Concord Revisited Project, organized by pianists Jason Hardink and Kimi Kawashima at Westminster College (Salt Lake City), Green composed The Baldwin Sonata : a concert-length piano sonata celebrating and musically analyzing the life, legacy, philosophy, and text of the legendary James Baldwin. Other social justice works include: short cabaret operas, which are comedic-yet-piquant critiques on capitalism via corporations (one of which was premiered by Strange Trace for their 2021 Stencils Festival); His Mind & What He Heard in Central Park in the Late 90s for solo voice, concerning a gay Black man’s encounters with queer racism and toxic exotification (premiered by Anna Elder at the 2019 Conference: Music & Erotics at the University of Pittsburgh); To Anacreon in the US for solo piano, concerning nationalism - especially US “patriotism” (premiered by Aristo Sham at New England Conservatory, with subsequent performances by Kathleen Supové at Barge Music, Clare Longendyke at the Mostly Modern Festival, and more); the sax quartet Almost Over, a musical symbol of Black history in the United States (featured in the 2017 Grachten Festival in Amsterdam and the 2017 Gaudeamus Music Week in Utrecht); rest - reflect - reignite, a video work exploring Black rest, inspired by the Nap Ministry (commissioned by the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project for the Re:Sound 2021 Festival); Piano Concerto: Solution, sonifying and visualizing the power of women (commissioned by the McCormick Percussion Group; presented at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and the Milwaukee Art Museum presented by Present Music); and I Returned. I wanted to., a video work examining Black joy, Black queerness, Christianity in Africa, and more (commissioned by CAP UCLA for the 2021 Tune In Festival), amongst others. Publications include text for New Music Box, TEMPO (Cambridge University), Archive Books, Positionen magazine (Berlin), and more.

Green’s most important social justice work has been with Castle of our Skins : a concert and education series organization dedicated to celebrating Black artistry through music. Co-founder, associate artistic director, and composer-in-residence, his work with Castle of our Skins has included concert/workshop curation and development, community outreach, lecturing about the history and politics concerning Black composers of classical music, commissioning and supporting young, emerging, and established composers, curating the BIBA (Beauty in Black Artistry) Blog, and more. The current 10th season will be his final season with CooS, after which he will transition to director emeritus, occasional consultant, and lifelong friend.

His primary teachers include Susan Kelley, Dr. Donald Rankin, and Maria Clodes-Jaguaribe for piano, and Dr. Martin Amlin, John Drumheller, Theodore Antoniou, Lee Hyla, and Dr. Robert Cogan for composition. He has participated in masterclasses with Laura Schwendinger, Paquito D’Rivera, Walter Zimmermann, Jonathan Harvey, the Fidelio Trio, and the JACK Quartet, amongst others. His solo and collaborative work has been recognized by grants from Meet the Composer, the Argosy Foundation, New Music USA, and the American Composers Forum as a McKnight Visiting Composer, among others. A passionate educator, Green has given courses, workshops, lectures, and studio visits at numerous institutions, including Walker West Music Academy, Boston University, the Longy School of Music, the Piet Zwart Instituut, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), UC Santa Cruz, the Eastman School of Music, Northwestern University, the Gotland School of Music Composition (Gotlands Tonsättarskola), Westminster College, the University of Milwaukee, and Columbia University. He has served on the faculty for the Sewanee Music Festival, Project STEP summer program, Really Spicy Opera’s Aria Institute, the Alba Music Festival Composition Program, and the Vienna Summer Music Festival’s Composers Forum. An avid thought contributor, he has appeared on panels concerning various subjects for the Wellesley Composers Conference, the 2020 New Music Gathering (along with Angélica Negrón, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and more), and most recently for the 2022 WASBE Conference in Prague (along with Jennifer Higdon and David T. Little, and more), among others. He has also taught various subjects and given private composition lessons at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music, Theater, and Dance. He is a 2021 graduate fellow (alumnus) of the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Science (BAS) at the Berlin University of the Arts graduate school (Graduiertenschule), and also holds degrees from New England Conservatory and Boston University.

Green was born on Nacotchtank land (Arlington, VA) and raised on Narragansett and Pauquunaukit land (Providence, RI) in a country named by violent Europeans and built significantly by the labor of the enslaved. He currently splits his time mostly between the US and Europe, with ever-increasing travel to Africa. He is married to his occasional piano duo partner and forever husband Dr. Itamar Ronen.

Photo credit: Mariam Mekiwi