A composer, singer, and conductor, Patrick Greene (b. 1985) is a rising artist in the world of contemporary art music.
Hailed by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as a composer of “true musicality,” Mr. Greene writes "shimmering" music (New Music Box) that wholeheartedly embraces the aesthetic diversity of the modern world. Recent engagements include performances by the Boston Musica Viva, the Atlanta Chamber Players, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (and Wind Quintet), loadbang ensemble, Christopher Houlihan, Transient Canvas, Balletik Duo, and many others. As a frequently commissioned choral composer, Patrick’s music has been performed by choirs across the United States as well as Germany, Portugal, and Italy.
In the fall of 2010, Patrick won the Rapido! New England competition. In January, 2011, at the Rapido! Take Two!! National Finals in Atlanta, his piece abstractEXTRACTION garnered the Internet Audience Favorite Award. Mr. Greene’s piece The Long Walk was recently chosen as the official anthem of Trinity College’s Cornerstone Campaign, a $32.9 million- dollar restoration project. In 2011, Patrick became the youngest commissioned composer in the two-decade history of Boston Musica Viva Family Concerts.
Mr. Greene earned his MM degree in Composition from The Boston Conservatory in May 2010, where he studied with Andy Vores and Dalit Warshaw. He graduated with a BA in Music from Trinity College in 2007, as a student of Gerald Moshell, Douglas Bruce Johnson, and John Rose.
Patrick is a member of the Society for Music Theory, the American Composers’ Forum, CompositionToday.com, and the Society of Composers, Inc. He is also a founding member of the Fifth Floor Collective and the Equilibrium Concert Series. Outside of music, he is the Global HR Coordinator for Oxfam America, an international NGO headquartered in Boston. He lives with his wife (the actress Micah Greene) and son in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where he serves on the town's Cultural Council.

PROGRAM NOTE

JUICY, a shimmering little piece for electronics, represents two things for me: an homage to a classic piece of postmodern design, and a chance to fully embrace the lifelong habit I’ve had of smacking steel things together and listening to the resultant sounds.
The “design” homage is to the Juicy Salif, an aluminum squid Philippe Starck created as a citrus juicer as part of his contract with the Italian housewares maker Alessi in the late-‘80s. Starck’s genius isn’t in improving functionality (the Salif is actually a pretty awful juicer). It’s in redefining the lens through which we observe the built environment around us. He turns things askew so that we examine them, discuss them, come together and laugh and think a bit. This has become the droll go-to for a generation of postmodernists, but in the twilight of the Reagan years it was something novel and important.
When I finally found a Juicy Salif on sale, I leapt at the opportunity. It arrived at our doorstep a few weeks later, a gleaming, angular cephalopod just begging to be struck against a hard surface.
Let me explain.
Since I was a child, I’ve been endlessly fascinated by the ringing overtones that erupt whenever certain objects collide. I could honestly sit alone in a room with a triangle and a steel beater and be perfectly content for hours. Maybe days. It’s this same appreciation for harmonic partials, I think, that attracted me to music in the first place. Striking a supported piece of metal is like shining a light into the acoustical darkness with which we surround ourselves—one perceives that fundamental, resonant frequency, but one also hears buzzing, beating tones stretching out ad infinitum. When I knocked one of the Juicy Salif’s legs with a fork, I immediately perceived an extremely strong G and C (-ish), but this
quickly dissolved into a harmonic wash that spread out and surrounded me. I knew immediately that I’d have to find an excuse to write a piece using these sounds.
As an homage to Starck, I’ve turned off (or at least quieted down) the left side of my brain in composing JUICY. The only pre- compositional work I undertook was analyzing the various spectra of the Salif being struck with assorted implements. I tried to highlight the relationships of the constituent harmonics with one another, to amplify and diminish certain intervals, to magnify interesting aspects of the juicer’s timbre, to manipulate and transpose partials, etc. The resultant piece is nothing more than a chance to bathe in the refulgent complexity of a piece of aluminum being struck with all manner of household objects.
I hope you enjoy it.