Bios

Joshua Frankel

Joshua Frankel is a visual artist working in a range of old and new media, including animation, which often resides at the center of his work. He also creates through drawing, printmaking, film, and opera. 

Frankel is the director and animator of A Marvelous Order. The forthcoming multimedia opera is about cities and how they change, about power and how it is confronted, and about two nearly-mythological figures from twentieth-century New York City—Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses—who clashed through a battle of ideas that manifested itself in the streets. 

The opera will feature animation throughout, and was conceived collaboratively by Frankel, composer Judd Greenstein, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. His animations are the heart of the opera’s production design. They appear on screens embedded in the set—a series of blocks and towers manipulated by the cast. 

He grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City in a building filled with musicians, actors, and dancers. He spent much of his youth listening to hip-hop and trying not to let anyone take his lunch money. 

Frankel’s work has been presented by institutions including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Library of Congress, London Institute of Contemporary Art, New Museum, Film Society of Lincoln Center, United Nations World Urban Forum, San Diego Symphony, EMPAC, PEAK Performances, and Wassaic Project. He even had a creation presented in a shipping container in Berlin.

A presentation at New York City’s River to River Festival involved his animation being played on more than fifty video advertising screens in the Fulton Center. The animation was synchronized to music performed live by a chamber ensemble and five singers.

Judd Greenstein

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 a piano background combining an urban, beat-oriented sensibility with a late-Romantic classical harmonic language. 

Greenstein is a composer of structurally complex, viscerally engaging works for varied instrumentation. A passionate advocate for the independent new-music community across the United States, much of his work is written for the virtuosic ensembles and solo performers who make up that community and is tailored to their specific talents and abilities.

Greenstein’s philosophy as both a composer and a curator involves music that is an organic blend of multiple styles, sounds, and instruments. Standout groups that reflect that polyglot sensibility, including yMusic, Roomful of Teeth, and NOW Ensemble, counted Greenstein among their earliest commissions and continue to perform his work. 

He also has attracted attention through his close collaboration with many of the best young solo musicians in New York City and beyond, including violist Nadia Sirota, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, percussionist Samuel Solomon, violinist Colin Jacobsen, pianists Michael Mizrahi and Blair McMillan, and flutist Alex Sopp. 

Greenstein has been increasingly in demand as a composer for orchestra and stage. He has received recent commissions from Minnesota Orchestra, Lucerne Festival, and North Carolina Symphony, among others. 

Recent projects attest to the diversity of his output. They include an orchestral song cycle for indie rock vocalist DM Stith; the score for A Marvelous Order, an opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs; a ballet score for Isabella Boylston and choreographer Gemma Bond; and a flute concerto for Sopp and The Knights. 

In addition to his work as a composer, Greenstein is a promoter of new music. He’s the co-director of New Amsterdam Records, an artist service organization that supports post-genre musicians in developing their most personal new projects. He is the curator of Ecstatic Music Festival at New York City’s Merkin Hall, an annual showcase of new collaborative concerts among artists from different musical worlds. He’s a founding member of NOW Ensemble, a composer-performer collective that develops new chamber music for its idiosyncratic instrumentation. He co-curates Apples & Olives festival in Zurich, Switzerland, which cultivates in Europe the post-genre ethos of the Ecstatic festival and New Amsterdam.

Greenstein earned degrees from Williams College, Yale School of Music, and Princeton University. He has received fellowships from Tanglewood Music Center, Bang on a Can Summer Institute, Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, and Sundance New Frontier Story Lab.