…which has information about my work as a composer and musicologist, as well as writings on other subjects, including racism, African literature, and the relations of men and women.

The most important thing I know about the art of music, I learned from the great American poet and educator, Eli Siegel, with whom I had the honor to study. It is this principle of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy he founded in 1941, and it explains the true relation of art and life:

“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making
one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

To read more about this extraordinary idea—the deepest and kindest idea I have ever met—you may wish to read some of the essays I’ve posted on this website. They are about Art and they are about Life, and they take up questions which only Aesthetic Realism can answer:

• Can understanding why music is beautiful make us better, kinder people?
• Can art make sense of life–with all the confusion life might bring?
• Can we have emotions, on an everyday basis, about the world and the people around us, that are as exciting and satisfying as the emotions Beethoven, Ellington, Bach—and, yes, Mahler—make for?
• And can understanding the technical basis for the beauty of music–of all centuries, cultures and genres–enable us to see honest reason to like the world itself?

I hope, as you visit this website, you’ll see some of the evidence for why the answer to all these questions is Yes! The evidence is cultural, scholarly, and also “straight from life”–for I am personally grateful to Aesthetic Realism for restoring to me what I once thought I had irreparably lost: my ability to write music. Certainly, the statements about my work as a composer you may have read on my opening page, would never have been possible had I not engaged in this great education about art and life. Some of that education I document on this website.

—Edward Green