About
I am a music theorist, musicologist and violist, currently head of the department of music at Bar-Ilan University, and violist with the Carmel Quartet. My chief interest lies in eighteenth-century form, which I approach from a diachronic perspective, inquiring into the process of its change over time – its origins, evolution and subsequent development – rather than its synchronic properties. My work relies heavily on statistical methods and corpus studies, which I combine with insights from systems theory and with in-depth analysis of illustrative works.
Further research concerns Jewish music, computerized recognition of musical style, and music and the arts in the first half of the 20th century. I am also violist with the Carmel Quartet, with whom I present the critically acclaimed concert-lecture series Strings and More Publications
Books:
How Sonata Forms, A Bottom-Up Approach, Oxford University Press (2022)
Chapters in Collections:
Yoel Greenberg, Precedents for the ‘Secondary Development’ from Bach to Mozart and Their Implications for Understanding Early Sonata Form”, Bach Perspectives 14, ed. Paul Corneilson (2022)
Rebecca Cypess, Yoel Greenberg, “Hearing the Ancient Temple in Early Modern Mantua: Abraham Portaleone and the Cultivation of Music within the Mantuan Jewish Community”, Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music, Oxford University Press (forthcoming 2023)
Journal Articles:
Omer Maliniak, Yoel Greenberg, “Follow the Solo: The Formal Evolution of the Concerto in the Eighteenth-Century”. Music Theory Spectrum 44/2: 231-259 (2022)
Yoel Greenberg, “An Early String Quartet Movement by Paul Ben-Haim”, Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online, Vol. 18 (2021)
Yoel Greenberg, “Tinkering with Form: On W. F. Bach’s Revisions to Two Keyboard Sonatas.” Music Theory and Analysis Vol. VI/2: 200-223 (2018)
Yoel Greenberg, “Ordo ab Chao: The Fugue as Chaos in the Early Twentieth Century.” Music and Letters, 99/1: 74-103 (2018)
Yoel Greenberg, “Haydn’s Early Altered Recapitulations as Evidence of Early Sonata-Form Logic.” Music Theory and Analysis Vol. V/2: 168-189
Yoel Greenberg, “Of Beginnings and Ends: A Corpus-Based Inquiry into the Rise of the Recapitulation.” Journal of Music Theory Vol. 61.2: 171-200 (2017) – Recipient of the David Kraehenbuehl Prize, 2018
Yoel Greenberg, “These Are Your Gods, Oh Israel: Chosenness in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron as a Response to Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 48/1: 71-99 (2017(
Yoel Greenberg, “Ben-Haim’s String Quartet, Op. 21: A Programmatic Reading”; Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online, Vol. 12 (2015)
Yoel Greenberg, “Parables of the Old Men and the Young: the Multifarious Modernisms of Erwin Schulhoff’s String Quartets”; Music and Letters Vol. 95 no.2: 213-250 (2014)
William Herlands, Richard Der, Yoel Greenberg, Simon Levin, “A Machine Learning Approach to Musically Meaningful Homogeneous Style Classification”; Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-14): 276-282 (2014)
Yoel Greenberg,“Minding a Gap: The Transition from the Slow Introduction to the Fast Section in Haydn’s Symphonies”; Journal of Musicology, Vol. 29, no. 3: 292-322 (2012)
Yoel Greenberg, “Drawn Up out of a Mute Wellspring: The Revival of Paul Ben-Haim’s Early String Quintet (1919)”; Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online, Vol. 9 I: 25-42 (2012)
Dalia Cohen, Yoel Greenberg, “Computerized performance of Palestrina counterpoint, whose rules are based on natural schemata that express tranquility”; Proceedings of Understanding and Creating Music Conference 2005, Caserta, Italy (2005)
Book Reviews:
Joy Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014. Studies in Contemporary Jewry 30, 280-282 (2015)
Ben-Moshe, Raffi / Experiencing Devekut: The Contemplative Niggun of Habad in Israel (Yuval Music Series, 11). Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 73(1), 120-122 (2015)
