Joseph Greene, 18, a senior at Springs’ Flabob Airport Preparatory Academy who lives in Riverside, is a gifted classical music composer and performer. He has been offered a music scholarship and a trustee merit scholarship for $14,500 from California Baptist University (CBU)—although he has not committed to going to the school—and has taken three music classes through Springs, excelling in each one. Joseph has attended Springs schools since 3rd grade and maintains a 4.08 GPA.
Joseph began playing piano at age 11 after his older brother began playing. He recalled, “I begged him to teach me some, and then took his lesson book and began to teach myself.”
He began collecting music books with the works of composers such as Beethoven and Bach, “hungrily playing as much music as I could, which made me an adept sight-reader.”
He began to study under a music teacher and played for a church children’s choir. He initially thought about making music performance a career but decided a better option would be music composition. In 8th grade he wrote his first piano sonata as part of a class assignment, studying the melodic, harmonic, and structural conventions used by great composers. He finished the first movement for the assignment, but then went on to spend an entire year completing the other two movements.
He continued, “Since then, however, I have grown immensely in my understanding of music, and can write pieces with much more sophistication, and in a much shorter time.”
Over the summer he organized an ensemble which included two violins, a cello, a French horn, and flute, with him on piano. He wrote a 25-minute piece entitled “The Maelstrom” for the ensemble to perform, which he believes is his best work to date. He is working on a second piece for the group, as well as a sonata for piano and another for violin.
He plans on studying music composition in college, where “I can perfect my craft.”
He continued, “From there, I hope to be able to write music for a living, not the kind of music that lowers itself to the worst parts of humanity, or that is so complex that it is almost unintelligible, but the sort of music that can be felt by anyone, and raise people up to a higher understanding and appreciation of beauty. I am not quite sure how I will do it, but I am certain that there is a hunger within people for this sort of art, and that with the proper training I can help to provide it to them.”
Listen to Joseph’s work on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZj5EENi9ciknd5CkPyyBKQ.
