Yoel Greenberg is Emanuel Alexandre Chair of musicology and head of the Jewish Music Research Centre in the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and violist with the Carmel Quartet. His research brings methods from data science and systems-theory to bear on traditional concerns of music theory, He has published extensively about musical form as a self-organizing system, interactions of music, arts and literature in the early twentieth century, and computerized recognition of musical style. His research on Jewish music includes articles on Jewish composers in early twentieth-century Europe, such as Schoenberg, Schulhoff, Milhaud, Toch and Ben Haim, and an article with Rebecca Cypess on the 1612 treatise “Shiltei Giborim” by Mantuan scholar Abraham Portaleone. He has also brought to publication several forgotten works from Ben-Haim’s early oeuvre, and performed and recorded these works, as well as several works from Mandate Palestine reconstructed by Alon Schab.
Greenberg has published in numerous leading journals, winning the David Kraehenbuehl Award for 2018 and the SMT’s Outstanding publication award for 2023. His book, How Sonata Forms (Oxford University Press 2022) has received laudatory reviews in numerous top journals. His work has been supported continuously since 2014 by three separate grants from the Israel Science Foundation. Together with the Carmel Quartet, Greenberg maintains a busy performance schedule in Israel and abroad, presenting the critically acclaimed narrated concert series “Strings and More”.
Greenberg holds degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science and musicology at the Hebrew University, and has done post-doctoral work in the departments of music, and of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. In 2012 he joined the department of music at Bar-Ilan University, where he was head of department from 2020-2023. In 2023 he transferred to the Hebrew University.