Eli Greenhoe is a composer, producer, conductor, and guitarist whose music is characterized by its close attention to the materiality, topography, and movement of sound, alongside an affinity for lyricism and overt emotion, and is guided by a desire to find ecstatic ways to coax unity and focus out of complexity. A prolific lyricist, his music is attentive to the poetics of form, and his vocal works often explore the hybridity of words as sound, meaning, and history, as well as the nature of repetition and memory.
His concert works have been commissioned and performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, Bergamot Quartet, Miranda Cuckson, Aki Takahashi, loadbang, and Contemporaneous, among many others, and performed at festivals including the Taproot New Music Festival at UC Davis, Village Trip Festival, Corcoran Music Festival at George Washington Univerisity, and Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend. In 2018 he was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2021 he was selected as a finalist in the Beth Morrison Projects “Next Generation” program. Additional fellowships, residencies, and recognition have come from I-Park, ASCAP, Bang on a Can, and Yale University.
As a songwriter and producer, he collaborates regularly with musicians in a wide variety of traditions. Primarily, he records music and performs as half of a project he co-leads with composer/multi-instrumentalist Hans Bilger. The duo released their debut Orchids on Adhyâropa records in 2025, which was described by The Fader as “elegantly fusing both [experimental composition and acoustic pop]” and Belgian radio BRF 1, who called the album “a vibrant burst of blossoms ... very fascinating.”
As a performer, Eli works in a multitude of musical spaces. He plays regularly in the improvising sextet Locomotive, co-led by Adam O’Farrill and David Leon, and alongside violinist/composer Ledah Finck in the avant-folk duo Freddy and Sally. Other notable recent engagements as a guitarist include performances with Contemporaneous, the Yale Philharmonia, and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. As a conductor, he recently premiered Patricia Brennan’s Of the Near and Far, an evening-length work for improvising ensemble, at the Jazz Gallery in New York.
Eli is also active in interdisciplinary collaboration: his film and commercial music has been featured in Vogue Magazine online and as an official selection of the 2020 Maryland Film Festival. A frequent collaborator with filmmaker Max Bowens, the pair’s most recent project, Looking at You Looking at Me, was selected for participation in the 2026 Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, France.
Eli is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree at the Yale School of Music, where he has studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Christopher Theofanidis. Other important mentors include Reiko Füting, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Stephen Coxe.
Artist Statement (250 words)
I make music in several different ways. I compose and conduct notated chamber and orchestral music, write and produce vernacular, pop, and experimental music in recording studios, and improvise extensively—both in performance with other improvisers, and as a writing tool. The thread that connects my omnivorous musical activity is a joy and reverence for mystery of sound and its ability to create worlds in space and time.
My music is characterized by its close attention to the materiality, topography, and movement of sound, alongside an affinity for lyricism and overt emotion, and is guided by a desire to find ecstatic ways to coax unity and focus out of complexity. I think that one of the most fundamental experiences of being a conscious being is watching something specific and comprehensible emerge out of a vast field of information—like finding meaning in the shapes of clouds, or deciphering patterns of movement from footprints in snow. In making art we adorn that property of sentience and make it sumptuous. In organizing the elusive and the overwhelming, we peek behind nature’s curtain; we observe and model the hidden machinations of reality.
I love to be overwhelmed, perplexed, and bewildered by sounds. I love to encounter music that demands to be listened to over and over, and preferably back to back. I love to feel held by the architecture of a piece of music, to exist within it and experience the particularities of the way it holds me. I look for all of this in my own music.