After an active career as a composer, critic, teacher, and thought leader on the future of classical music, Greg Sandow has now turned to composing full-time.

As a critic, he had a national reputation for writing about both classical music and pop, with his classical writing appearing in the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications, and his pop writing in Entertainment Weekly, where he was also senior music editor. He made many public appearances, and was perhaps the only person ever to speak on public discussion panels for both the New York Philharmonic and an annual hard rock and heavy metal convention.

His main home as a teacher was Juilliard, where he taught graduate courses for 26 years; he also taught at Peabody, Eastman, and at the University of Minnesota. As a thought leader, he has written extensively on classical music’s future, and given talks on it throughout the United States and abroad. He’s also been a consultant, working with individuals and organizations, helping with career and audience development and doing projects with the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra.

His most prominent recent composing project has been a recording of his three string quartets, played by the Naumburg-winning Terra String Quartet, and released on the Acis label. Also in the past year he’s written Cooperation, a string trio commissioned and premiered by the Cret String Trio, and, going back a bit, he wrote two variations on “America the Beautiful” for pianist Min Kwon’s America/Beautiful project. Coming up are a choral piece for Geoffrey Silver’s District Chorale, an oboe quartet for ROCO, the entrepreneurial chamber orchestra in Houston, and Greg’s own creation, Recital — a full recital program for soprano and piano, with Greg’s own versions of music commonly sung on vocal recitals, including old Italian songs and arias, German lieder, French art songs, and more, with, as encores, an Italian opera aria in dramatic verismo style and a Broadway show tune.

This change in Greg’s life has been joyful. By making it in his 80s, he’s freed himself from the chains of ambition. Would having long-term plans make any sense? He’s free to flow like water, writing music he loves, for musicians with whom he can warmly collaborate.

He’s also freed from old preoccupations. The future of classical music — what is that, exactly? Greg would say, based on his research and experience, that classical music has, in the U.S.,  faded somewhat from public view, and that in a worst-case scenario it’s losing its audience. While too many people in the field may not know how to turn things around, because they don’t know enough about contemporary culture.

When Greg composes, he doesn’t think about that. He just writes music he loves, and the result, in its form and texture, feels firmly classical. Though, given his wide appreciation of music of many kinds, he’ll sometimes refer to other styles. In his string trio, for instance, he quotes Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,” and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” (in a transcription for solo cello by the Cret String Trio’s cellist, Clancy Newman).

He doesn’t do this, though, with any agenda in mind. He’s not saying that classical pieces must link to pop music (though he does think pop music connections of many kinds could benefit the field). Similarly, when he writes tonal and even triadic music, as he often does, he’s not rejecting the atonal masterworks of the 20th century, which in fact has strongly influenced him. The influence may not be apparent, but it’s there, in (for instance) a constant development of musical ideas, which he learned from Schoenberg, or in the movement of melodic lines from voice to voice, which he learned from Webern.

If he has any ideology as a composer, it’s that all the music in the world — past and present, in every style — is alive around us. And that classical composers should feel free to use any of it. As for his own work, he thinks a friend of his was right to call his work both cerebral and emotional. Emotional, because it wears its expressive heart on its sleeve, and cerebral, because there’s always a strong compositional understructure, with relationships built among many parts of a piece (something else influenced by the Second Vienna School), and in little games played here and there with musical form. None of which needs to be audible. =For a listener, Greg’s music isn’t difficult. He just loves having an active musical mind.

Among past pieces he’d love to resurrect are four operas, especially his treatment of Frankenstein, which was triumphant in workshop performances, but has never had a formal premiere. He wrote it in a full operatic style, with dramatic melodies and high notes, as a tribute to his love of Bellini and of Verdi’s early works. But (with a libretto by the science fiction writer and poet Thomas M. Disch) it’s a fully serious work, ending with great pathos as the Creature dies alone on the polar ice (as it does in Mary Shelley’s novel), with his fading heartbeat in the orchestra the last sounds we hear.

Also Greg has written Weegee Photos, a piano piece based on 1940s tabloid photos of crime scenes, fires, and lovers lost in their dreams. Plus Short Talks, based on Anne Carson poems, for a pianist who also plays a drum. Also Shakespeare Songs, women’s monologues from Shakespeare. for soprano and piano. And an unfinished opera, based on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, subtitled “A Feast of Music,” to honor all the varied songs, choruses, and operatic singing the play calls for.

Greg lives his life with his own approximation of spirituality, and could list, among many swirling interests (some dating from his New York childhood), 1950s horror comics, detective thrillers, and rock & roll; the New York subways; baseball (the New York Mets); Antonioni and Godard films; and Communist history (especially North Korea and the Soviet Union).

He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Anne Midgette, the distinguished former classical music critic at the New York Times and the Washington Post, who in a transition parallel to Greg’s has reinvented herself as a novelist. They have two cats, sociable and slightly crazy, and a son, 14 years old as this is written, who has no taste for classical music, as is his inalienable right.