George Edwards (1943-2011), Edward MacDowell Emeritus Professor of Music, had a long and distinguished career at Columbia, in addition to his significant public career as a composer and critic. Edwards grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He attended Oberlin College, where his principal teacher was Richard Hoffman, and from which he graduated in 1965. From 1965-68, he attended graduate school and earned the M.F.A. at Princeton University, where he studied with Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and Earl Kim. He taught music theory and composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston beginning in 1969. He won the Rome Prize in Composition in 1975, and in 1977 he was appointed assistant professor of music at Columbia University in New York. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in both 1980 and 1986, and earned tenure at Columbia in 1987, heading the composition program here from 1987 to 1995. He also served on the advisory committee of the Alice M. Ditson Fund from 1988 to 2005, serving as the committee's secretary. He served as Chair of the Department of Music at Columbia from 1996 to 1999. After his retirement in 2006, he was named Edward MacDowell Emeritus Professor of Music by Columbia's Board of Trustees.
George Edwards
Studios
Veltin
George Edwards worked in the Veltin studio.
Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…