George Edwards, the retired Edward MacDowell Professor of Music at Columbia University, died Oct. 23, 2011, after a long illness. He was 68.
Edwards graduated from Oberlin in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in music, and received an M.F.A. from Princeton in 1967. He taught music theory and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1969 to 1976. From 1973 to 1975, he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He won two Guggenheim fellowships.
He began teaching at Columbia in 1976, and later became the MacDowell Professor of Music. From 1987 to 1995, he directed the graduate composition program, and was chair of the music department from 1996 to 1999. In 2005, he retired due to ill health.
Elaine R. Sisman *78, the Bender Professor of Music at Columbia, said Edwards “was a brilliant composer, who was famous for his dry wit and wrote beautifully about music.” He had written essays on music originally published in literary journals, reprinted in 2008 in Collected Essays in Classical and Modern Music. He was a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, named the third president of Princeton in 1758.
Edwards is survived by his wife, the poet Rachel Hadas; and a son, Jonathan.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.