Greg Sandow

Who is Greg Sandow?

Greg Sandow is an American music critic and composer. He is a graduate of Harvard University, with a bachelor's degree in government, and of Yale University, with a master's degree in composition.

For many years, Sandow was best known as a critic, both of classical music and pop. As a critic, Sandow wrote for The Village Voice in the 1980s. His column was on new classical music, though he also wrote about the mainstream repertory, typically challenging traditional assumptions about its function and its meaning. In recent years his writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Opera News, and the Wall Street Journal, where for a long time he was a regular contributor. In pop music, he became chief pop critic of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1988, and in 1990 joined the staff of Entertainment Weekly, which had just begun publication, and where he served first as music critic and then as senior music editor.

During his years as a critic, Sandow abandoned composition, but later resumed it.