Edward Rothstein is a critic and a composer.

Rothstein holds a B.A.

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

 from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 (1973), an M.A.

Master of Arts (postgraduate)

A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...

 in English literature from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, and a Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 from the Committee on Social Thought

Committee on Social Thought

The Committee on Social Thought is one of several PhD-granting committees at the University of Chicago. It was started in 1941 by historian John Ulric Nef along with economist Frank Knight, anthropologist Robert Redfield, and University President Robert Maynard Hutchins.The committee is...

 at the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 (1994). In addition, Rothstein did graduate work in mathematics at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

.

Rothstein is currently the cultural critic-at-large for the The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, particularly examining the reach and depth of museums, large and small, one by one. He has worked as a music critic for The New Republic

The New Republic

The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

and as the chief music critic for the Times.

Rothstein is a two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor

Deems Taylor

Joseph Deems Taylor was a U.S. composer, music critic, and promoter of classical music.-Career:Taylor initially planned to become an architect; however, despite minimal musical training he soon took to music composition. The result was a series of works for orchestra and/or voices...

 Award for music criticism, and was given a Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

 in 1991.

As a composer, Rothstein supports the idea that music may be linked in a distant way to physical and mathematical ideas such as string theory

String theory

String theory is an active research framework in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a contender for a theory of everything , a manner of describing the known fundamental forces and matter in a mathematically complete system...

. He explores this notion in his book Emblems of Mind.

Writings

• Archive of Rothstein's New York Times articles
• Archive of Rothstein's tech columns in New York Times
• "Mozart: In Search of the Roots of Genius", Smithsonian, February, 2006.
• "Contemplating Churchill", Smithsonian, March, 2005.
• Visions of Utopia (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities), with Herbert Muschamp
  Herbert Muschamp
  Herbert Mitchell Muschamp was an American architecture critic.- Early years :Born in Philadelphia, Muschamp described his childhood home life as follows: “The living room was a secret. A forbidden zone. The new slipcovers were not, in fact, the reason why sitting down there was taboo. That was...
  
   and Martin E. Marty
  Martin E. Marty
  Martin Emil Marty is an American Lutheran religious scholar who has written extensively on 19th century and 20th century American religion. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956, and served as a Lutheran pastor from 1952 to 1962 in the suburbs of Chicago...
  
    (Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0195171616.
• 1998 Diary in Slate
• Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics (Times Books, 1995).
• Foreword to Arthur Loesser
  Arthur Loesser
  Arthur Loesser was an American classical pianist and writer.Born into a musical family, Loesser received early training from his father until he began lessons with Sigismund Stojowski at the Institute of Musical Art, now called the Juilliard School.Loesser was the author of the books Humor in...
  
  's Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (1991).
• Archive of Rothstein's essays 1979-90 in The New York Review of Books