Portland State music alumnus wins prize to create open-source non-Western instruments

The 2025 Andries Deinum Prize for Visionaries and Provocateurs has been awarded to Richie Greene, who earned his Master of Science in Music this month. With this honor, which comes with a $10,000 cash award, Richie will create “Cimbalo Cromatico,” a deeply researched exploration of microtonality outside of the existing 12-note Western standard. As part of this project, Richie plans to design and distribute affordable, open-source instruments for the use of innovative music makers around the world.

An unconventional path

Richie Greene’s musical career to date has been marked by bold moves, a penchant for experimentation, and a lightning-bolt moment where his perception of music was forever changed.

Growing up on Maui, Richie began his musical career as a practicing multiinstrumentalist, moving from one instrument to another. For Richie, “a music lesson was an opportunity to have a different instrument in your lap every sitting,” which suited his nature much better than forcing himself to stick to one instrument.

When it came to college, he chose Portland State, selecting violin as his primary instrument and earning his Bachelor of Music in Composition between 2010 and 2014. Studying under Renée Favand-See and Dr. Bonnie Miksch, he was exposed to a variety of avant-garde and experimental compositions, including the phonorealistic piece DEUS CANTANDO (God, singing), by Peter Ablinger, a work written for computer-controlled piano and screened text, in which mechanically pressed keys mimic the sound of a person speaking.

“Little could have prepared me for the perceptual fascination excited by hearing the solo piano played in this work,” he said. And he set about to “better understand sound itself and our endless emotional responses to it,” by exploring ways to make acoustic instruments collectively “speak.”

Meanwhile, despite the rigor and challenge of his undergraduate program, Richie’s relentless curiosity started to kick in, and soon he was boldly emailing his favorite Portland bands, Parenthetical Girls and others, asking if they had any interest in adding violins to their albums. To his surprise, they said yes, adding a new dimension to his musical education.

“By my senior year, I was arranging for various rock bands,” which would eventually include luminaries Y La Bamba, Blind Pilot, and Nick Jaina. Even before graduation from college, “I became the kid known for doing notation work in the Portland indie rock scene.” Living the dream of many young musicians, he got to go on tour with some of these groups. In 2016, he collaborated with Luz Elena Mendoza on the album “Ojos del Sol,” which was included in NPR’s Best 50 Albums that year.

These connections led to gigs where he found himself composing and arranging music for dancers with the New York City Ballet through the Satellite Arts Collective, Juilliard graduate students and choreographers, and eventually the Oregon Symphony, among others.

The drive for experimentation

As exciting as these experiences were, he also started to yearn for something different – that curiosity kicking in again – and when the Covid-19 pandemic began, he suddenly found himself with time on his hands and the freedom to explore an area that had long intrigued him: the relationships and interference patterns between tones in music.

“That’s when I built my first instruments, because for me to explore this area of music, I had to build instruments that existed on a different collection of notes.” A metallophone, essentially a giant glockenspiel, was one of the first instruments he built. “That meant me ordering 60 feet of raw aluminum bar and cutting it up with Harbor Freight cut saws, spending hundreds of hours on constructing it,” he said. “A standard glockenspiel has 12 notes to the octave, where this one has 41 notes to the octave, and it has three octaves. It’s really absurd and difficult to play, and I love it so much.”

“I guess when you start, there’s no turning back with it,” he reflected.

“Eventually, I got myself a 3D printer to make these keyboards” for the Cimbalo Cromatico project, named for a 15th-century keyboard that differentiated enharmonic steps like F-sharp and G-flat by splitting its black keys horizontally into two halves. Inspired by the Renaissance-era instrument, Richie developed an open-source method for converting a MIDI controller to create a similar microtonal layout, thereby expanding the number of notes to 17 or 19.

“As a musician, I've kind of always been dabbling, and so teaching myself how to do 3D design and instrument building just sort of made sense.” While some musicians might be intimidated by the technical challenge of building entirely new, experimental instruments, his attitude is “don't be too afraid of it. Just jump in.”

In 2023, he returned to PSU to pursue his graduate degree and further explore music theory and composition. He served as the lead editor of Subito, the student-run academic journal of the School of Music & Theater, and as a graduate teaching assistant in music theory and history, graduating in June 2025.

“Richie Greene is one of the strongest scholar-practitioners that our graduate program has ever seen,” said Bonnie Miksch, his professor and advisor. “His enthusiasm for the creative work he does is infectious.”

When the opportunity to apply for the Andries Deinum Prize for Visionaries and Provocateurs came along, Richie saw a chance to make this technology available to a wider audience, and lower barriers to musicians who wish to incorporate non-Western traditions, such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Indian, into their work. With the financial support that comes with the Deinum Prize, Richie plans to expand the project by offering video production and musical performance demonstrations, providing adaptation to additional types of MIDI controllers, and developing a browser-based customizable 3D design software, which will give musicians freedom to create the keyboard of their choosing, no longer restricted to the limitations of the major and minor scales.

He expects the project to be complete and the components to be available by spring 2026.

“Richie’s project to expand his work with Cimbalo Cromatico is poised to impact a growing community of experimental music makers and increase the visibility of his research to an international audience,” Miksch said.

“I’ve never been so musically excited in my life than I am now, engaging in this exploration and getting to compose music,” he said. “By inviting musicians to be directly involved in the design of their instruments comes the possibility of reimagining the boundaries of music practice in itself.”