Sheldon Morgenstern (1 July 1938 – 17 December 2007) was an American conductor, and founder of the Eastern Music Festival.
In 1962, he founded in Guilford College (Greensboro) the Eastern Music Festival[1] which will become a major centre for summer classical music in the United States, and where great artists and teachers will regularly participate, such as Joseph Gingold, Leonard Rose, Dorothy DeLay, Philip Farkas, Gérard Poulet, Michel Lethiec, Gary Karr, the Beaux Arts Trio, the Guarneri String Quartet, Robert Bloom, John Mack, Leon Fleischer, Charles Rosen, Vic Firth, Saul Goodman, Franco Gulli [it], Jaime Laredo, Lukas Foss, Peter Paul Fuchs, Gunther Schuller, Richard Pittman, Mircea Cristescu, Mathias Bamert... With a very busy season - three orchestras presenting 16 different programmes, dozens of chamber music ensembles, nearly 250 instrumentalists including 40 pianists - the Eastern Music Festival's programme is extremely rich and varied in the field of instrumental classical music.
Morgenstern will devote most of his musical career to developing and maintaining the artistic and pedagogical level of this summer festival.
Among the alumni of this festival are Wynton Marsalis, Adrian McDonnell, Antoine Tamestit, Guillaume Sutre.
In 2001, Morgenstern published No Vivaldi in the Garage, a book in which he recounted anecdotes from his professional experience, but also denounced the "disastrous" management of the arts in the 1990s at the institutional, political and industrial levels.