He was born in
London, the son of a cleric, Thomas Green(e) (1648–1720) who was a chaplain of the
Chapel Royal, and his wife Mary Shelton (d. 1722). He became a
choirboy at
St Paul's Cathedral under
Jeremiah Clarke and
Charles King. He studied the organ under
Richard Brind, and after Brind died, Greene became organist at St Paul's. With the death of
William Croft in 1727, Greene became organist at the Chapel Royal, and in 1730 he became Professor of Music at the
University of Cambridge. In 1735 he was appointed
Master of the King's Musick. At his death, Greene was working on the compilation
Cathedral Music, which his student and successor as Master of the King's Musick,
William Boyce, was to complete. Many items from that collection are still used in
Anglican services today. Greene wrote in the prevailing Georgian England, particularly longer verse
anthems, of which
Lord, Let Me Know Mine End, is a representative example. In it, Greene sets the text using a polyphonic texture over a continuous instrumental
walking bass, with an effective treble duet in the middle of the work. Both this section and the end of the anthem contain examples of the
Neapolitan sixth chord. His organ voluntaries — published only some years after his death — are closer to
Thomas Roseingrave in style than, say, John Stanley or William Boyce, and are more contrapuntal than melodic. They do not specify manuals or stops, unlike later contemporaries such as Bennett, Boyce and Stanley. Instances of '
false relation' can be heard frequently in these works. Chromaticism is also common in the voluntaries. Greene died in 1755 aged 59 and was initially buried at
St Olave Old Jewry. On the church's demolition in 1887, he was reburied in
St Paul's Cathedral. ==Works==