Edward Joseph Collins (November 10, 1886 – December 7, 1951) was an American pianist, conductor and composer of romantic classical music. Collins was born in Joliet, Illinois. He studied with Rudolf Ganz in Chicago and in 1906 went with Ganz to Berlin, where he studied performance and composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik under Max Bruch and Engelbert Humperdinck. Upon graduation, he had a successful concert piano debut in Berlin. He returned to the United States in 1912 and toured with the contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink. He was an assistant conductor with the Century Opera Company in New York City and with the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. During World War I, Collins served in the U.S. Army as an interpreter and entertained the troops as pianist. After the war he returned to Chicago, and joined the faculty of Chicago Musical College. There he met and married a young voice student, Frieda Mayer, daughter of meat-packing magnate Oscar Mayer.
Collins composed ten major orchestral works (including a symphony, two overtures and three suites), three piano concertos, Hymn to the Earth (for orchestra, choir, and solo voices), several chamber works, 15 songs for voice and piano, the musical Who Can Tell, the opera Daughter of the South, and more than a dozen piano solo and duo scores.