Composers Datebook

Some special music had its premiere at Harvard University (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) on today's date in 1980. It was commissioned to honor the memory of Walter Piston, who had taught composition at Harvard for a number of years, and it was one of his students, the American harpsichordist and organist Daniel Pinkham, who composed it. Pinkham had exceptional teachers. He studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska, organ with E. Power Biggs and, in addition to Piston, Pinkham studied composition with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Arthur Honegger. But Pinkham credits another familiar name for his most important musical epiphany. In 1939, while still a teenager, Pinkham heard one of the first American concerts given by the Trapp Family, whose sentimentalized story is familiar from "The Sound of Music." The Trapp Family's usual ensemble, which combined Renaissance and Baroque instruments like recorders and gambas with the bright and clear voices of young children, spoke to the young Pinkham as no music had before, becoming "a part of my way of looking at things," as he put it later. Since then, Pinkham has composed everything from symphonies to electronic music. His choral and organ works are especially admired, and in 1990, he was named "Composer of the Year" by the American Guild of Organists.