Here’s an obituary written by Carson Cooman.

American composer Daniel Pinkham passed away on the morning of December 18, 2006 in Natick, Massachusetts, USA after a brief illness.

Pinkham, one of America’s most active and well-known composers of music for the church, was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, USA on June 5, 1923.  He studied at Harvard University and Tanglewood with Walter Piston, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Arthur Honneger, and Nadia Boulanger.  As an organist and harpsichord he studied with Wanda Landowska and E. Power Biggs.

For over forty years, Pinkham was music director at Boston’s historic King’s Chapel, where he led one of the premiere church music programs in America.  Until his death, he served as senior professor of musicology at the New England Conservatory where he founded their program on early music in the 1950’s.

His catalogue as composer included our symphonies and other works for large ensembles, cantatas and oratorios, concertos and other works for solo instrument and orchestra for piano, piccolo, trumpet, violin, harp and three organ concertos, theatre works and chamber operas, chamber
music, electronic music, and twenty documentary television film scores.

His work has been performed by ensembles ranging from the New York Philharmonic to small parish choirs.  He was named Composer of the Year in 1990 by the American Guild of Organists and had been awarded six honorary doctorates.

His final completed composition, “A Cradle Hymn” for mixed choir and string quartet was premiered on December 17th and 18th by the Harvard University Choir in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA for the 97th Annual Harvard Carol Services.

Stanley moved suddenly, sitting up as though to break a spell.  He sat rigid on the edge of the bed, clenching his teeth as though to discipline the activity of his mind, which he could hardly stir during the day when he tried to work.  How could Bach have accomplished all that he did?  and Palestrina?  the Gabrielis? and what of the organ concerti of Corelli?  Those were the men whose work he admired beyond all else in this life, for they had touched the origins of design with recognition.  And how?  with music written for the Church.  Not written with obsessions of copyright foremost; not written to be played by men in worn dinner jackets, sung by girls in sequins, involved in wage disputes and radio rights, recording rights, union rights; not written to be issued through a skull-sized plastic box plugged into the wall as background for seductions and the funnypapers, for arguments over automobiles, personalities, shirt sizes, cocktails, the flub-a-dub of a lonely girl washing her girdle; not written to be punctuated by recommendations for headache remedies, stomach appeasers, detergents, hair oil . . .

William Gaddis, The Recognitions, p.322

Steve Layton writes:  “Our hip weekly in Seattle, The Stranger, has a yearly “Strangercrombie” Xmas-auction of unusual gifts. One of the music-related gifts up for grabs is this”:

Alex Ross’s iPod

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross set music nerds’ hearts aflutter last year on his national iPod Tour, lecturing on 20th-century composers from Ligeti to Bjork to Messiaen and playing samples from his iPod. Now here’s your chance to possess an Alex Ross-programmed iPod of your very own. The venerable Ross has programmed two playlists into this very iPod Nano (silver) in his own New York apartment with his own delicate fingers.  Eeeeee! Priceless! Opening bid: $1.99!

Don’t you have to be old to be venerable?

Elsewhere, the WaPo had a wonderful young-musical-genius-finds-a-way-despite-all-adversity story today.  

My friends, this is heaven. 

(Thank Kevin Leong.)

A sold-out REDCAT held a brilliant concert to celebrate the re-birth of our Monday Evening Concerts and to honor the late Dorrance Stalvey, the man who directed the concerts for almost 35 years.  The series had hit a rough patch when Stalvey became director (and curator of music at LACMA).  He brought creativity in programming and in performance to the series.  To recognize Stalvey’s contributions to our community and our music, Alan Rich provided a lovely tribute to the man in the concert’s written program, and the centerpiece of the concert was the performance of Stalvey’s last completed composition, “Stream” (2002) for violin and piano.  As appropriate for a modernist who also started an important jazz program at LACMA, “Stream” was resolutely modernist, except for a touch or two of bebop with some stride piano in the pianist’s left hand.

The program began with Luciano Berio’s “Circles” (1960), first performed in this series in 1962 and twice more under Stalvey’s leadership.  Written for Cathy Berberian, our performance had Christina Zavalloni dazzling us.  We heard her first back in March when she sang Andriessen’s “Inferno” as part of the Minimalist Jukebox series.  Last night she was an elemental force, prowling the stage, sometimes playing with the words and sounds, sometimes cajoling, sometimes commanding, at all times handling the fearsome leaps and techniques as mere trifles.  The piece supports the soprano with harp and two percussionists who each handled 15-20 different instruments, plus occasional vocalisations.  Our harp was the Phil’s Lou Anne Neill (playing this for the third time in this series); our percussionists were Ross Karre and Steven Schick (formerly the Banger percussionist), now with “red fish blue fish” at UCSD.  The soprano is given the words to three poems by e.e.cummings with which to use Berio’s notes.  Berio’s program notes from the 1962 Monday Evening concert contained the following summary:  “The theatrical aspects of teh performance are inherent in the structure of teh work itself which, most of all, a structure of actions:  to be listened to as theater and to be viewed as music.”  Oh, he would have been happy with last night’s performance.

Christina Zavalloni gave one encore, a performance of Berberian’s “Stripsody” (1966) for soprano solo.  The score, of which a page is copied below, courtesy of Sheet Music Plus, is a collection of sounds or phrases which might have been written into assorted comic strips.  Once again Zavalloni triumphed.

The concert ended with Gerard Gisey’s “Vortex Temporum” (1994-1996) for piano (Vicki Ray in a major part), violin (Mark Menzies), viola (Kazi Pitelka), cello (Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick), flute (Dorothy Stone), clarinet (Philip O’Connor).  Musicians from California E.A.R. Unit and Xtet (the two regular groups of Monday Evenings at LACMA) formed the group and Donald Crockett of USC and Xtet served as conductor.  Mark Menzies has a good commentary on the work, with sound clips, at this site.

The work has elements of real power.  The most impact on me was the conclusion of the first part of the work when the piano launches into a demanding, difficult, aggressive solo, culminating with a crash of sound that slowly decays.  Into this quiet a faint sound begins intruding; it isn’t a sound from outside, or from the mechanical equipment, it’s the noise of the bows slowly scratching along the strings and finally a note resolves itself in the sound.  I found myself holding my breath.

Bruce Hodges comments on a 2004 New York performance of the work, and he was just as swept away, but he remained much more coherent about it than I.

What a great re-start to a series that means so much to our musical lives.  The remaining three concerts of the year will be in Zipper Hall of Colburn School, a slightly larger venue with outstanding acoustics.  This is so much nicer than LACMA’s multi-purpose auditorium!

Sometime, not too long ago, I seem to remember a discussion of the definition of spectral music running in the comment section. The latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine includes an interview with composer Joshua Fineberg, who gives it a go:

We are creatures that are tremendously sensitive to timbre because the vowels of language depend on timbral perception, as does our auditory scene analysis. The fact that we are relatively less good at identifying things like pitches and intervals is part of why for a long time they were interesting.

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OgreOgress artist Debora Petrina.  Hat tip to Glenn Freeman. 

Tuesday night Thomas Ades was the guest pianist, filling Leonard Stein’s slot, in the Piano Spheres concert at Zipper Hall of the Colburn School.  This brought out the largest audience I’ve seen in a Piano Spheres concert, even larger than the audience for Gloria Cheng’s series opener.  The buzz about Ades has been good, to understate the reactions.  Perhaps our important piano series is beginning to get the audience it deserves.

The program to let us hear Ades, the pianist, was not showy or flashy.  It wasn’t new:  the whole second half of the program is on his EMI recording.  And while a few pieces were easy, even those were played with such commitment and conviction by Ades that I felt I understood what the composer heard in his mind while composing.  The program started with a survey of 40 years of the piano music of Janacek; first was a grouping of five short pieces, beginning with a work from 1886 and ending with a fragment from 1928.  This was followed “In the Mist” (1912) by the middle-aged, unsuccessful, teacher/composer whose opera had not yet been accepted by Prague; as pianist, Ades successfully presented the hesitency and introspection in Janacek.  The Janacek was followed by two of his own works with elements of introspection, both early, both of which are on his debut recording,  “Darknesse Visible” (1992) and “Traced Overhead” (1996).  “Darknesse” has the brilliant student exploring and re-making a 1610 Downling song for lute; “Traced Ovehead” was a commission for the 25-year-old from the pianist Imogen Cooper; the title has been picked up as the title of a festival of the music and the conducting of Ades to be given at the Barbican in March and April of 2007.

The second half of the concert comprised ten of the short pieces in Niccolo Castiglioni’s “How I Spent the Summer” (1983), followed by three short works by Stravinsky.  The concluding work was Conlon Nancarrow’s “Three Canons for Ursula” (1988), written for Ursula Oppens, for which the middle canon was thought to be unplayable and had been withheld.  Kyle Gann has the story.  Ades played the unplayable, without sweat, and without seeming to apply any more concentration than he did on the little waltz that Stravinsky wrote for children to be able to play.  That man has talent.

On Sunday we attended the concert by the Philharmonic not on one of our series, despite the fact that the second half was a not-a-favorite symphony by a not-a-favorite composer.  We felt that we could easily withstand the Tchaikovsky 6th to be able to hear Ades as composer and conductor leading the Phil in a performance of “Asyla” (1997).  We first heard this in Ojai with Rattle conducting the Phil; the recording was an early transfer to my iPod.  Sunday’s performance was another of those which I wish were available as a recording.  I thought that Ades and the Phil gave a more interesting, and more persuasive, performance than Rattle’s recording.  It’s a good work, and Ades is a good composer.  In an unequal allocation of skills, Thomas Ades is also a pretty good conductor; yes, his technique with his left arm could use a little improvement, but he’s better than some other composers we know.  His beat is clear and well-maintained; he handles changes of meter very smoothly, and watching him from the audience helps you understand what the music is doing.

It’s not fair.  Pianist, composer, conductor.  And young.  And he seems to be a nice guy.  I hope it’s true that he returns soon, and regularly.

By the way, that Tchaikovsky “Pathetique” was the first conducting assignment at a subscription concert by the Phil’s assistant conductor, Joana Carneiro.  She led a very persuasive interpretation, making the symphony more cohesive and less painfully “pathetic” than usual.  I lasted through the performance with no trouble.  She deserved the audience compliments she received.

In an indulgent little piece in today’s NY Sun, Fred Kirshnit reorders the historical construct of the Big Five as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, LA, Chicago, Boston. His thoughs on the NY Phil: 

Not even the best orchestra on the plaza.

 

Limiting our discussion to the modern era, the local Phil has been deficient for a long time. A pedestrian string sound, a tendency to lose intonation as a piece drags along, an inconsistent trumpet section, and a sometimes frightful set of French horns are just background for an ensemble that often seems to have little investment in its own performances. Add to the ensemble’s frustrating nonchalance a conductor in Lorin Maazel who simply cannot leave a piece alone and the net result is often blaring, leadfooted, and embarrassing. The worst part may be that, on certain evenings, they can still conjure a decent performance. At Avery Fisher, it often seems that attitude is more critical than aptitude.

Well, at least he got some things right.