#daniel pinkham

[ozkar-krapo]

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"Sound Image : a Magazine of aural and visual Art (number 1, 1975)"

(LP. Sound Image. 1975) [US]

[famousborntoday]

Daniel Pinkham : Born June 5, 1923

Daniel Rogers Pinkham Jr. was an American composer, organist, and harpsichordist.

Link: Daniel Pinkham

[msmarymillspaulos]

Daniel Pinkham

“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”

Leonora Carrington

[rionsanura]

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So I don’t know how many people know about the Christmas Cantata by Daniel Pinkham, but it is one of those pieces I learned at an early age and desperately wish I had written. I also cannot seem to find a good commercial recording of it without huge wobbly vibrato, with sufficient dynamic variation, and using the brass-chorus arrangement, which I think is the only way to do it, really.

The second movement, for all its vast length of 3′43″, seems to encapsulate eternity in all its static and changing expansion and contraction. It is extremely simple, in an unusual way, harmonically and melodically, and I think it is one of the best things. Ever. Its casual flipping back and forth between major and minor third degree, its relay drone, where the switchover between trombones is audible but unimportant, a ripple in the pool of infinity. Its gradual cascade of complexity, adding vocal parts and melodic ideas until a singularity, which incites a few necessary consequences, restatements of the brass motives, before an inevitable decline back into simplicity and quiet, and an echo of the last idea. It puts me in a state of calm but expectant serenity, which I think any setting of the O Magnum Mysterium text should, and it makes me aware of both my insignificance and my importance in a way that mostly otherwise only visual art and cosmological scale comparisons have been known to do.

So I am posting the Rice Chorale recording I am in from 2001, not because it doesn’t have wobbly vibrato or the occasional messy cutoff or one or two brass hiccups, but because I was there and all the ingredients for perfection in expression are there. It is a well of calm.

[musicainextenso]

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As Christmas Day approaches, I'd like to share this recording of my university choir and philharmonic from our annual holiday concert in December 1990. The piece is Daniel Pinkham's Christmas Cantata, popularly performed by student artists all over. Though it isn't a difficult work, its sense of pure joy is palpable.

Christmas Cantata - Daniel Pinkham Carnegie-Mellon Concert Choir & Philharmonic, 1990 Dr. Robert Page, conducting

I hope you'll enjoy this small piece of my past! - Melinda Beasi