Skidmore to Host Filene Concert Artist Daniel Pinkham in Special Concert

Skidmore will host a special celebration for composer Daniel Pinkham in honor of his 80th birthday at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19, in Filene Recital Hall on campus.

The celebration will be in the form of a concert featuring 175 students and faculty from the College’s Music Department performing music by Pinkham, who is a Filene Concert Series guest artist at the College this fall. The program will include choral, vocal, and instrumental music by Pinkham. Janet McGhee, Skidmore choral director, will direct the program.

Tickets to the event are $5 for the general public, $2 for students and senior citizens; and Skidmore students will be admitted free with identification.

The concert, which Pinkham will attend, is the culmination of his brief on-campus residency made possible at Skidmore through the support of the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation of Boston.

A native of Lynn, Mass., Pinkham is a prolific and versatile composer whose catalog includes four symphonies and other works for large ensembles; cantatas and oratorios; concertos and other works for solo instrument and orchestra for piano, piccolo, trumpet, violin, and harp; three organ concertos; theater works and chamber operas; chamber music; electronic music; and 20 documentary TV film scores.

As a student at Phillips Academy, Pinkham studied organ and harmony with Carl F. Pfatteicher. Pinkham then attended Harvard, where he was a student of A. Tillman Merritt, Walter Piston, Archibald T. Davison, and Aaron Copland. At Tanglewood, Pinkham studied composition with Arthur Honegger and Samuel Barber, and subsequently with Nadia Boulanger.

Pinkham has taught at a number of colleges and universities and is currently a faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music, where is a senior professor in the Musicology Department. He is music director emeritus of King’s Chapel in Boston, where he actively served from 1958 to 2000. His honors and awards include Fulbright and Ford Foundation fellowships, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he is a fellow; and six honorary degrees. In 1990 Pinkham was named composer of the year by the American Guild of Organists, and in 1996 he received the Alfred Nash Patterson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the choral arts.

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