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The Music of Gordon Binkerd
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
Klaus George Roy, in a profile of Gordon Binkerd's Harvard mentor, Walter Piston, spoke of that composer's musical ‘mental health’, of his work as ‘sane and un-neurotic; he does not hand on to us his problems, but his solutions’. Although these are scarcely qualities one acquires by classroom study, they have proved equally characteristic of Binkerd himself. He recalls that the knowledge of Bach fugues gained under Piston's tutelage was ‘the most decisive single factor in my preparation as a composer’. Binkerd came to Harvard as a candidate for the Ph.D. in musicology, directly after the end of World War II and naval service in the Pacific theatre. Earlier, he had worked with Bernard Rogers, ‘that orchestral genius’, at Eastman, and with Russell Danburg and Gail Kubik at Dakota Wesleyan University. He was born 22 May 1916 on the Ponca Indian Reservation in Lynch, Nebraska, a few miles below the South Dakota border. Grandparents on both sides of his family had homesteaded in the Sand Hills during the 1860's, and Binkerd's parents lived in various small towns in Nebraska before moving to the Rose Bud Sioux Reservation at Gregory, South Dakota.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975
References
Notes
1 Roy, Klaus George, ‘Walter Piston’, Stereo Review, 04 1970, p.67 Google Scholar.
2 Cohen, David, ‘Music from the “Radical Center”’, Perspectives of New Music, Fall-Winter, 1964, pp. 131–132 Google Scholar
3 Hagan, Dorothy Veinus, ‘Gordon Binkerd’, American Composers Alliance Bulletin, 09, 1962, p.2 Google Scholar.
4 Cohen, p. 134.
5 Hagan, p. 3.
6 Bennett, Joan, Four Metaphysical Poets, Vintage Books (Random House), pp. 5–6 Google Scholar.
7 Smith, James, ‘On Metaphysical Poetry’, A Selection from Scrutiny, Vol. II, Cambridge University Press, p. 171 Google Scholar.
8 Ransom, John Crowe, Ed., Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy, Collier Books, p.ix Google Scholar.
9 Other instances of large-scale retrogradation in Gordon Binkerd's music are the first and third movements of his Sonata for Violin and Piano (commissioned by the McKim Fund in the Library of Congress and given its world première there on 2 May 1974 by Jaime Laredo and Ann Schein, now recorded? by the same artists on Desto DC 6439) and the whole of his String Quartet No. 2 (1961). The latter has been discussed in some detail by Smither, Howard in Current Chronicle: Pittsburgh, Kansas, The Musical Quarterly, 04 1963, pp. 237–240 Google Scholar.
10 Smith, William Jay, Ed., Herrick (The Laurel Poetry Series), Dell Publishing Company, pp. 19–24 Google Scholar.