The long and illustrious career of Daniel Pinkham (b.1923) includes a large catalogue of compositions, teaching, and performing.  Today he continues as music director of King's Chapel, Boston.  In addition to a large body of choral works, he has written symphonies, concertos, documentary film scores, stage works, and many chamber works, often employing "his" instruments -- the harpsichord or organ.  Pinkham has taught at Boston University, Harvard, and from 1959 lectured in composition and headed the department of early music performance at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Pinkham's interest in early music and his role as a composer-performer came together in producing his most often performed work, the Christmas Cantata.  Subtitled Sinfonia sacra, the piece recognized the polychoral works of Giovanni Gabrielli and Heinrich Schutz.  The Latin texts ar drawn from the Mass and various Christmas services.  The three-movement work is scored for three choirs:  one vocal and two brass.  Ever the pragmatist, the composer scored the second instrumental choir for either brass or organ.  The first movement Qem vidistis, pastores? Dicite (Whom do you see, shepherd?  Tell us) uses contrasting textures and rhythms to render the conversation of the text. with its modal tonality and long, sustained melismaas, the second movement O magnum mysterium (O great mystery) evokes a medieval atmosphere.  The final movement presents statements of the text Gloria in excelsis deo (Glory to God in the highest) accompanied by brass alternating with a capella statements of the psalm Jubilate Deo omnis terra (Rejoice in the Lord, all y lands).  The organ joins the final, joyous Alleluias.

The Christmas Cantata received its premier on December 1, 1957.  It was performed by the New England Conservatory Chorus and conducted by Lorna Cooke DeVaron, for whom it was composed.

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"I want to play the piano.  I want to write music for Broadway and Hollywood.  I want to write symphonic music.  I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician.  I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry.   And I think I can...do justice to them all.  But I can't do them all at once."  It seems that the immensely talented Leonard Bernstein (1918-1992) spent his life in a wild juggling act of all this and more.  In June of 1964 he took a fifteen-month sabbatical from the hectic life of as conductor of the New York Philharmonic to concentrate on the new music and his relationship to it as a composer.  He summed up his feelings about his time of pondering with an article in the New York Times, October, 1965.  Much of it was written inverse as the following excerpts illustrate:
 

Of time to think as a pure musician
and ponder the art of composition.
Four hours on end I brooded and mused
on materiae musicae, used and abused;
On aspects of unconventionality,
Over the death in our time of tonality,
Over the fads of Dada and Chance,
The serial strictures, the dearth of romance,
"Perspective in Music" the new terminology,
Physiomathematommusicology;
Pieces called "Cycles" and "Sines" and "Parameters"-
Titles too beat for these homely tetrameters;
Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos
With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos
played with the forearms, the fists and the palms
-And then I came up with the Chichester Psalms.
These psalms are a simple and modest affair,
Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square,
Certain to sicken a stout John Cager
With its tonics and triads in E flat major.
But there it stands the result of my pondering,
Two long months of avant-garde wandering -
My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet.
And he stands on his own two tonal feet.
 

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Coming form the year 1877 -- an unusually tumultuous year in Tchaikovsky' life (1840-1893) -- the Symphony No. 4 in f minor, Op. 36 depicts the composer's struggle to reconcile the extremes of melancholy and frenzied optimism.  1877 was the year of the composer's ill-fated marriage, suicide attempt, psychological breakdown, and finally the appearance of his patron.  Nadezhda van Meck.  By mutual consent, Madame von Meck and Tchaikovsky never met , but their correspondence and her generous financial patronage supported the composer until 1890.  It was to her -- "my best friend" -- that the work was dedicated.  At her request he provided a program of the symphony -- in reality a post-compositional attempt to explain the emotional experiences that he expresses in hits work.

The piece begins with the seed of the whole symphony, a brass fanfare -- the call of fate.  This theme appears throughout the first movement, and reappears near the end of the last movement.  The despair of fate contrasted with dreams of happiness dominate the first movement.  An oboe solo introduces the second movement.  "Here is that melancholy feeling which enwraps one when he sits at night alone in the house...One thinks on the gladsome hours, when the young blood boiled and bubbled, and there was satisfaction in life...And it is all so sad and yet so sweet to muse over the past."  The playful pizzicato of the third movement expresses "capricious arabesques of elusive images which rush past...your spirit is neither cheerful nor yet sad.  You think of nothing; you give free rein to your imagination...somewhere in the distance, a military procession passes."  This movement is made up of "completely disjointed images which rush past in your head when you have fallen asleep.   Of the fourth movement the composer wrote "if within yourself you find no reasons for joy, look at others.  Go among people.  Observe how they can enjoy themselves, surrendering themselves wholeheartedly to joyful feelings."  But then "irrepressible fate again appears and remind you of yourself.  But others do not care about you...they have not noticed that you are solitary and sad....Do not say that everything in this world is sad.  There are simple but strong joys.  Rejoice in others' rejoicing.  To live is still possible!"
 

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