Exploring Mt Auburn, the beautiful garden cemetery in Cambridge, I wandered down Halcyon Garden Walk and saw inscribed on a pillar of gray fine-grained granite, the name Daniel Pinkham.
Could it be the local composer? Quick Google check and yes, the one i’d seen many years ago give a concert at, I think, MIT.
An old man then in his late seventies or early eighties, he impressed me with the evident delight he took in music, the making of it, the performing of it.
So I’ve been listening to his music this evening, while reading his biography, and looking at photographs showing him as a serious young man and a smiling old one.
Most of what I found on youtube were shorter pieces, many for organ, a favorite instrument of his. Indeed, for years he was organist in King’s Chapel, the old church downtown that represented, when it was built, a poke in the eye to the Congregational control of Boston town. Many of the recorded performances were given since his death, so his legacy lives on. Now I too am engaging with the lively musical imagination, alive again, of one whose stone stands so tall and still in an unfrequented corner of a quiet cemetery.
The Seven Days; Divertimento for Organ and Oboe, performed in Estonia with sections: Flowing, Serene, Quick, Pensive, Questions and Answers, Playful, Quickstep. It’s a short piece, light, amusing, companionable, an occasion of pleasure for performers, audience and me. You may be gone, D.P., but I can still hear you.