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Composers Bureau ArchivesGordon BinkerdBiography Gordon Binkerd, an eminent American composer who wrote prolifically in every classical musical medium, except opera, died on the morning of September 5, 2003 at his home in Urbana, Illinois after a long illness. He was 87. For more than five decades, Gordon Binkerd, a sturdy and energetic man of the Prairie, labored quietly writing music and tending his fertile black earth of trees and flowers. He delighted in making things grow. The strong musical forms that sprang from his ordered mind were as organic as plant growth, and as beautiful as the stark Nebraska landscape to which he was born. In discussion about Sun Singer, Binkerd's first major orchestral work, Howard Pollack, in his book Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and His Students, from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski, found it harder to describe Binkerd's style than to label the music of his contemporaries: "The work's national ambiance stood in some contrast to Piston's New England, or Harris's Far West, or even Kubik's Midwest, evoking rather Binkerd's native Northern Plains, with its antiphonal textures and modal melodies suggesting Lutheran Church music, and in its vigorous rhythms and repeated snippets, Indian ceremonial music. And though the work's regionalism bore some resemblance to that other symphonist from Nebraska, Howard Hanson, of whom Binkerd also could be seen as something of a successor, Binkerd's classical elegance had no room for the picturesque or sentimental, and his kind of dark, romantic regionalism probably was matched sooner by the novels of Willa Cather than by the symphonies of Hanson or anyone else." Gordon Ware Binkerd, the eldest of three sons of Archibald and Verna Jones Binkerd, was born in Lynch, Nebraska on May 22, 1916. Because of his father's work with the Bell Telephone Company Binkerd's family moved frequently throughout his childhood but settled in Gregory, South Dakota by his fifteenth birthday. Significant recognition of Binkerd's talent came during his first year in Gregory when he was chosen at a national competition as one of the five best young pianists in America. In 1933,, as the Dust Bowl spread north through the Great Plains, the young musician left home to attend Dakota Wesleyan College in nearby Mitchell, SD. While the nation battled the Great Depression, Wesleyan ingeniously transformed itself into a beacon of education, attracting prominent faculty with substantial salaries partially paid in warrants - Scrip that could only be spent as real money in the town of Mitchell. Mr. Binkerd benefited at this prairie college from associations with musicians such as Gail Kubik and Russell Danburg. Kubik, who later became known for his arrangements for the weekly national radio broadcasts of the Robert Shaw Chorale in the late 1940's, won the Pulitzer Prize for composition in 1952. At Wesleyan Binkerd was also influenced by prominent teachers who nurtured his interest in literature, and poetry. Gordon Binkerd matured late as a composer. Though advanced study began at the Eastman School of Music in 1940, where his principal teachers were Max Landau and Bernard Rogers, it was not until he entered Harvard College in 1946, following naval service in WW II, that his talent began to ripen. As a candidate for the Ph.D. in musicology, his absorption of music of the past, with historians Archibald Davison, Otto Kinkeldey, Willi Apel, and others, provided an historical base of knowledge that framed Binkerd's compositional perspective. During four years at Harvard, Mr. Binkerd's skills were refined not only as a student of Walter Piston, but as teaching assistant to composer and theorist Irving Fine, who became a personal friend. It was also at Harvard that Gordon Binkerd broke the habitual response, for a pianist, of composing at the piano - a factor accounting for the organic musical forms that shaped his unique American voice. Though trained as a musicologist, Binkerd left Cambridge in 1949 to accept an appointment as theorist and composer at the University of Illinois. As a professor, uninterrupted time to compose came each summer as an ASCAP Artist in Residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, or at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. These retreats, where he associated with many of the prominent literary minds of his day, enriched Binkerd's art song and choral composition. During the mid 1960's, Mr. Binkerd entered into an exclusive contract for the publication of all his music with Boosey & Hawkes, the New York based publishing house. By then Binkerd had written three symphonies; a piano sonata; two string quartets; a growing list of sonatas for wind and string instruments and a large quantity of chamber, choral and vocal music, which his publisher began to release in 1965. Six years later, at the age of 55, Binkerd retired from academic duties to devote himself fully to writing music. During the next quarter century Binkerd wrote prodigiously until the onset of Alzheimer's disease in 1996 brought compositional activity to an end. Critical acclaim first came in 1955 when Stanley Fletcher, Binkerd's mentor in writing for the piano, recorded his Sonata for Piano in New York. Joseph Block described the work in the Julliard Review, as a "… a very impressive discovery." This first effort for the instrument of his youth was followed by a number of piano cycles and shorter works in addition to three other sonatas for piano. The Fourth Piano Sonata, written thirty-two years after his first, was fittingly premiered by Mr. Fletcher during a seventieth birthday retrospective concert in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. In the tradition of Bartok and Hindemith, Binkerd, mindful of the need to compose repertoire for those developing their craft, wrote substantially for the young pianist. Gordon Binkerd eschewed method in his compositional style even though he began to manipulate serial technique in his earliest writing. Though his first major work, Sonata for Cello and Piano, (192), is thoroughly dodecaphonic, it is not a textbook example of the Schoenbergian system. While working on Symphony No. 1 in 1954, at the MacDowell Colony - a work he dedicated to Mrs. Edward MacDowell - Binkerd suddenly experienced revulsion from the system between the second and third movements. From that point on in his career his returns to serialism were brief and more casual. In a review of Symphony No. 1 for High Fidelity, Alfred Frankenstein spoke of Binkerd's creative genius; "… everything about this vividly, grandly shaped score is personal and individual, and what is more important, everything is right…" The New York Times' Irving Sablosky also recognized Binkerd's creative spark in his review of the composer's Symphony No. 2; "… conceived in big terms and carried out with breadth of imagination and feeling…Binkerd's symphony is cast in two movements, the second a slow one spanning more than twenty minutes, sustained with striking originality and beauty." Along with Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, John Harbison and others of Walter Piston's important students, Gordon Binkerd shared with his teacher a deep love for the written word. Binkerd's published choral and vocal output alone, numbers well over 160 compositions. In 1981 Babette Deutsch recognized Binkerd's literary expertise in the fourth edition of her Poetry Handbook. Indeed, the composer's acumen in painting exquisite text is the hallmark of his choral and vocal writing. In a review of one of Mr. Binkerd's art songs, Somewhere I Have Never Traveled, Times critic Edward Downes wrote" "The grave beauty of Mr. Binkerd's soprano solo, grateful for the voice and strikingly spare in its accompaniment, was touching music." About his masterpiece choral cycle, To Electra, on poems of Robert Herrick, Richard Cox wrote in the Choral Journal: "because of Binkerd's extraordinary ear for color, the effect of these pieces far transcends any possible verbal description, and they must be regarded as among the most significant works of the twentieth century." Beginning in the early 1980's, until his final composition in 1996, Gordon Binkerd published forty works, mostly choral and vocal pieces, two piano cycles and his third and fourth piano sonatas through Samizdat Press, his self-publishing enterprise. These compositions, which comprise the composer's last period, made greater use of folk material and were an attempt to compose in a more accessible style that reflected his Welsh heritage. Gordon Binkerd was the first professor at the University of Illinois to become a member of its Center for Advanced Study. He became a Guggenheim fellow in 1959, and in 1964 received an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Commissions for larger works came from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the University of Illinois, South Dakota State University, the Fromm and Ford Foundations and, in 1973, from the McKim Fund of the Library of Congress. In 1987 Dakota Wesleyan University honored Binkerd as its Alumnus of the Year and in 1996 DWU awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts. A member of ASCAP, Binkerd's music is published by Boosey & Hawkes, Samizdat Publications, Associated Music, H.W. Gray, Highgate Press, and C.F. Peters. Gordon Binkerd is survived by his wife of 61 years, Patricia Walker of St. Louis whom he married in that city in 1942 and by cousins of the Jones Family. © September 2003 by David Saladino |
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