Daniel Pinkham

Daniel Rogers Pinkham, Jr. (June 5, 1923 – December 18, 2006) was an American composer, organist, and harpsichordist.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, into a prominent family engaged in the manufacture of patent medicines (his great-grandmother was Lydia E. Pinkham), he studied organ performance and music theory at Phillips Academy, Andover, with Carl F. Pfatteicher. "The single event that changed my life was a concert [at Andover] by the Trapp Family Singers in 1939, right after they had escaped from Germany," Pinkham once recalled. "Here, suddenly, I was hearing clarity, simplicity. It shaped my whole outlook," he said in a 1981 interview with The Boston Globe.

At Harvard, he studied with Walter Piston; Aaron Copland, Archibald T. Davison, and A. Tillman Merritt were also among his teachers. There he completed a bachelor's degree in 1943 and a master's in 1944. He also studied harpsichord with Putnam Aldrich and Wanda Landowska, and organ with E. Power Biggs. At Tanglewood, he studied composition with Samuel Barber and Arthur Honegger, and subsequently with Nadia Boulanger.

Pinkham taught at the Boston Conservatory beginning in 1946, and at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1959 until his death in 2006; while there, he created and chaired the program on early music performance. In 1951, Pinkham conducted ten works by Boulanger Award winners in their Boston performance première in a special Peabody Mason Concert series commemorating the Paris Bi-Millennial year. He also taught at various times at Simmons College (1953–1954), Boston University (1953–1954), and Harvard University (1957–1958). Among Pinkham's notable students were the jazz musician and composer Gigi Gryce (1925–1983) and the composer Mark DeVoto.

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