This week we share selections from guest curator Wesley Chinn who curated our holiday season posts at the end of 2020. We look forward to sharing holiday favorites with you in person at our first concert back this coming December!

For today’s clip, we turn to another contemporary composer influenced heavily by music of the past, albeit in a rather different fashion. Daniel Pinkham (1923–2006) was educated at Andover and Harvard and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (like so many of his generation of New England composers), as well as being a student of Samuel Barber and Aaron Copland. He was organist at King’s Chapel in Boston, and was also an active harpsichordist, and in this Gloria (an except from his Christmas Cantata), we can clearly hear the influence of the Baroque style.

Rather than containing familiar tunes, however, Pinkham’s piece partakes of a kind of rhythmic vitality that is characteristic of so much music of the baroque period. The nascent Early Music movement of which Pinkham was a part was busy bringing this idea the forefront of Baroque interpretation, and it manifests in this neo-Baroque style re-imagined as a series of shifts from triple- to duple meter in a way that bears a relationship to the baroque hemiola without being something you would ever find in an actual composition from that era. Similarly, the harmonies, while never anything I would classify as dissonant, fit together in ways that are recognizably modern even though each chord by itself is something you could find in music from 350 years ago. The total effect is perhaps something like looking at a piece of baroque music through a musical kaleidoscope. I’ve been a fan of this piece since I first sang it in high school—long before I traced some of Pinkham’s music steps into both baroque performance practice and the musical life of Harvard and Boston—and I hope you will enjoy it as well.

– Wesley Chinn

DANIEL PINKHAM Gloria in Excelsis Deo

Voice of Ascension
Dennis Keene, Artistic Director

Recorded live at the CANDLELIGHT CHRISTMAS CONCERT
Wednesday, December 17, 2019, The Church of the Ascension, New York City
The singers in this performance are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO.