Daniel Pinkham, 83; composer tackled variety of genres

The composer Daniel Pinkham , who for six decades played a central role in the Boston music community as a conductor, teacher, organist, and harpsichordist, died yesterday in Natick. He was 83 .

The cause of death was leukemia, according to his longtime partner, Andrew Paul Holman .

Mr. Pinkham was a versatile composer whose large output included symphonies, concertos, organ works, and especially music for chorus. His "Christmas Cantata" has entered the repertory of many church choirs and student ensembles around the country. His music won admiration for its ability to engage a wide audience beyond the small circle of connoisseurs following the latest trends in contemporary music.

"The thing that most defines his musical personality was a sense of elegant simplicity," said John Gibbons, chairman of the historical performance department at New England Conservatory and a harpsichordist who studied with Mr. Pinkham in the 1960s.

In a 2002 Boston Globe review of his Concerto for Organ and Wind Quintet, Richard Dyer praised Mr. Pinkham's "playful mastery of counterpoint" and his "delight in the interplay of color and timbre." He also described the way each of the four movements "brought quiet chuckles and murmurs of pleasure from the audience."

A pioneer of the local early music movement, Mr. Pinkham served on the faculty of New England Conservatory since 1959 and taught at many other local schools. He served at King's Chapel as music director and music director emeritus for more than four decades. Widely admired by colleagues for his generosity and quick wit, he was also an active performer on harpsichord and organ, playing for many years in a duo with the violinist Robert Brink. His orchestral music was once performed by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein.

"He was always making music, whether he was writing it or playing it," recalled Laurence Lesser, former president and interim chief executive of New England Conservatory. "I'm sure he was philosophical, but more than anything he was practical. He was a real doer."

Daniel Rogers Pinkham was born in Lynn. He began playing music at age 5 and deepened his studies at Phillips Academy, Andover. His most prominent composition teachers later included Paul Hindemith, Arthur Honegger, and Samuel Barber, with whom he studied at Tanglewood, and Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied privately. At Harvard University, he took classes with Aaron Copland and Walter Piston, among others.

Lorna Cooke deVaron , a longtime choral conductor at New England Conservatory , remembered meeting Mr. Pinkham when both were students in Piston's composition class. He wrote his popular "Christmas Cantata" for her and the New England Conservatory Chorus.

Speaking by phone yesterday, she praised the work's "wonderful poignancy and joy," and the way its basic scoring and modest technical demands allowed it to be performed even by a good high school choir.

"It was so very American in the way that Copland's music was," she said. "I was teaching at Tanglewood in the . . .1950s and I introduced it to all of the young conductors there. And then it just spread like wildfire through the country."

Around that time, Mr. Pinkham began experimenting with 12-tone compositional techniques and later electronic music. But the values of practicality and accessibility remained paramount, even as they may have ultimately limited the exposure his music received in some of the more elite corridors of the contemporary music world.

He wrote frequently for the church, and in more recent years, he allowed his compositional imagination to roam widely, at one point indulging audiences of the future in his setting of Robert McCloskey's famous children's story "Make Way for Ducklings."

He composed music well into his later years. As recently as Sunday night, the evening before Mr. Pinkham's death, Edward E. Jones led the Harvard University Choir in the world premiere of his work, "A Cradle Hymn," at Memorial Church in Cambridge.

Funeral services will be private.