Peter Winkler Biography

Narrative Biography:

I was born in California in 1943, and began playing the piano and making up tunes at an early age. It was my good luck that a wonderful concert pianist, Lyell Barbour, was living in my home town of Escondido, and I studied with him from 1954 to 1960. I also studied theory and composition with Howard Brubeck (Dave’s older brother). On Howard’s recommendation, I attended Darius Milhaud’s composition seminar at Aspen Music School in 1959.
I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1960’s. My teachers at Berkeley included Seymour Shifrin, Andrew Imbrie, and David Lewin, but I was equally influenced by my fellow students Douglas Leedy and John Patrick Thomas. While at Berkeley I worked in the music department of KPFA, the first listener-supported radio station.
Just as things were getting interesting in Berkeley (the Free Speech Riots, the beginnings of the “hippie” subculture) I moved to Princeton University to pursue an MA in musical composition. I studied with Milton Babbitt for a year, but my true mentor, the teacher who influenced me most profoundly, was Earl Kim. Earl’s spare, exquisite music and his goal of “reducing music to its maximum” has continued to inspire me over the years.
It was also while I was studying at Princeton in the mid-1960’s that I was fatally seduced by the music of the Beatles and Motown, and began a life-long creative and scholarly involvement with popular music. This passion was fueled when I met William Bolcom and Joshua Rifkin around this time; inspired by them, I began composing and playing ragtime. While living in New York City in 1966-67, I wrote rock music criticism for Cheetah magazine and did some arranging and musical direction for Definition, the first (and only) album by an extraordinary band, Chrysalis (recently re-released by Rev-ola records in the U.K.)
Some of my experiences in the commercial music industry were pretty scary, though, and I decided that I would be better off in a university environment. Thanks to Earl Kim’s recommendation, I was elected a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where I spent three years composing (mostly my Humoresque, a mammoth 40-minute long piano piece), investigating the history of American popular music, and starting a family with my wife, Judy (now Judy Eda) - Maria was born in early 1969, and Paul was born in 1970.
I went from Harvard to a teaching position at Stony Brook University, where I still teach today. I was incredibly lucky to get in on the ground floor of a music department which has grown into an internationally respected institution - and one where my quirky proclivities were not only tolerated but encouraged. For many years I taught a course in Rock music to classes of up to 500 students. (I feel I’m too old to teach about Rock and Roll anymore, but I still teach courses on Jazz, Folk, and older popular music.)
During my first seven years at Stony Brook I worked on a large-scale Symphony which was premiered at the grand opening ceremonies of Stony Brook’s Fine Arts Center (now the Staller Center), conducted by my old friend David Lawton. The last movement of the Symphony, composed at the MacDowell Colony in 1978, was a turning-point for me: it was unabashedly tonal, and ended with a lilting, Caribbean melody.
In the early 1980’s I stopped writing concert music, and turned to musical theater. I served an apprenticeship of sorts at Theater Three in Port Jefferson, N.Y., writing music for several cabaret shows, one of which, Professionally Speaking, went on to an Off-Broadway run in New York city and several productions by regional theaters. “Tamara, Queen of the Nile,” from this show (lyrics by Ernst Muller), has become a staple in the cabaret repertories of Joan Morris & William Bolcom, and Jodi Karin Appelbaum & Marc-Andre Hamelin.
It was also in the early 1980’s that I became very involved with the fledgling International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). In addition to presenting papers at many IASPM conferences, I edited their international newsletter, RPM, for several years, edited several issues of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and served as chair of the American branch in 1990-91.
In 1987 I met and fell in love with Dorothea Cook; we formed the violin-piano duo Silken Rags and I began writing concert pieces again, many of them for Deede. Much of my recent music has been about connecting in various ways with older musical traditions: our Silken Rags CD, released in 2004, includes tributes to gospel music, Ghanaian highlife, Cuban music, American popular song, and tango. Following Deede’s interests, I also got involved in early music performance; I studied continuo realization with Stony Brook’s extraordinary harpsichordist, Arthur Haas, and wrote a Partita for his Stony Brook Baroque Ensemble. Most recently, much of my music has drawn on traditional Appalachian folk music, inspired by several visits to the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia.
Since 1997, I’ve been a member of Rhoda Levine’s extraordinary opera improvisation group, Play it by Ear, facing the exhilarating challenge of creating musical theater in the moment. And I’ve continued to write “show” music, much of it with my dear friend, Winston Clark, the conductor of the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus. Our magnum opus (so far) has been Out!, a full-length musical based on the actual experiences of guys in the chorus.