Discipline: Music Composition

Peter Winkler

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: East Setauket, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1978
More: www.peterwinklermusic.com
Peter K. Winkler is an American composer and a musicologist specializing in the theory of popular music. His compositions include both concert works and music for the theater. Many of his works involve a synthesis of popular and classical styles. He earned a B.A. in music at the University of California (1963), studying with David Lewin and Seymour Shifrin, and an M.F.A. at Princeton University, where his principal teacher was Earl Kim. He continued studying with Earl Kim as a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University (1968–71). He then joined the music faculty of Stony Brook University, where he taught for 42 years, retiring in 2014. As a pianist, Winkler was the accompanist for Rhoda Levine's improvisational opera group, Play it by Ear, from 1996 to 2012, and appears with his wife, violinist Dorothea Cook, in the duo Silken Rags. He was a pioneer in teaching university courses in popular music, and was one of the founding members of the U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, editing its newsletter RPM from 1984 to 1989 and its Journal of Popular Music Studies from 1992 to 1995.

Studios

Phi Beta

Peter Winkler worked in the Phi Beta studio.

Funded by the Phi Beta Fraternity, a national professional fraternity of music and speech founded in 1912, Phi Beta Studio was built between 1929–1931 of granite quarried on the MacDowell grounds. The small studio is a simple in design, but displays a pleasing combination of materials with its granite walls and colorful slate roofing. Inside is…

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