Gordon Sherwood

Gordon Sherwood (August 25, 1929 – May 2, 2013) was an American classical composer. Known in Germany as the "Beggar-Composer", his works exhibit various early 20th-century European and American classical music styles, as well as showing influences from blues, Arabic, Indian and Asian music. The New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos gave his career a promising start as a prize-winning young composer at Carnegie Hall in 1957. Aaron Copland said he was "his most gifted student". He studied with famous teachers and won more awards and stipends in academia, but drifted into virtual anonymity until the mid-1990s. He began begging on the streets of Paris and two stipends from the financed composition studies with Philipp Jarnach at the , Germany. During a break from his fellowship studies in Hamburg in 1960, Sherwood was arrested for vandalising an Elvis poster in the New York City Subway. According to his autobiography, he worked for a New York City music publisher. Out of frustration with his job, dispatching heavy boxes of sheet music orders that were mostly Elvis Presley's songs, he defaced a poster with red paint and profanity. This was the year in which his supporter, friend and father-figure, Dimitri Mitropoulos died. Sherwood's German girlfriend Ruth, pleaded to the judge for sympathy in consideration of their financial situation and his musical talent, for which she provided a copy of the New York Philharmonic program as proof, and he was let go. Ruth, herself a soprano, subsequently married Sherwood and after three years studying in Hamburg beginning in 1959, they moved to Rome where he studied for another six years. In 1964 he won first prize at the where his teacher until 1967 was Goffredo Petrassi.

Upon returning to the United States after almost a decade of studies in Europe, Sherwood unsuccessfully solicited offers to teach music at the college and university level and then disappeared from the American and European musical scene, not to be heard from again until the mid-1990s. In 1968 he moved to Beirut and played in a piano bar. Other locations of brief residence included Cairo, Egypt, Israel, and Greece. When they could, he and his wife performed songs including his compositions together as a duo. During this period before 1970, he caught poliomyelitis, was briefly an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital, served several jail sentences and was deported from more than one country. In the 70s, he lived 8 years in Kenya and earned a degree in Swahili language. He continued to compose, with little regard for financial success, social standing or recognition. Support was provided by his parents in spite of their poor relationship to him since childhood. Fellow American composer George Crumb and University of Michigan alumnus also provided him with support. after spending the last 8 years of his life in a nursing home in nearby Herzogsägmühle.

Works The catalogue of Sherwood's works includes almost 150 entries, most of which have never been published or performed. It includes chamber music, works for orchestra, instrumental and vocal music of sacred and secular nature. Noted influences are Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, American tradition, blues and oriental music. The conductor Werner Andreas Albert describes his music as "very catchy, but not in the sense of trivial or easy to comprehend…it is also very complex". In 2000, his Piano Concerto, Op. 107, received its world premiere by piano soloist Masha Dimitrieva and the Bavarian State Youth Symphony Orchestra in Germany. The premiere performance of the complete first symphony, Opus 3, that of which the last two movements were played in the 1957 Carnegie Hall concert was recorded by the in 2002 and released together with Opus 107 and Sinfonietta together as a CD in 2004. Premieres of his compositions were also presented at the museum MARTa Herford, Germany. "Memories of Waters", an oratorio in classical crossover style about the River Danube was co-written with the German world music band Dissidenten. The Philharmonic Orchestra of the Cottbus Theater premiered his Blues Symphony in May 2014. In 2015, his organ works received their world premiere by the German organ soloist Marcel Rode, followed by the performance in the US in 2016. In 2017, Marcel Rode played the organ works at the organ of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels, Cartago.

In his testament, Gordon Sherwood entrusted his musical legacy to the Russian-born pianist Masha Dimitrieva, to whom he dedicated his piano concerto, one of the rare compositions of his published on CD during his lifetime by Classic Produktion Osnabrück. At present Masha Dimitrieva is carrying out on her own label “sonus eterna” the complete edition of Sherwood's piano solo works as well, together with the German soprano Felicitas Breest, of his songs.