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, frie