And those essentials, I guess, are what my simple music is all about.”Īh, the music. I came to know his story well and to appreciate his philosophy of, as he said in one of his frequent musings published in The Day, “living in simple, creative poverty.”įor Frink, the true heroes in life were not the rich and powerful, whose only goal was the endless and tiresome quest for more riches and increasing power, but everyday people who practiced random acts of kindness for no return on their investment.Īs he once said, “I look on poverty now as a way of getting the junk out of life - of getting to the essentials: the essentials of feeling, thought, action, the relations of people to one another and to nature.
#Professor frink song series#
Later, I spent countless hours with him as we plotted a series of successful concerts and musical plays for the local William Billings Institute of American Music and, later, Performers’ Co-op, for which I served as president for half a dozen years. Interested in writing and performing music, I met Frink more than 30 years ago at his cramped, nondescript house on Gardner Avenue where books and sheet music predominated. Sunday in the Alewife Cove section of Ocean Beach Park. A memorial service for Frink will be held at 2 p.m. And he did - at the edge of poverty, with little recognition except in his hometown, which mourned his death at age 86 last winter. Two hundred years after Washington, Jefferson and Adams, though, times had changed and brilliance of mind and character were out of fashion unless there was money to be made brilliance of musical ability was almost an afterthought in the late 20th to early 21st century, unless one were also willing to play games or curry favor.Ĭharles Frink wanted to stand on his own. He spoke his mind - not bitterly but always with a compelling humanitarian logic and never afraid of the consequence that he might upset someone in power. Had Charles Frink been born two centuries earlier, it’s easy to imagine him being recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of America a century earlier, he could have been known as one of the country’s most accomplished composers.Ī brilliant student, an avid historian, a serious man with a light touch of self-reflection who gracefully filled leadership roles from his early days as head lifeguard at Ocean Beach to his later years as a New London City Councilor, Frink was a force to be reckoned with - on stage and off.
Memorial service for Frink will be held Sunday
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