Peter Winkler is a composer, pianist,and
Professor of music at Stony Brook University, where he has taught since 1971. His principal composition teacher was Earl Kim, with whom he studied at Princeton and Harvard Universities. While a graduate student in the mid-1960’s he was fatally seduced by the music of the Beatles and Motown, and began a life-long creative and scholarly involvement with popular music.
His compositions include both concert works and music for the theater; many of his pieces explore connections between popular and classical idioms.
As a pianist, he appears with Rhoda Levine’s opera improvisation group, Play It By Ear,and with his wife, violinist Dorothea Cook,in the duo Silken Rags.
His research and teaching deals with the history and theory of American popular music, as well as traditional composition and theory; he was one of the founding members of the American Brance of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).