Klaus George Roy, in a profile of Gordon Binkerd's Harvard mentor, Walter Piston, spoke of that composer's musical ‘mental health’, of his work as ‘sane and un-neurotic; he does not hand on to us his problems, but his solutions’. Although these are scarcely qualities one acquires by classroom study, they have proved equally characteristic of Binkerd himself. He recalls that the knowledge of Bach fugues gained under Piston's tutelage was ‘the most decisive single factor in my preparation as a composer’. Binkerd came to Harvard as a candidate for the Ph.D. in musicology, directly after the end of World War II and naval service in the Pacific theatre. Earlier, he had worked with Bernard Rogers, ‘that orchestral genius’, at Eastman, and with Russell Danburg and Gail Kubik at Dakota Wesleyan University. He was born 22 May 1916 on the Ponca Indian Reservation in Lynch, Nebraska, a few miles below the South Dakota border. Grandparents on both sides of his family had homesteaded in the Sand Hills during the 1860's, and Binkerd's parents lived in various small towns in Nebraska before moving to the Rose Bud Sioux Reservation at Gregory, South Dakota.

The most extensive sketches in the volume are of a third movement for the String Trio op. 20. Thirty-one bars were completed and are headed ‘planned as third movement ofthe String Trio op. 20 (August 1927 broken off in Hafning)’. The sketches cover five densely-packed pages and are transcribed as Ex. 18. Many passages exist in two, three or even more versions but usually the earlier, superseded, attempts have been crossed out and it is possible to trace the final form by following a path through the maze of vi – de signs, asterisks and arrows. Occasionally, however, there are several versions of a single bar or motive, none of which have been deleted. In the interests of achieving a continuity so that Ex. 18 can be read—and even, perhaps, played—as a torso, I have, in each of these ambiguous places, selected the version which seemsto me to be the most nearly definitive. For example, when one variant has the word ‘gilt’ by it, this is the one I have also chosen, even though the other versions may not have been crossed out.