About: 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 Dmitri 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 around 1980. A 1994 Norddeutscher Rundfunk/Arte feature-length television documentary "Der Bettler von Paris" exposed his life and work