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.

A 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.

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. 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.

Charles Frink wanted to stand on his own. And he did — at the edge of poverty, with little recognition except in his hometown, which mourned his death at age 86 last winter. A memorial service for Frink will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday in the Alewife Cove section of Ocean Beach Park.

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. 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.

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.”

For 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.

As 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. And those essentials, I guess, are what my simple music is all about.”

Ah, the music. Frink had a robust talent for a wide variety of pursuits — first local playwright to be performed at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, a longtime social studies department head at New London High School, a teacher’s union organizer who led strikes against the city school system and a pianist who could play a mean boogie-woogie, among others — but it was his ability to write music that would be his most lasting legacy.

“He very successfully combined folk and classical elements into a riveting and cohesive composition,” recalled June Ingram, former concertmaster for the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra who currently serves as a music librarian at Connecticut College. “He was a thoroughly American composer combining elements somewhat the way Charles Ives did, although Charles Frink was his own man.”

Frink rejected many of the musical pretentions of the avant-garde, finding the incessant dissonance and constant tempo changes an annoyance that contradicted humans’ innate desire for harmonious resolution. Nothing infuriated him more than intellectuals’ habit of turning the art of music into a snob game.

Frink saw the condescension toward the type of music he liked first hand while attending the Yale University School of Music, and he quickly dropped out.

“I felt I was surrounded by a bunch of people who had gotten lost on their own ego trips,” he once told The Day. “In order to be respectable a piece of music had to provide an occasion for intellectual games — to appeal to culture snobs. … It all seemed dead to me.”

Frink finally returned to Yale, but it would be years before he began writing music again. When he did, in his mid 20s, it was like the floodgates opened. He wrote songs, choral pieces, tone poems, dance scores, musical plays, symphonies and even an opera. At least one of his symphonies was performed by the ECSO under the baton of Frink’s old music teacher, the late symphony founder Victor Norman.

It’s easy to hear in Frink’s music the influence of some of his favorite genres: spirituals, cowboy songs, sea chanteys, work songs and the blues, among others. This was what Frink called people’s music to separate it from folk music, which by the 1960s had become increasingly commercial.

Frink made only one major stab at hitting the musical limelight, heading down to New York City more than half a century ago to see if a performance-licensing company would be interested in publishing his work. The executive took one look at the score and proclaimed it too simple.

“A lot of my music is simple,” Frink once said. “I make it that way on purpose.”

What he didn’t say is that simple, in music as in writing, is much harder to do than complicated. And that the result of simple statement — direct, heartfelt communication — is much more effective.

“Frink is Dickinson, Frost and Housman,” said the late poet William Meredith when former Day columnist Bethe Dufresne asked him to describe Frink’s settings of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s poems into a song cycle.

Meredith complimented the writing as spare, but also found mystery in Frink’s music, noting how it is “sometimes broken and cracking down, and then suddenly serene again. A very catchy tune, and then suddenly discord. Very interesting.”

Frink’s music for the theater was equally interesting and tuneful. I was a member of the original cast of “Hands,” a play with music based on characters in and around Bank Street in New London co-written by Frink’s wife Resurreccion Espinosa, and the reaction we got was astonishing for its fervent feeling and cathartic effect. We actually had to turn some people away at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point theater, and were forced to put on an extra performance. A few years later, we revived it yet again to equal enthusiasm.

Frink’s song from “Hands” titled “Gentle Neighbors,” based on the story of a 1960s flower child, was especially heartbreaking and beautiful.

“‘Hands’ is a free-wheeling social commentary, in monologue, mime, dance and song that goes well beyond Bank Street in incisive, lyrical and often brutal portrayals of urban struggle and smugness,” wrote former Day columnist Steve Slosberg in describing the piece, which revolved around the murder of 18-year-old prostitute Desiree Michaud in a Groton motel room in 1984. “It is extraordinary not only for its execution but because it is wholly of this region in concept, content and cast. There has never been another piece like it here.”

But “Hands” was just the opening salvo of a remarkable run for Performers’ Co-op that lasted more than a decade and included other major original pieces including “Voices,” “Oranges for Cambalooh” and “Strange Harvest.” At the same time, Frink led a chorus of up to a dozen people who were devoted to singing songs of the American experience, everything from “What Do We Do with the Drunken Sailor?” to the spiritual “Down by the Riverside,” arranged for voice and piano in the most compelling way possible by Frink himself.

One of my favorite Frink arrangements was his version of “Joe Hill,” the famous union song that he set for Sherry Stidfole and me. It was a barn burner that often ended concerts on a spine-tingling note. It also demonstrated the intellectual capacity of the man, since Frink combined the tune from Earl Robinson’s original “Joe Hill” in the bass part seamlessly with words written by the union rabble-rouser himself on the eve of his execution by firing squad in 1915 after being convicted, controversially but perhaps understandably, of murder.

No doubt Frink felt a little bit like Joe Hill at times, facing the figurative firing squad of fellow citizens after writing against the American fetish of lawns, advocating for the abolishment of Columbus Day based on the early mistreatment of Native Americans, pushing against urban renewal, coming out in favor of drug legalization and, in his later years, fighting a battle against establishing a strong-mayor form of government in the city — a position that was a complete U-turn from beliefs he had espoused to me just a few years before.

Tom Couser, a professor emeritus at Hofstra University who performed with the William Billings Institute chorus, said he had the impression that Frink cared more about his fellow man and the state of American civilization than he did about appearances.

“He was a renaissance man with a range of interests and talents,” Couser said. “But he was a modest guy — not a self-promoter or a blowhard.”

“The bold defiance that caused an 18-year-old to walk out of one of the world’s best music schools has set the tone for Frink’s life,” noted Day writer Scott Timberg in a 1996 profile of Frink for The Day. “He’s made a career out of refusing to compromise, whether as a composer, playwright, rabble-rousing public school teacher or leader of a close-knit gang of actors and singers.”

While his refusal to compromise lost him more than a few friends — and caused a rift in our friendship when I could no longer devote as much time to “the cause” — it also allowed him to maintain a laser-like focus that kept him artistically relevant right to the end. Only a few months before his death, he had rewritten portions of a dance piece for the Albano Ballet performed decades previously and restaged last August at Central Connecticut State University.

It was the last major performance of a Frink piece in his lifetime, a spiritual experience that perfectly meshed with his philosophy that the best art is something to be experienced rather than bought and sold.

“Music and theater began together as religious ritual,” he once wrote. “So I have never thought of the performing arts as separate, really, and I’ve never thought of them as merely aesthetic. I’ve always thought of them as having this moral dimension.”

Frink left his work to the Yale Music Library, where musicologists may someday discover that a composer accused of being behind the times could very well have been years ahead of his time. It would be a story not unfamiliar to Frink, who liked to point out that J.S. Bach, considered by many the greatest composer of all time, was deemed old fashioned by the arbiters of culture two and a half centuries ago.

Soon though, as he recalled in an essay for The Day, “Performers and critics discovered that this obscure, provincial, difficult man had been the greatest composer of his time.”

l.howard@theday.com

Twitter: @KingstonLeeHow

A Frink tone poem using the “Joe Hill” tune that was performed decades ago by the ECSO just went up on YouTube and can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My-BBYrpBno. “John Henry,” another piece for chorus and orchestra performed by the ECSO, is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4BvXya49_g.