Robert Erickson (March 7, 1917 – April 24, 1997) was an American modernist composer and influential music teacher. He was one of the first American composers to explore the twelve tone technique and to compose tape music.

Education

Erickson was born in Marquette, Michigan. He learned both piano and violin as a child, and studied composition with Ernst Krenek at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, graduating in 1943. He returned to Hamline after three years in the US Army, and earned a Master of Arts in music in 1947.

Career

Teaching

He taught at the College of St. Catherine in Saint Paul, Minnesota, San Francisco State College, the University of California, Berkeley, and chaired the composition department of the San Francisco Conservatory from 1957 to 1966. With composer Will Ogdon, he founded the music department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1967: "We decided we wanted a department where composers could feel at home, the way scholars feel at home in other schools."

As a composer

Erickson was one of the first American composers to compose twelve tone system music ("I had already studied—and abandoned—the twelve tone system before most other Americans had taken it up." and Sound Structure in Music (1975), an important early attempt to systematically study timbre in music.

Erickson also served as music director of KPFA radio in Berkeley from 1955 to 1957 and as a director of the Pacifica Foundation, KPFA's parent body, for several years thereafter.

Recognition and awards

He received several Yaddo fellowships in the fifties and sixties, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966, a Ford Foundation fellowship, was elected as a fellow of the Institute for Creative Arts of the University of California in 1968, and his string quartet Solstice won the 1985 Friedham Award for Chamber Music. He also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy.

There are two books about Erickson's life and music: Thinking Sound Music: The Life and Work of Robert Erickson by Charles Shere and Music of Many Means: Sketches and Essays on the Music of Robert Erickson by Robert Erickson and John MacKay.

Illness and death

He suffered from a wasting muscle disease, polymyositis, and was bedridden and in pain for fifteen years before his death. He died in San Diego in 1997, California, aged 80.

Recordings

  • American Classics - A Continuum Portrait Vol 9 - Erickson: Recent Impressions, Songs, High Flyer, Summer Music. Naxos 8.559283
  • Robert Erickson: Pacific Sirens. New World Records 80603
  • Robert Erickson: Kryl, Ricercar, Postcards, Dunbars Delight. CRI 616
  • Robert Erickson: Auroras. New World Records 80682
  • Robert Erickson: Complete String Quartets. New World Records 80753
  • Robert Erickson: Duo, Fives, Quintet, Trio. New World Records 80808

Bibliography

  • Erickson, Robert. 1975. Sound Structure in Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. .
  • Erickson, Robert. 1988. "Composing Music". Perspectives of New Music 26, no. 2 (Summer): 86–95.
  • Erickson, Robert, and John MacKay. 1995. Music of Many Means: Sketches and Essays on the Music of Robert Erickson. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press.
  • MacKay, John. 1988. "On the Music of Robert Erickson: A Survey and Some Selected Analyses". Perspectives of New Music 26, no. 2 (Summer): 56–85.
  • Reynolds, Roger. 1988. "Wonderful Times". Perspectives of New Music 26, no. 2 (Summer): 44–55.
  • Shere, Charles. 1995. Thinking Sound Music: The Life and Work of Robert Erickson. Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press.
  • Shere, Robert. 2001. "Erickson, Robert". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.

References

  • University of Akron Bierce Library Smith Archives Composer Profile: Robert Erickson
  • ClassicToday.com Review of Pacific Sirens by Robert Erickson Artistic quality: 8, Sound quality: 9.
  • Dunbar's Delight Review of Sierra & Other Works by Elliott Schwartz, American Music, Fall, 1998
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  • Interview with Robert Erickson, February 27, 1988
  • Robert Erickson Papers MSS 96. Special Collections & Archives, University of California San Diego Library.

Listening

  • two works by the composer: General Speech (1969) and East of the Beach (1980)