Robert Erickson

Robert Erickson studied at Hamline University. Training under Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Krenek is recorded. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are twelve-tone technique. Employment is recorded with University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego. Distinctions recorded are Arts and Letters Award in Music and Guggenheim Fellowship.

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.

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 to create tape music: "If you get right down to the bottom of what composers do, I think that what composers do now and have always done is to compose their environment in some sense. So I get a special little lift about working with environmental sounds." He also has used invented instruments such as stroking rods, used in Taffy Time, Cardinitas 68, and Roddy, tube drums, used in Cradle, Cradle II, and Tube Drum Studies, and the Percussion Loops Console designed with Ron George, used in Percussion Loops. Many University of California San Diego faculty performers appear on his 1991 CRI release Robert Erickson: Sierra & Other Works (CD 616), playing works written for and with them: • Kryl (1977), Harkins, named after the travelling cornet player Bohumir Kryl. The piece from time to time creates a hocket between the singing and playing. • Ricercar À 3 (1967), Turetzky. For bass soloist live and on two tape tracks. • Postcards (1981), Carol Plantamura and lutenist Jürgen Hübscher • Dunbar's Delight (1985), timpanist Dan Dunbar. Virtuoso solo piece for timpani. • Quoq (1978), flutist John Fonville. Named after Finnegans Wake. • Sierra (1984), baritone Philip Larson, SONOR Ensemble conducted by Thomas Nee. Commissioned by Thomas Buckner. He also has an album Pacific Sirens on New World Records. He wrote Ricercar a 5 for Trombones for Stuart Dempster. The piece uses baroque imitation as well as singing, whistling, fanfares, slides, and other extended techniques. His final work is Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Tympani (1990).

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.

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