Program Notes

Robert Erickson (1917-1997)

For the first of its new Composer Retrospectives series of concerts, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's longstanding model of exuberant inclusiveness finds a wonderful parallel in the marvelous music of the American composer Robert Erickson. Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Erickson had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere points of interest. Composing was the central activity of his life. He thought as a composer and as a composer engaged wholeheartedly in so many other musical pursuits: presenter, administrator, author, and most significantly and influentially as an especially gifted and sympathetic teacher. He was a profound and original musical thinker who embraced the expressive possibilities of all music, from the Western classics and moderns of his own early education to Indian and Balinese traditions and all manner of contemporary experimentation, as long as it served a musical purpose. All these activities fed back into his music. When encountering his work, one doesn't need to know more than one hears: what's important are the sounds one encounters and the expressive journey they suggest for each listener.

Robert Erickson lived the first part of his life in Michigan among members of a musically active extended family, learning piano and violin. Attending high school in Marquette, Michigan, band and community music gatherings provided a further broadening of his musical world. A year out of high school he moved to Chicago, where he became acquainted with a group of people centered at Park House, an experiment in community living that attracted intellectuals and artists. Here he met his future wife, the artist Lenore Alt, as well as an older musician, Frank Kearney, and Ben Weber and George Perle, two composers his own age. Kearney furthered Erickson's knowledge of and interest in the classical repertoire, while Weber and Perle joined Erickson in exploring the recent and current masterworks of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. (Perle, of course, went on to become the leading expert on Berg's work, and both Perle and Weber became successful composers.) Erickson began studying formally with Wesley La Violette, who was already working with Perle and Weber, and the three started a concert series to program the new music they otherwise knew only from scores.

In 1939 Erickson began a prolific correspondence with the recently arrived European refugee composer Ernst Krenek in response to his book Music Here and Now. Krenek would soon become the younger composer's most significant mentor. Following a period making a living as a ceramicist in rural Michigan, Erickson and his wife moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Krenek taught at Hamline University. Erickson earned his master's degree there, and his connection to a composer of Krenek's stature ultimately led to a performance of his orchestral work Introduction and Allegro by the Minneapolis Symphony under Dimitri Mitropoulos. In St. Paul, Erickson also met one of his most ardent future champions, the conductor Thomas Nee, and began his teaching career at St. Catherine's College. His progress was interrupted for a time by Army service in Louisiana, but poor eyesight kept him in administrative work stateside.

In 1953, following a year in New York City where Erickson completed his first book, The Structure of Music, with funds from a Ford Fellowship, he and his wife picked up and moved to California. It was here that Robert Erickson really came into his own in all facets of his career, the somewhat patchwork career he had so far maintained for fiscal survival blooming into a mosaic of complementary facets of a musical career. One of his most important long-term relationships was as music director, then board member, of the new San Francisco radio station KPFA, which in part satisfied his interest in concert promotion and advocacy of new music. He taught briefly at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley before joining the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory. His activities and teaching there had a great impact on the lives of many younger musicians and on San Francisco's new concert music scene. Among younger musicians in his orbit were Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick, each of whom went on to highly successful, off-the-beaten-track careers of their own.

In his own music, Erickson initially worked in a style influenced by the contemporary European masters that held his fascination, including Berg and Schoenberg as well as Krenek. Although he was never really a serialist, the twelve-tone method colored his harmonic language and contrapuntal textures. His early works, such as the Introduction and Allegro for orchestra, the Piano Sonata, and the String Quartet No. 1, reveal a strong respect for the traditions of his predecessors. The expressionistic, rhapsodic Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra, the earliest piece on this program, employs motivic retrograde and inversion and other such techniques not exclusive to but frequently encountered in the twelve-tone method. In fact we can find similar techniques in Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, written more than a decade before the development of the twelve-tone method. This piece seems to stand as a particular model for the Fantasy: the harmonic and melodic sonority of the perfect fourth, which dominates Erickson's piece, is prevalent in Schoenberg's seminal post-tonal work.

Erickson wrote the Fantasy in 1954, partly as a reaction to the death of his Park House mentor Frank Kearney. Ernst Krenek led the premiere with the Hamburg Radio Symphony in Hamburg later that year, and it was quickly taken up by the San Francisco Symphony. In a single movement of about fifteen minutes' duration, the piece can be seen as three big sections, A-B-A. An opening recitative in slow and free tempo, the cello well in the foreground with light accompaniment, primarily in the orchestra strings, takes about a third of the piece. The second section, although not always propulsive in its meter, is marked "Fast and Intense" at the start. The soloist for the most part keeps to the tempos established by the orchestra, which has a far more active and colorful role than in the first part. The final section is a return to the opening mood, but with far greater participation from the large and colorful orchestra.

The Fantasy was one of the first works Erickson wrote upon arriving in San Francisco, and it arguably hailed the end of a period reliance on older models. By the end of the 1950s Erickson was deeply involved in the kinds of theatrical and perceptual experimentation of which John Cage was the most famous instigator. The use of technology in music, including pre-recorded and live electronic sound, was a part of many of concerts presented by Erickson and his San Francisco Conservatory colleagues. Erickson, fascinated by sound of any kind, built chiming sound sculptures that grew seemingly of their own volition and constantly tested materials for their use in new pieces, sometimes working with ancient or traditional tuning systems. Cardinitas '68 was written for some of these hand-assembled instruments. Improvisational passages and graphic notation opened the door to a high degree of trust in Erickson's many performing colleagues. Particularly notable in his works of the 1960s are the Concerto for Piano and Seven Instruments, a thorny, frenetic modernist work from 1963 that includes improvisation but otherwise bears comparison to Berg's Chamber Concerto; Ricercar à 5 for trombone with four tracks of prerecorded trombone, written for Stuart Dempster; and Ricercar à 3, a similar work for double bass written for Bertram Turetzky. The large-scale orchestra work Sirens and Other Flyers III loomed in the middle of the decade; his Pacific Sirens (1969) for orchestra incorporates pre-recorded and manipulated ocean sounds.

As with many artists, the 1960s for Erickson were a period of expansion beyond the strictures of tradition media, performance, and even audience, which led to a reconsideration of musical means in the following decade. In 1965 he had been asked to help found the music department of the University of California-San Diego, and he joined his old Hamline classmate Will Ogdon there beginning in 1967. He remained at UCSD for the rest of his teaching career, until his official retirement in 1987, although his health by that time—he suffered from the degenerative muscle disease myositis—had long since limited his mobility and required frequent hospital stays.

Erickson's tenure at UCSD was even more influential than his time at the San Francisco Conservatory. With Ogdon and others he established an atmosphere of freedom, encouragement, and sympathy that, at first, aimed at community and a continuing, interactive learning environment in which both faculty and students could explore music together, rather than relying on the old model of master and pupil. He continued to explore musical possibility. He traveled with his wife in 1974 to Indonesia, where he was able to witness gamelan performances, and later in the decade spent time in Japan. He wrote his second book, Sound Structure in Music, in 1974, drawing on his observations of a vast range of work from the Western concert music tradition as well as world music. In fact, in the last two decades of Erickson's works we find many examples of a deliberate radical limitation of materials and simplification of surface, including use of pentatonic scales, drones, and vast swaths of stasis, in part in order to allow the listener to focus attention on other aspects of the music—timbre, especially, or the detail of a single melodic line.

One of his most conceptually striking pieces of the middle of the decade was White Lady, an exercise in Klangfarbenmelodie that can be seen both as an homage to Farben, the third of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), and Erickson's own exploration of tone color in an orchestral setting. A related work is Rainbow Rising, inspired by Erickson's contemplation of the shifting, yet stable, colors of a rainbow he observed from his house in Encinitas. His musical concerns are reflected (perhaps literally?) in the titles of many of his later works, which refer to different phenomena of light and/or nature: in addition to Rainbow Rising and White Lady, we have Auroras, the string quartet Solstice, Night Music, and Summer Music, among others.

Erickson wrote the quirkily gorgeous Night Music in 1978 on a commission from the SONOR ensemble of the University of San Diego, and its premiere was led by Bernard Rands on May 24, 1978. Erickson wrote, "The music takes advantage of the special skills developed by members of the SONOR Ensemble at the University of California, San Diego, in its use of microtones, hockets between two or more instruments, and the highly inflected melodic writing. Time flows free and unmetered or in a kind of rhythmic polyphony that has worked its way into my music over the past seven or eight years." It takes little imagination to link the heterophonic, harmonically consistent foundation and looped rhythmic patterns of this piece, combined with the melodic complexities (specifying "approximate" quarter-tones) of the solo excursions, to a myriad of folk-music traditions; many of the percussion sounds seem extracted from gamelan. The small ensemble is specifically deployed onstage in two wings with the amplified trumpet at the rear, the apex of the V. (The other players are flute, clarinet, bass/E-flat clarinets, trombone, two percussion, cello, and two double basses.) The virtuosic, infectiously effervescent trumpet part is closely related to that of Erickson's loony solo trumpet piece Kryl (1977). The piece is a single movement of about eighteen minutes; from a drone harmony based on F, the middle section shifts to a C drone, and the end, in a long, pleasant repose, returns to F.

The title of Erickson's East of the Beach for orchestra refers to the composer's physical and spiritual grounding in the home he shared with his wife north of San Diego in Encinitas—the house from which he saw the rainbow of Rainbow Rising. It was commissioned by the conductor Tom Nee, the old friend from since his St. Paul days, who led the premiere with the New Hampshire Festival Orchestra on August 12, 1980. Its temporal and conceptual proximity to Night Music is immediately evident in the presence of drones, in which we can also hear the timbre-shifts of White Lady and Rainbow Rising. The hocket texture (instruments combining to create a kind of rhythmic-melodic mosaic) might again suggest gamelan. The composer writes,

"East of the Beach was composed for the New Hampshire Festival Orchestra, a "classical" orchestra with winds in pairs and a small body of strings. There are three interconnected sections: constantly changing timbre of a single pitch; an adagio; and a fast finale. The first section uses composite attacks to occasionally mask the identity of the instruments involved. The second has two long passages of what I call simultaneous variation, the variants of the theme producing at time a sort of "not quite counterpoint." The final section is hocketed throughout, to make a texture of broken instrumental color behind the long lined melodies. I was much involved in tone color and rhythm in this composition, but the tonal organization, simple and complex at the same time, was very intriguing to me, and carries hints for future pieces. The title comes from the place where I live, not far from the Pacific Ocean."

East of the Beach is about fifteen minutes long. (Interestingly, Erickson's biographer, Charles Shere, suggests that it might be possible to combine this piece, Night Music, and another work, Gardens, to make a three-movement symphony—although the differences in scoring might make this highly impractical.)

Along with more "exotic" musical models, beginning in the later 1970s or so Erickson, like many other composers at the time, began to reexamine with greater interest some of the classics of the Western orchestral repertoire, and in particular the symphonies of Mahler and Sibelius, for the lessons one could learn from their broad, world-encompassing movements. Auroras, written in the two years after East of the Beach, dedicated to Thomas Nee, and premiered by him with the American Composers Orchestra in New York City on February 27, 1984, exhibits not only many of the characteristics found in East of the Beach and Night Music (drones, microtonal melodies, hocket, timbral shifting, pentatonic scales) but also some taste of Erickson's new interest in the ultra-late Romantics, for example in the remarkable melodic string writing that emerges following the opening drones. In contrast and complement to such familiar passages are the sonorities of some of Erickson's homemade percussion instruments, tube drums with a deep, resonant sound and metal rods, first used in the 1966 Roddy, with an ethereal, high-pitched ring.

Auroras is a single movement, about twenty-two minutes in length, but much more internally varied than either of its close predecessors on this program. It might be tempting to hear it as a summing-up: as he revealed in a lengthy program note in the score, he was deeply concerned about the onset of his health woes and contemplating matters of mortality. "As it happened, just at the period when I was full to the brim with these preoccupations, I was invited to California State College in Turlock to lecture. At the Divine Gardens motel I awakened at about 4:30 a.m. to the sound of birds, lots of them, varied voices, including some that were new to me. They were concentrated in shrubs and trees surrounding a large fountain area in the center of the restaurant. There were enough birds, hundreds, to produce textures of orchestral size and density, all singing against the sort of silent background that, in modern times, is becoming very rare. I hadn't heard birds against such silent backgrounds since I was a boy, and perhaps that was the trigger that brought bird orchestra, things divine, living and dying, closer together, to make a ball of feeling in my belly that was the whole non-verbal source of the musical action of AURORAS…. I did not follow a literary program or dramatic scenario—I composed the ball in my belly."

Certainly the idea of a bird orchestra never seems as explicit as in Messiaen's music, or even Respighi's. Upon revising the score in 1985, Erickson added another note that applies just as well to all of his music: "I think of my music as simple; easy for listeners though not so easy for the performers. AURORAS is expressive music—music of feeling. For me its meanings are non-verbal and non-visual—musical. Nevertheless they are as precise, definite and rich in detail as visual and verbal meanings, and for me deeper too, close to ultimate things."

Erickson's tenure at UCSD was celebrated with great fanfare, including a concert of his music, in 1987 on the occasion of his retirement, but the composer's health had by that time nearly immobilized him and he was unable to attend. For a few years he continued to compose, with difficulty, writing his last work, Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Timpani for the SONOR ensemble, in 1990. He died on April 24, 1997.*

-- Robert Kirzinger

*Two valuable sources of information about Robert Erickson's life and music are Music of Many Means, a kind of dual-volume including an autobiographical sketch by Erickson as well as close assessment of individual works by John McKay, volume 17 of the Composers of North America Series (Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1995) and Charles Shere's Thinking Sound Music (Fallen Leaf Press, 1995).

Copyright 2008 Robert Kirzinger. Robert Kirzinger  is an active composer who writes frequently for the Boston Symphony Orchestra program book and is editor of the program book for the annual Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.