Education[edit]
Erickson was born in Marquette, Michigan. He studied with Ernst Krenek from 1936 to 1947: "I had already studied—and abandoned—the twelve tone system before most other Americans had taken it up."[1] He influenced notable students Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Louise Spizizen, Betty Ann Wong, and Paul Dresher. He is the author of The Structure of Music: A Listener's Guide, which he claimed helped him overcome a "contrapuntal obsession",[1] and Sound Structure in Music (1975), an important early attempt to systematically study timbre in music.
Career[edit]
Teaching[edit]
He taught at the College of St. Catherine in Saint Paul, Minnesota, San Francisco State College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Conservatory. 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."[1] While there he met faculty performers such as bassist Bertram Turetzky, trumpeter Edwin Harkins, flutist Bernhard Batschelet, and singer Carol Plantamura: "I could go to Bert, or Ed, with something I'd written down and ask 'Hey, can you do this?' And I'd get an immediate answer. It was a fabulous time for cross-feeding."[1] He also helped start the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Pauline Oliveros, among others, praises his teaching:
Recognition and awards[edit]
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. 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, death and final works[edit]
He suffered from a wasting muscle disease, polymyositis, and was bedridden and in pain for fifteen years before his death; his final work was Music for Trumpet, Strings, and Tympani (1990). He died in San Diego, California, aged 80.