Notes from Music of Robert Erickson, CRI SD 494:

In an unpublished memoir called Remembered Sounds, Robert Erickson (b. 1917, Marquette, Michigan) reveals the vivid sonic landscape that surrounded his early years in Michigan where he was raised and educated. He writes about the "clank and thud" of his uncle's upright piano, of his aunt's zither virtuosity; he remembers the "water sounds" of summer, the "neat and precise" crackle of winter, the trains, and scratchy old records. 

"When you come right down to it," Erickson told me on a radio interview a couple of years ago, "every composer really composes his environment. I don't listen to music; I listen to sounds. And when I compose, I compose sounds." Sound Structure in Music (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1975) is Erickson's ultimate disquisition on the primacy of timbre as a central musical concept; it ought to be required reading for anyone - composer, listener, or both who cares about the ear and what goes into it. 

Erickson's major influence was Ernst Krenek, who taught at Hamline University at St. Paul in the early 1940s. He had tried 12-tone writing on his own as early as 1936. "I gave up on serialism long before most composers of my generation even knew what it was." he remembers. Of all the Schoenbergian precepts, the concept of the klangfarbenmelodie, the "melodic line" of tone-colors rather than of pitches, remained with him the longest. The 1960 Chamber Concerto (CRI SD 218) shows late traces of this concept, along with an infusion of a lively sense of improvisation totally at odds with Schoenbergian principles. 

Erickson moved to San Francisco in 1953, where he taught at the Unversity of California at Berkeley and at the San Francisco Conservatory. At the latter institution in particular he was paterfamilias to a whole generation of rebellious young composers - among them Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Rush - who were discovering the new realm of electronic music and, with it, the wonderful realization that musical creation could be whatever its composer said it was. (The degree of revolution implicit in that philosophy resulted in the ejection of several of these Young Turks from the Conservatory.) Erickson and his students formed a remarkably cohesive unit in San Francisco in the late 1950s; the music of both teacher and students veered more and more decisively from "normal" structural principles and sounds, and in the direction of sound experimentation. 

In 1966 Erickson, along with several other progressive composers, was invited to form a new music department at the University of California at San Diego, a school whose sybaritic setting belied its remarkable leanings toward the far-out in a number of academic disciplines. "We decided to make a place where composers could feel at home," Erickson recalls, "the way musical scholars feel at home in most other music deparments. We wanted students who would 'do' music, the way scientists in other departments 'do' chemistry or physics. The result is that the scientists on campus are much more sympathetic to what we're doing than the humanities people." 

It is a remarkable school, peopled not only with progressive composers but also with performers eager to expand the techniques of their respective instruments. One of these is a fabulous trumpeter named Edwin Harkins, whose abilities to "bend" pitches and otherwise humanize his instrument directly inspired Erickson's Night Music (along with a solo piece called Kryl in honor of the legendary Midwest virtuoso); another is the remarkable soprano Carol Plantamura, one of that rare breed of singers (like Jan de Gaetani, the late Cathy Berberian - who else?) totally in command of the most abstruse vocal demands, for whom The Idea of Order at Key West was composed. 

Above all, Erickson has retained that boyhood fascination with sounds, and with the most generous definition of the musical experience. Pacific Sirens is a broad, rhetorical examination of the notion that "composers compose their environment"; in a companion piece, the haunting Summer Music, a solo violin forms a descant over an "orchestra" consisting of Sequoia mountain brooks recorded and electronically tuned to finite pitches. In his teaching, he imparts a healthy disrespect for textbook definitions of sounds and music; in one of the fascinating courses in the UC-San Diego curriculum students are encouraged to tape natural sounds of their own choosing and work them through electronic techniques into extended compositions - as Erickson himself did in Pacific Sirens. One interesting aspect of this course is that it is accessible to the entire University, not just music majors but anyone with ears and a willingness to use them. 

Night Music (1978) is for solo trumpet and ensemble. If I had to choose a single work to demonstrate the persistence of beauty in contemporary music, it might well be this haunting evocation, with the solo trumpet weaving an audible garland around a single obsessive note and the other instruments moving in and out of range like moonbeams. 'Time flows free and unmetered," Erickson writes, "or in a kind of rhythmic polyphony that has worked its way into my music in recent years. The composition stems neither from the 18th-century Nachtmusik nor from the Mahlerian evocation of it. Rather, it evokes the kind of night that belongs to dreaming, an oceanic night."

The Idea of Order at Key West (1979) is a cantita for Carol Plantamura. "I got acquainted with Wallace Stevens' poem in 1953", says Erickson. 'The range of feeling in the brilliant language spoke strongly to me, and I was especially attracted by its images of singer and sea, its internal music and its rich and complex rhythms."

Alan Rich Music Critic, Newsweek


The Arch Ensemble is known nationally and internationally for its consistently high standards of performance of the music of (largely) living West Coast composers. Comprised of fourteen instrumentalists (one of each orchestral instrument), the group presents concert series throughout the year in the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California. Begun in 1977 as a project of 1750 Arch Concerts, the Ensemble has been since its inception under the joint directorship of Robert Hughes and Tom Buckner. Hughes is a conductor, composer and bassoonist. He has conducted the Oakland Symphony, San Francisco Ballet, the Cabrillo Music Festival, and has made guest appearances with orchestras from Alaska to Southern California and in Italy.

Gregory Barber holds solo bassoon positions with the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and the orchestras of the San Luis Obispo Mozart and Cabrillo Music Festivals. As its Assistant Conductor, he has led the Arch Ensemble in performances in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Europe. Barber has also appeared as guest conductor with the Oakland Symphony and the Cabrillo Music Festival. He is a faculty member of Mills College.

Carol Plantamura was a founding member of The Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo under the guidance of Lukas Foss. From 1966-78 she lived in Europe and performed in virtually every opera house, concert hall, and radio and television station in Eastern and Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand with some of today's finest performing ensembles of both new music and of baroque music. Since 1976 she has been Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego and continues to perform throughout the world.

David Burkhart is principal trumpet with the Oakland Symphony, the Arch Ensemble and the Vintage Brass Ensemble. He also serves on the faculty of San Jose State and Stanford Universities.


Members of the Arch Ensemble performing on this record are: 

Night Music: Patrice Hambelton, flute Larry London, B-flat clarinet William Wohlmacher, E-flat and bass clarinets David Burkhart, trumpet soloist (assisted by George Mealy) Dan Livesay, trombone Norman Peck and Ward Spangler, percussion Ami Radunskaya, cello Mel Graves and J. Karia Lemon, bass 

The Idea of Order at Key West: Patrice Hambelton, flute William Wohlmacher, E-flat and bass clarinets David Burkhart, trumpet Nathan Rubin, viola Ami Radunskaya, cello 

This record is sponsored by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters as part of its music awards program. Cash awards and CRI recordings are given annually to honor four outstanding composers and to help them continue their creative work; Robert Erickson was a winner in 1981. Additional funding was generously provided by Betty Freeman. 

Night Music-ACA (BMI): 18 min. Recorded by Tony Gnazzo, Hayward, CA, Jan. 1983 
Idea of Order-ACA (BMI): 10'55" Recorded by George Craig, Oakland, Jan. 1983 Produced by Carter Harman Liner ©1984 Composers Recordings Incorporated 


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Notes for Robert Erickson, General Speech. Stuart Dempster, trombone, from New Music for Virtuosos 2, New World Records NW 254:

Robert Erickson was born in 1917 in Marquette, Michigan, where as a youth he played violin, piano, and flute. Drawn to composition in his teens, he found his principal teacher in Ernst Krenek, whom he met in Chicago in 1936. He followed Krenek to Hamline University in Minneapolis and worked with him until 1947, when he received his M.A. degree. Since then Erickson has taught at St. Catherine College (St. Paul), the San Francisco Conservatory, and, since 1966, the University of California at San Diego. Among his credits are several Yaddo Fellowships (1952, 1953, 1965), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1966), election as a Fellow of the Institute for Creative Arts of the University of California (1968), and a commission from the National Endowment for the Arts for a work for violin and orchestra (1976). 

Erickson has composed prolifically for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal combinations. In recent years he has worked in electronic music (usually employing musique-concrete procedures) as well. He was one of the first American composers to explore the resources of the twelve-tone system, and by 1943 his music had evolved to a less systematic type of atonal writing rooted in the rigors of imitative contrapuntal procedures. On writing his book The Structure of Music: A Listener's Guide to Melody and Counterpoint he found himself "purged ... of the contrapuntal obsession," and since then (1952) his music has been more intuitive, in which, "craft, thought, and intuition are so merged that it is all one thing." In this most recent period his concerns have included expanded notions of instrumental and vocal timbre (of which General Speech is one example), increasingly flexible means of rhythmic articulation, and improvisation within controlled limits. Among his works are Variations for Orchestra (1957); Duo for Violin and Piano (1959); Chamber Concerto (1960); Toccata and Ramus, for piano (1962); Concerto for Piano and Seven Instruments (1963); Down at Piraeus, for soprano, chorus, and two-channel tape (1967); Ricercar a 3, for solo contrabass (1967); Pacific Sirens, for instruments and tape (1969); Nine and a Half for Henry (and Wilbur and Orville), for instruments and tape (1970); Summer Music, for violin and tape (1974); Rainbow Rising, for orchestra (1974); Garden, for violin and orchestra (1974); and Summer Music, for trumpet and instruments (1978). 

General Speech was composed in 1969 for Stuart Dempster, who commissioned it. Based not merely on a text of General Douglas MacArthur's but as much on his persona or, one might say, the myth he consciously lived and exemplified, the piece uses speech as a bridge between music and theater. The trombonist is required to merge his playing of precisely notated (and often difficult) musical events with the verbal articulation into the instrument of a phoneticized version of MacArthur's retirement speech at West Point. Thus the opening "Duty, honor, country" (which functions as a refrain throughout the piece) is articulated as "Doo-tee yonor cunt'treeeeee," etc. Erickson instructs the performer to, "as best as possible... perform the vowels and consonants as seen in the word abstractions. . . ." This means shaping the mouth, tongue, and throat in all different manners in order to achieve the desired effect, and it will no doubt be found that a comprehensive analysis of each sound will have to be made. 

Several pages of the score are given to a discussion of such matters as dress and lighting (both the work of the composer's wife, Lenore Erik-Alt) and manner of performance—including a "fade-away" at the end. Erickson instructs the performer to listen to a recording of MacArthur's speeches and to consult the general's autobiography for pictures, speech texts, and other helpful information. 

The composer has supplied the following program note: 

The sounds of one language are often difficult to describe in terms of the categories used for describing another; and the more one looks at the languages of the world, the more one seems to have to increase the number of phonetic categories required for making adequate descriptions. Whether this is so or not depends in part on what one means by making an adequate phonetic description. . . . We may now consider the general form of the kind of phonetic description that is being proposed here. It must, like other parts of the description of a language, be capable of being expressed completely in a set of explicit statements or rules, so that we can be sure that no intuitive (possibly fallacious) concepts are required for its interpretation. Ultimately it would be convenient if the rules produced a set of signals which could control a speech synthesizer. Then we could be certain that the entire account of a language was contained in the rules and the theory (which would have to include a specification of the speech synthesizer). Such a description could, in a very literal sense, be part of a generative grammar; and the grammar would be very powerful in that it would contain rules which were not merely possible (specifying correct but not necessarily all the phonetic correlates) but necessary and sufficient (containing all and only the information required to generate speech).* 

Text: “Duty! Honor! Country! [suddenly raise body to full height} Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. [hard stare; survey audience] They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail. [immobile, pleading look] To regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, [immobile] to create hope when hope becomes forlorn, [drink from half-filled water glass] You now face a new world, a world of change, [immobile] The thrust into outer space of the satellites, spheres, and missiles marked a beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind, [leaning forward slightly] Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night. [immobile] Duty! Honor! Country! You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense, [intense stare] From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds, [survey audience] The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words (ahem). Duty! Honor! Country! (ahem) [belch] [drink, fill glass, drink, pose, etc., prepare for solemnity and self-pity] Today marks my final roll call with you. [raise up, lean forward, reach out] But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps. I bid you farewell!”

Copyright 1977 by Seesaw Music Corp., 1966 Broadway. New York, N.Y. 10023. Text from Robert Erickson's GENERAL SPEECH. Reproduced by permission. 

* Peter Ladefoged, "Linguistic Phonetics: Preliminary Version for Comment and Criticism," Working Papers in Phonetics, VI (June, 1967). Phonetics Laboratory, University of California, Los Angeles. Typographical errors corrected and minor changes made September, 1967. 


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Notes for End of the Mime from New Vocal Music, CRI SD 325:

ROBERT ERICKSON (b. Michigan 1917) has been the recipient of Guggenheim and Ford Foundation Fellowships. His Second String Quartet won the Marion Bauer Prize in 1957. Since about 1965 his compositions have exhibited an intense interest in musical timbre, and he has invented several acoustical musical instruments which explore the possibilities of controlling new timbres. He composes and teaches at the University of California, San Diego. His Chamber Concerto is on CRI 218.

Mr. Erickson writes:

"What drew me to Finnegans Wake was especially its polyphony. That quality of multiple levels was what I have tried to bring out in my setting of this passage from the end of Book I, Chapter 2.

"There is no plot in Finnegans Wake — almost all of its themes appear on every page — but in this particular passage there is an event sequence which may be helpful to those who are new to Joyce: the children come home from play; they study their lessons; they become noisy; their father chases them off and slams the door; they flee to the bedroom; a prayer ends the chapter.

"Joyce's meanings fan out from this domestic scene to the life and history of mankind; all fleeing, all thunderous door slams, all sexual relationships are woven in. The multiplicity of meaning can become very confusing, although there are no nonsense words. Everything has a meaning — more likely, several."