Robert Erickson, "Night Music"

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In an unpublished memoir called Remembered Sounds, Robert Erickson (b. 1917, Marquette, Michigan) reveals the vivid sonic landscape that surrounded his early years in Michigan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 pater familias 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 [stay tuned] 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." -- Alan Rich Music Critic, Newsweek

-- from Avant Garde Project