Robert Erickson, "Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra" (1954)

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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 of 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 pre-recorded 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.—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.