Title: Thinking sound music
First published: 1995
Description: Robert Erickson's music bristles with the quintessential virtues of modernist American composers: intelligence, good humor, lyricism, rich sonorities, inventive sound-colors. It is firmly rooted in a thorough understanding of all musics now available, from ancient Greece to Webern, Varese, and John Cage - not ignoring the music of Indonesia, Africa, and the Far East.

Yet it speaks with a characteristically American voice, direct and good-natured, attuned to the vernacular, never condescending to its audiences.

Thinking Sound Music looks at this fascinating man and his music.

An absorbing narrative traces Erickson's childhood influences; his studies with the Austrian modernist Ernst Krenek; his dislocating, often amusing experiences during the Depression and in the army in World War II; the academic politics in Erickson's early teaching career in Berkeley and San Francisco; and his role in establishing pioneering experimental music studios at the San Francisco Conservatory and the University of California at San Diego.

In a detailed, nontechnical survey of Erickson's music - from the early, tentative pieces for chorus through the experimental tape compositions and game pieces of the 1960s to the haunting, evocative masterpieces of the 1970s and '80s - the author places Erickson's works in the context of musical developments of the time, presenting for the nonspecialist the panorama of music at the close of the twentieth century.

Shere explains complex subjects in a direct, plain-English style, in the hope that the natural and universal values of Erickson's music will be revealed to the audiences for whom it was composed.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, Composers, Biography, Composers, united states, Composers, biography
Places: United States
People: Robert Erickson (1917-)
LC classification: ML410.E767 S54 1995