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For Robert Erickson

premiere: Steven Schick, Conrad Prebys Music Center, La Jolla, 4/23/25

length: 16 minutes

date: 2024

instrumentation: solo percussion (vibraphone, just tuned vibraphone, and cymbals) and electronics

score

video

program note:

For Robert Erickson is an homage to the composer and professor Robert Erickson (1917-1997) who was the founder of the UC San Diego Department of Music, and an extraordinary, adventurous, and inventive musician and thinker. Erickson fostered an environment that valued creativity, collaboration, and experimentation above all else, and would be especially welcoming to composers and performers (as opposed to music scholars who dominated most university music departments at the time.) Steven Schick (for whom I composed this piece) and I have both benefited from being able to work and collaborate in this Department for many years, and we dedicate this piece to his memory with admiration and gratitude.


If you wish to perform this piece, you will need to borrow or create a set of "Steiger just-tuned" vibraphone bars. One manual of bars is replaced on each instrument with a retuned set of bars (one octave each adjusted 31 cents flat, 49 cents flat, and 41 cents sharp):

In addition, six microphones are placed over the instruments, and their signal is processed in a computer running a patch in Miller Puckette's Pd software environment.

Please contact the composer by email (rand@ucsd.edu) for further information and assistance.