Bard Faculty News
Raymond Erickson
Harpsichord, Piano
Primary Academic Program: Bard Conservatory of Music: Chamber Music
Academic Program Affiliation(s): Bard Conservatory of Music, Bard Conservatory of Music: Graduate Instrumental Arts
Biography: Raymond Erickson, harpsichordist, pianist, and music historian, graduated with high honors from Whittier College and holds the Ph.D. in musicology from Yale. He is one of America’s most experienced teachers of historical performance practice, having taught the subject since the mid-1970s at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music and the CUNY Graduate Center (DMA program), as well as Rutgers University. In his performances all over the US and Europe, on both harpsichord and piano, he has revived once-standard practices now largely forgotten, such as improvised preludizing and embellishments. In recent years, he has focused on Bach, and has given master classes and lectures on Bach interpretation at major conservatories and universities both here and abroad. He has published non-traditional but historically-based interpretive approaches to the Bach Ciaccona for solo violin and to the classic repertory, as well as on improvisation for classical musicians. His four books include Schubert’s Vienna (Yale, 1997) and The Worlds of Johann Sebastian Bach (Amadeus, 2009), both of which are outgrowths of the Aston Magna Academy program he directed, sponsored by the Aston Magna Foundation with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Erickson’s principal keyboard teachers were pianists Margaretha Lohmann and Nadia Reisenberg and harpsichordists Ralph Kirkpatrick and Albert Fuller.