Robert Erickson (March 7, 1917 – April 24, 1997) was an American composer. Education Erickson was born in Marquette, Michigan. He studied with Ernst Krenek from 1936 to 1947: "I had already studied—and abandoned—the twelve tone system before most other Americans had taken it up." He influenced notable students Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Louise Spizizen, Betty Ann Wong, and Paul Dresher. He is the author of The Structure of Music: A Listener's Guide, which he claimed helped him overcome a "contrapuntal obsession",<ref name="Rich">Erickson, Robert. Quoted in Robert Erickson: Sierra & Other Works (1991 CRI CD 616). Liner notes by Alan Rich, music critic, Los Angeles Daily News.</ref> and Sound Structure in Music (1975), an important early attempt to systematically study timbre in music. Career Teaching He taught at the College of St. Catherine in Saint Paul, Minnesota, San Francisco State College, the University of California, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Conservatory. With composer Will Ogdon, he founded the music department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1967: "We decided we wanted a department where composers could feel at home, the way scholars feel at home in other schools." While there he met faculty performers such as bassist Bertram Turetzky, trumpeter Edwin Harkins, flutist Bernhard Batschelet, and singer Carol Plantamura: "I could go to Bert, or Ed, with something I'd written down and ask 'Hey, can you do this?' And I'd get an immediate answer. It was a fabulous time for cross-feeding." He also helped start the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Pauline Oliveros, among others, praises his teaching: As a composer Erickson was one of the first American composers to create tape music: "If you get right down to the bottom of what composers do, I think that what composers do now and have always done is to compose their environment in some sense. So I get a special little lift about working with environmental sounds." He also has used invented instruments such as stroking rods, used in Taffy Time, Cardinitas 68, and Roddy (electronic tape composition), tube drums, used in Cradle, Cradle II, and Tube Drum Studies, and the Percussion Loops Console designed with Ron George, used in Percussion Loops. Many UCSD faculty performers appear on his 1991 CRI release Robert Erickson: Sierra & Other Works (CD 616), playing works written for and with them:Kryl (1977), Harkins, named after the travelling cornet player Bohumir