Raymond Erickson

Raymond Erickson (Minneapolis, 1941) is an American harpsichordist and musicologist whose career combines the performance of early music with historical research and the application of computing to musicology. His academic career is chiefly associated with Yale and the City University of New York (CUNY), where he carried out much of his teaching and institutional work.

He graduated from Whittier College in California in 1963 and obtained his doctorate in music history at Yale in 1970, studying with teachers including Claude Palisca, William G. Waite and Lawrence Gushee. His instrumental training included piano with Nadia Reisenberg and harpsichord with Ralph Kirkpatrick and Albert Fuller, with whom he studied for three years as a special student and without tuition fees. After his doctorate he carried out postdoctoral research at the IBM Systems Research Institute in New York.

In 1971 he joined the faculty of Queens College. Between 1978 and 1981 he chaired the music department, a period during which he oversaw its conversion into the Aaron Copland School of Music, of which he was the first director. In 1993 he was appointed Dean for Faculty of the Division of Arts and Humanities, and in 1976 he joined the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center. From 1973 his involvement with the Aston Magna Foundation, which arose from his relationship with Fuller, was decisive for the development of the foundation and the organisation of its summer courses.

His written output covers the application of the computer to musicology, especially the DARMS encoding system, and the translation of medieval treatises, such as the Musica enchiriadis and the Scolica enchiriadis. He has also performed in concerts and radio broadcasts, has contributed to reviving the practice of improvisation in Baroque and Classical repertoire, and left several commercial recordings. His legacy lies in the union of philological rigour, computing tools and the popularisation of early music.