Composer-in-Residence Program
Since 2013 LIEDER ALIVE! has been at the forefront of new song development, hosting the only active multi-year composer art song program in North America.
LIEDER ALIVE!’s composer residency program infuses the lieder tradition with a 21st Century sensibility, pairing established works from the canon with little known gems and completely new compositions. New works are often inspired by or in conversation with existing repertoire, providing audiences with new perspectives on familiar repertoire.
Composer Kurt Erickson works closely with LIEDER ALIVE! artists and administrative staff, adding to the repertoire through the creation of new works and crafting thoughtful programs that add to the rich cultural life of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Erickson directs the Neue Lieder program, a project designed to encourage fellow composers to create works that are inspired by or in conversation with existing repertoire. A sample of participating composers include: Veronika Krausas, Daron Hagen, Erling Wold, Luna Pearl Woolf (Canada), Henry Mollicone, Quinn Mason, David Conte, Omari Tau, Mark Carlson, and Anno Schreier (Germany).
Works created by Kurt Erickson during his LIEDER ALIVE! residency have been performed across the globe with recent performances taking place at St Andrews University (Scotland), Melbourne Conservatory of Music (Australia), Northwestern University, at the Hartt School of Music, and at LIEDER ALIVE! concerts in San Francisco and Berkeley.
Kurt Erickson
Kurt Erickson is a composer working at the intersection of documentary practice and vocal music, creating multimedia works that merge oral history and archival research into new compositions. His song set Here, Bullet has been performed across the globe and occupies a unique place in the classical music world as a composition being turned into a short film, as a vehicle for veterans arts therapy programs, and the recipient of the First Prize Award in the 2020 NATS Art Song Composition Competition. During the 2024–25 season, retrospective concerts of his vocal works were held in San Francisco, Chicago, Hartford, Berkeley, and Melbourne.
With an interest in outreach and mental health advocacy, Erickson leads a transnational oral history collaboration with the Australian National Veterans Museum and veterans in the Sacramento area. In Spring 2026 he will lead Finding Voice and Vision, a three-month art therapy partnership with LIEDER ALIVE! and the San Francisco VA Medical Center supporting veterans battling PTSD and trauma.
Each Moment Radiant, his latest song set oratorio with poet Brian Turner, tells interweaving grief survivor stories from the tragic bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The work honors loss while celebrating resilience, love, and our capacity to celebrate the precious and ephemeral moments in our daily lives.
Erickson currently serves as Composer-in-Residence with San Francisco’s LIEDER ALIVE! He has designed and implemented over eighteen years of multi-year composer residencies with a wide assortment of performing arts organizations, dance companies, and cathedrals and national shrines. Erickson has been called “a composer at the height of his powers” and his music has been described as “haunting and poetic”, “gripping”, “genuinely moving”; with one author writing that a performance “moved this reviewer to tears”.
His work Seventeen Minutes and Twenty-Two Seconds was written for the opening of the San Francisco International Piano Festival’s fifth season, and a consortium of twenty pianists across North and South America. Recent performances of his music have been heard at Deutsche Oper Berlin, at colleges and concert halls across the country, and on classical music radio programs and podcasts. A recording of his music sung by baritone Andrew Garland will be released on the Bright Shiny Things Label in 2026. .
Erickson often performs with his wife, soprano and voice scientist Heidi Moss Erickson, presenting on composer-singer collaboration and vocal pedagogy subjects at colleges, conferences, and on podcasts.
FINDING VOICE & VISION PROJECT
Empowering Veterans Through Music, Expressive Writing, and Film
A collaboration between Kurt Erickson, Composer-in-Residence, and Kay Anderson, Community Engagement Director
This activity is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.