Pianist Raymond Erickson

Raymond Erickson is a widely-traveled musician, scholar, and teacher who has strong roots in California, having grown up there and having graduated with high honors from Whittier College, where he performed in the College’s Bach Festival in his undergraduate years under the guidance of Margaretha Lohmann.

Erickson’s piano career began with a performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto at age 17 and he has since performed, on both piano and harpsichord, all over the US as well as in Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, Japan, and China.  (He gave the first solo harpsichord recital ever in Beijing in 2014 and in 2017 played a return engagement to a sold-out house in that city’s venerable Forbidden City Concert Hall.). For almost forty years he was on the faculty of New York’s Queens College, CUNY (where he was the founding Director of the Aaron Copland School of Music and later Dean of Arts and Humanities), and served even longer on the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center.  He has also taught at Rutgers University and The Juilliard School.

Simultaneously active as a scholar, Erickson, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale, has produced four books, is a winner of the William H. Scheide Award of the American Bach Society, was elected an Honorary Member of Phi Beta Kappa, and has been decorated by the German government.  His research has been supported by Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.