“Erickson’s settings are simply gorgeous: the recording of the Los Angeles premiere (Here, Bullet)…moved this reviewer to tears.”
Kurt Erickson is an American composer whose collaborative artistic projects have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.
Erickson is co-founder of Finding Voice & Vision, a nonprofit initiative created with acclaimed poet and Iraq War veteran Brian Turner and Tony Award-nominated actor/director Will Chase that brings together music, poetry, and storytelling with veterans and military communities. In 2025, the organization received a California Arts Council grant supporting a partnership with the San Francisco VA Medical Center, followed by a 2026 National Endowment for the Arts award to expand the work further.
His award-winning song cycle Here, Bullet, based on Turner's poetry, received First Prize in the 2020 National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Competition. Originally commissioned by an international consortium of thirty singers on three continents, the work continues to gain recognition through two new commercial recordings, international performances, and an expanded version for Sybarite5 that is being adapted into a short film directed by Will Chase.
Recent projects include Each Moment Radiant, a multimedia work honoring the thirty-five Syracuse University students lost in the Pan Am Flight 103 tragedy, and Seventeen Minutes and Twenty-Two Seconds for solo piano, commissioned through an international consortium led by the San Francisco International Piano Festival.
Erickson serves as Composer-in-Residence with San Francisco's LIEDER ALIVE!, where he composes new works and directs the Neue Lieder Commissioning Program. Recent Composer Showcase concerts have been presented in San Francisco and Berkeley, at Northwestern University, The Hartt School of Music, and the Australian National Teachers of Singing Conference in Melbourne.
His music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Girls Chorus, Paul Yarbrough of the Alexander String Quartet, and at the American Guild of Organists National Convention. Additional commissions include a work celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Berkeley Community Chorus & Orchestra and collaborations with San Francisco Opera Ballet Master Lawrence Pech.
Beyond his compositional work, Erickson is a frequent speaker on the arts, mental health, and veteran storytelling. He has presented at colleges and universities, local governments, mental health organizations, and veteran organizations. Erickson regularly collaborates with his wife, soprano and voice scientist Heidi Moss Erickson, on performances and educational programs exploring contemporary vocal music and composer-singer collaborations.