Workshops, talks, and performances by husband and wife team Kurt Erickson and Heidi Moss Erickson

Healthy relationships, in music as in life, are key to a thriving arts career.

We are a husband and wife team (pianist/composer - singer/pedagogue/voice scientist), drawing inspiration working together with a shared sense of play in performances, commissioning projects, lecture discussions, mentoring, and embracing new ideas. In our personal lives we are proud parents, geo-tourists and mushroom obsessed hikers trekking through remote area of Northern California in search of hot springs and other geological oddities.

My wife is a unicorn, an elite scientific researcher who started her career investigating telomeres (the ends of DNA) by day at Rockefeller University, gigging in the New York opera/recital world by night; fusing her passions to become one of the premier voice scientist/pedagogues around. I’ve always been more of a dreamer, a pianist masquerading as a poet and comparative literature junkie fascinated by creativity and our innate expressive capacity as humans. My career path embraces group creative projects that invite others into the process through composer residencies and multi artist commissioning projects.

Music making and creativity should be fun; we embrace this idea and our life is filled with ease.

We encourage the pursuit of individual paths because we are a product of them - our individual and shared ADHD tendencies allowed us to develop our passions in unexpected ways. I developed as a composer by spending a gap year in San Francisco writing poetry and improvising. Heidi’s Bells Palsy affliction at the height of her career forced her to completely reevaluate the established views of the vocal pedagogy world.

Whether working with fellow neurodivergent artists, veterans struggling with PTSD, or complete beginners grappling with unorthodox creative approaches, we bring a uniquely wholistic approach informed by the latest scientific research coupled with years of experiential practice.

Navigating the minefield that is a career in the arts is tough enough (difficult); we need to better understand how our minds and bodies work in order to maximize our growth.

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Workshops, Talks, and Lecture Performances

Talks are modified for each individual group according to need, a sampling include the following:

  • The Neuroscience of Learning and Practice

  • Composing for the Voice - Relationships or Bust

  • The Neuroscience of Play (and why we need more of it!)

  • Composing is Creativity, and other things we forget

  • The Neuroscience of Emotion: Individuality, Interpretation, and Anxiety

  • Composing Workgroup for Professionals

  • Writing for the Voice 101

  • Singing in the Brain

  • Text is Timbre - How Vocal Color, Prosody, and Poetic Meaning Amplify Text Driven Compositions



Individually or collectively, you may have seen us…

[Idea: List all of our podcasts, talks,

Kurt: NATS, Mount Olive College, Cal State University Fresno
Heidi: MTAC, Vocology in Practice, Voice Study Centre, The Naked Vocalist, SEE HEIDI’S ‘TALKS’ PAGE FOR MORE LOGOS!!
Podcasts:

Presenters we’ve worked with:

  • University of St. Andrews (Scotland) August 20-26, 2023

  • Operation Opera at Cal State Sacramento June 1-12, 2023

  • University of West Virginia

  • LIEDER ALIVE!

  • Napa Music Festival

  • San Francisco Conservatory of Music

  • Livermore-Amador Symphony

  • Cosumnes River College (Sacramento)

Collaboration with Heidi Moss Erickson

Why are y’all working together? How are you uniquely equipped to provide a niche service?

Joint lecture topics

Bullet list of topics

Group work

If you want to put copy about any sort of group offering, here’s the place to do it, or we can do it later.

Gallery

(Just put all images in this gallery, and I’ll make it cute after. This gallery won’t stay as is. )

CONTACT

(I’ll tailor this, once I see what you have completed your copy).