Peter Racine Fricker

Biography

Peter Racine Fricker (5 September 1920 – 1 February 1990) was an English composer, among the first to establish his career entirely after the Second World War. He lived in the US for the last thirty years of his life. Fricker wrote over 160 works in all the main genres excepting opera. He was a descendant of the French playwright Racine.

Early career

Fricker was born in Ealing, London (the family home was at 42 Colebrooke Avenue, West Ealing) and studied composition with R. O. Morris, organ with Ernest Bullock and piano with Henry Wilson at the Royal College of Music. After serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, Fricker undertook a period of study with Mátyás Seiber at Morley College. During the war he served in the Royal Air Force as a radio operator and in 1943 he married (Audrey) Helen Clench, a Czech pianist who had been with him at the RCM. After the war Fricker became a professor of composition at the RCM, and in 1952 he became director of music at Morley College, where he succeeded Michael Tippett.

Music

His Wind Quintet (1947) attracted widespread attention, and his First String Quartet (1947) and First Symphony (1949) were also well received. Four more symphonies (1951, 1960, 1966, 1976) followed, which are among his most appreciated works. Other works include Paseo for guitar (1969), Sinfonia in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977), two violin concertos (1950, 1954), choral and chamber works (including the 1956 Sonata for Cello and Piano, recorded twenty years later for L'Oiseau Lyre by Julian Lloyd Webber and John McCabe) and works for piano and organ.
In 1952 his Concertante for three pianos, strings and percussion was performed by the identical twin piano duo Mary and Geraldine Peppin with additional pianist Kyla Greenbaum. His Horn Sonata, Op 24 was premiered by Dennis Brain and the pianist, Harry Isaacs at the Conway Hall, on 20 March 1955.
Stylistically his music was significantly different from the mainstream English school of the middle 20th century; instead of following in the lyrical, folk-song influenced tradition of Holst, Vaughan Williams and others, he wrote music which was chromatic, contrapuntal, and acerbic—more akin to Schoenberg, Bartók, and Hindemith than to any of his English contemporaries. Unlike Schoenberg, however, he never abandoned tonality altogether, preferring to work in a dissonant idiom which retained a tonal basis—a position considered to be conservative in the musical milieu of the 1950s and 1960s.

Later career

Fricker became visiting professor of music at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1964 and moved with his wife to Goleta, Santa Barbara the following year. Six years later, he took a permanent position at this university; he became chairman of the Music Department in 1970, and was appointed "faculty research lecturer" in 1979, the highest academic honour which the university bestows on its faculty. However, he maintained links with the UK and Europe through the International Society for Contemporary Music and the Composers' Guild of Great Britain. From 1984 to 1986 he was president of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music and Literature in England. He continued to compose large-scale works, including his Fourth and Fifth symphonies, the oratorio Whispers at these Curtains op 88 (1984) setting John Donne, and the Concerto for Orchestra, composed for the 1986 festival. His final orchestral work, With Joyance (1989), was written for the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra, for which he had become composer in residence. But Fricker died the following year, of cancer of the throat, in Santa Barbara, California, United States, aged 69.