Widening the Radius: Heidi Moss Erickson and Kurt Erickson in Recital

4th July, 2025, 6:30-8:00pm

Hanson Dyer Hall, Ian Potter Southbank Centre, Melbourne VIC

In 2007, soprano and scientist Heidi Moss Erickson suffered a cranial nerve injury that nearly ended her performing career. Determined to retrain and perform again, she harnessed her research background to embark on a journey toward self-rehabilitation. Her discoveries about the connections between the brain, music, and vocalization have allowed her to see singing in a new light and motivated her to educate new generations of singers through her insights. Together with her husband—composer, pianist, and pedagogue Kurt Erickson—she weaves together music, neuroscience, literature, and personal narratives for a reflection on how our stories shape the art we create.

Tickets:
Standard - $20.00
Student/concession - $10.00
Inspiring Voices conference attendees - $0.00 (Please book through your conference registration)

ANATS Ltd. welcome Heidi Moss Erickson and Kurt Erickson as part of the 2025 ANATS National Conference Inspiring Voices: Teaching Singing Today and Tomorrow

ANATS Ltd thanks the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, the Faculty of Fine Arts and the University of Melbourne as our venue partner for the ANATS National Conference and this recital.

Heidi Moss Erickson is a performer, educator and scientist. Noted for her “rich and radiant soprano” (Edward Oriz, Sacramento Bee) she has performed in both opera and concert repertoire. Moss Erickson received a dual biology and voice degree at Oberlin College, where she worked in the voice lab of Richard Miller. She pursued biochemistry and neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. Her postgraduate research on telomeres at Rockefeller University led to prestigious publications, including a landmark paper in Cell which demonstrated that the ends of DNA are looped. In 2007 Heidi came down with a rare CNVII nerve injury which halted her performing career for over two years. Through her rehabilitation, she resurrected her interest in neuroscience and developed a passion for how the brain controls the voice. Her courses and lectures have been featured both nationally and internationally at conferences and universities, including Renee Fleming’s Music and Mind series. Her many published writings link neuroscience with vocal pedagogy, therapy, and rehabilitation, including a chapter in the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Vocal Pedagogy.

Composer Kurt Erickson specializes in writing works for multi-disciplinary collaborative projects that address loss and healing. His song set Here, Bul- let 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. Each Moment Radiant, his latest work with poet Brian Turner, tells the stories of interweaving lives affected by the tragic bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988. 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 fifteen years of multi-year composer residencies with a wide assortment of performing arts organizations, dance companies, and cathedrals and national shrines. Erick- son has been called “a composer at the height of his powers” and his music has been described as “haunting and poetic,” “gripping,” “genuinely mov- ing;” with one author writing that a performance “moved this reviewer to tears”. His work Seventeen Minutes and Twenty-Two Seconds was written for a consortium of twenty pianists and opened the fifth season of the San Francisco International Piano Festival. 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. He is a frequent performer and collaborator with his wife, acclaimed soprano and scientist Heidi Moss Erickson.