Biographical Sketch
Composer, pianist, and conductor Ernst Bacon was born on May 26, 1898, to Dr. Charles S. Bacon and Maria von Rosthorn Bacon, a Viennese-trained musician. He studied at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, and also privately with Alexander Raab, Glenn Dillard Gunn, Ernest Bloch, and Karl Weigl. Among the numerous awards and grants he received are the Bispham Award, the Ditson and the League of Composers Commission, the Pulitzer Prize (Symphony no. 1, 1932), Guggenheim fellowships (1939, 1942, 1964), and grants from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, American Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
A multi-faceted musician, Bacon composed and conducted symphonies, operas, piano concertos, musical theater, and a variety of works for other performing forces. In addition, he concertized as a pianist in Europe and the United States and conducted the WPA orchestra in California from 1935 to 1937. He taught and administered at the Eastman School of Music (1926-1927), Syracuse University's music department (1945-1947), and Converse College in South Carolina (1938-1945). He distinguished himself as a writer with such works as Notes on the Piano, The Honor of Music, and Words on Music. In Our Musical Idioms, Bacon presented a new theory of scale models derived from diatonic scales. He was also music critic for The Argonaut, Converse College's weekly publication. Bacon was respected as a philosopher by a close circle of friends with whom he shared his unpublished writings, such as Imaginary Dialogues and his many poems. He was highly opinionated, as evident from the large volume of letters to the editor he wrote during his life.
Paul Horgan, one of Bacon's closest friends and his sometime collaborator, summarized Bacon by writing, "...his wonderful variousness of gifts all gather at the center in the name of the art inherent in mankind. With him, to see deeply is to see in a wide-angled vision; and to create is for him to release his full richness of nature in all his work. ... If there is no Grand Duke of Weimar now available to give his genius full patronage and opportunity, I think we may, even as we deplore the lack of comforting recognitions and rewards commensurate with his achievement, safely leave the future the proper recognition of Ernst Bacon as a great man and a great artist."
Ernst Bacon married four times and had six children. He died on March 16, 1990, in Orinda, California.