14 Facts About Ernst Bacon

Ernst Lecher Bacon was an American composer, pianist, and conductor.

Ernst Bacon was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships and a Pulitzer Scholarship in 1932 for his Second Symphony.

Ernst Bacon finished his education at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a master's degree for the composition of The Song of the Preacher in 1935.

Ernst Bacon married his first wife Mary Prentice Lillie, granddaughter of Richard Teller Crane in 1927.

Ernst Bacon met his fourth wife Ellen Wendt, a soprano singer, when he was 70 and she was 26 at 10,000 feet on a Sierra Club trip in Kings Canyon National Park in 1968, four years after he retired from Syracuse University.

Ernst Bacon died in 1990 at age 91 in Orinda, California.

At the age of 19, Ernst Bacon wrote a complex treatise entitled "Our Musical Idiom," which explored all possible harmonies within Equal Temperament and gave the numbers of chords available for each cardinality.

Ernst Bacon took the position that music is an art, not a science, and that its source should be human and imaginative, rather than abstract and analytical.

Ernst Bacon was self-taught in composition, except for two years of study with Karl Weigl in Vienna, Austria.

Ernst Bacon set out instead to write music that expressed the vitality and affirmation of his own country.

Ernst Bacon composed a large number of art songs, and much other music including chamber, orchestral, and choral works.

In 1928 Ernst Bacon traveled from New York to California to take up a position at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he served until 1930.

In 1935, Ernst Bacon was the guest conductor at the first Carmel Bach Festival in California.

Ernst Bacon continued to work until shortly before his death in 1990.