Fricker, Peter Racine

Epithet: composer

Biography / Administrative Information

One of the most important postwar British composers, Peter Racine Fricker was born in London in 1920 and was educated at London's St. Paul's School. In 1937 he entered the Royal College of Music where he studied theory with Reginald Morris and organ with Sir Ernest Bullock. He also studied at Morley College, where he met Michael Tippett. He left to serve in the Royal Air Force during WWII and after the war he returned to Morley College where he studied with Matyas Seiber until Seiber's death in 1960. In 1952 he succeeded Tippett as director of the college and in 1955 began teaching composition at the Royal College. In 1964 he accepted a one-year appointment to teach composition at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He accepted a full time appointment the following year and in 1970 became chairperson of the music department. He held a joint appointment in the Department of Music and the College of Creative Studies and taught composition, theory (particularly 20th century), and musicianship at UCSB until his retirement in 1989. He was also Composer-in-Residence for the Santa Barbara Symphony. His compositions won many awards, including the Koussevitzky Prize for his First Symphony in 1949. He was awarded the annual Faculty Research Lecturer award by the University in 1980 and was the first professor appointed to the Dorothy and Sherrill C. Corwin Chair in Music.

Fricker's works owed much to Bartok, Berg, Hindemith and Schoenberg and though his works are rarely serial, they are often freely atonal. His output was large numbering about 200 works, including seven film scores, five symphonies as well as numerous chamber, choral, and organ works.

He died in Santa Barbara in 1990.