“Enriching the Lives of Her Students: Helen Erickson”

By Julie D. Lillis -- Growing up in Minot, North Dakota, Helen Erickson was the daughter of a trained pianist (her mother), a doctor (her father), and the granddaughter of a well-known mathematician. “My grandfather was one of the people who worked on the new math, the original new math, at the University of Illinois,” she says. “When I was in high school, probably my most exciting teacher was a math teacher, who had studied with my grandfather.”

 

Helen’s mother was very active in the Community Concert Association, which Helen says was “a mainstay of small-town life in America,” and through that group exposed her daughter repeatedly to quality music and concerts.

 

“I’ve always loved opera,” Helen says, recalling the time when “I was very small” that her mother took her to see Maria Callas sing Bellini’s Norma at the Met. “She was amazing. She left such an impression on me.” (Many years later, while at Hackley, Helen wrote the book, A Young Person’s Guide to the Opera, published in 1980 by Silver Burdett; she completed the manuscript in just one summer, she says, “with a typewriter.”)

 

Facility with music and with math is common, and math remained a keen interest of hers. In college, however, music won out. “I think my chance at Radcliffe to understand music—to really approach it intellectually, in some ways akin to mathematics—was really a different way of looking at it. I mean, I really see the connection between how people learn math and how people learn music; there are connections there.” She majored in music, and minored in anthropology. As with all of her interests, anthropology remained a passion she never relinquished.

 

Moving smoothly from Radcliffe to Yale for her Masters in Music, Helen wrote her Master’s Thesis on 15th Century Byzantine chant; it was published by the Oxford University Press. While at Yale, she learned Russian during the summer, and then practiced it at the church she attended regularly. “A lot of the old people in the parish, they really had to speak to you in Russian, because they really didn’t speak English.” Simultaneously, she was busy picking up another language at Yale: Ancient Greek. “I needed it for my Master’s paper,” she says. “Basically I read the New Testament [in Greek], which gave me enough of a background. I learned classical Greek, and then worked on New Testament Greek; there’s sort of an interlinear translation available for New Testament.”

 

Right after graduation from Yale, Helen began teaching. “My first experience in the classroom was teaching math, and teaching dance.” (As a child and adolescent, she spent many years taking class with a former principal dancer of the Estonian National Ballet, who had resettled in Minot after World War II. Helen even spent a summer dancing at the famous performing arts camp, Interlochen.) Meanwhile, she served as a Choir Director at a church in New Britain. Moving shortly thereafter to California, she worked for the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Berkeley in a multi-faceted position—and one that reflected her many talents and passions. She was “a sort of jack of all trades,” she says, in the Department of Physical Anthropology, doing everything from cataloguing to writing grant proposals. It was during this time that she met the Leakeys—Mary, Louis, and their son, Richard. “Mary Leakey was a bundle of energy. Louis, when I met him, was already fairly old, and was sort of just a quiet, old gentleman. And of course Richard Leakey was a very good politician, shall we say. And I think that’s why he’s been so successful in the environmental work he’s done,” she says. “I find him extremely interesting.”

 

Keeping active in the music scene at Berkeley was rather easy: she taught Byzantine chant as a Lecturer in the Extension program. “I worked with glee clubs out there. And they gave me the opportunity to go to the Banff Center for the Arts, in the summer, and study conducting.” In addition, she directed choirs at Holy Trinity Cathedral on Green Street in San Francisco. This would be yet another continuation of a theme in her life—remember her choir directing in New Haven?—and another passion. “I think one of the reasons I like choral music is that I don’t think I was ever a soloist personality,” Helen says. “You know, I always loved music, but to be a good performer you have to be a certain type of front-and-center person. And so when I discovered conducting, I started to feel much more that that was my place, because I could get other people to produce something that was related to a musical vision that I had...It’s much more ‘me.’”

 

Leaving Berkeley, she moved to D.C. to teach music at Beauvoir, the elite elementary school that feeds into both St. Albans and the National Cathedral School. “I taught in the Orff program when I was there,” she says, before coming to Hackley.

 

Her work here has spanned the gamut from kindergarten through grade 12. A music teacher since 1973 and Head of the Performing Arts Department since 1989, she has taught a wide assortment of music courses. These include K-6 general music, Chorus, Folk Dance, Recorder, Middle School choral programs, Concert Choir, Vocal Chamber Ensembles, Lady Grey Notes (girls’ chamber ensemble), Music Theory (multiple levels of that, including Advanced Placement), Music Listening and Literature (including when an Advanced Placement course existed), Composition, Choral Conducting, and various Independent Studies (e.g., Schubert, Isadora Duncan, 19th Century Violin Virtuosos). In addition, she was the force behind the Americana Festival and the Gilbert and Sullivan performances in the Lower School—a tradition for an entire generation of students at Hackley. It was her idea to have the Americana and the Medieval festivals, as well as the Gilbert & Sullivan and the St. George & the Dragon performances—and she arranged the music, and did the choreography and the staging for all of them until she moved to the Middle and the Upper schools.

 

Elizabeth Tryon ’96 trained as an opera singer, writes her own songs, and bridges the world of both classical and contemporary music with aplomb. Her recently released CD is available through www.cdbaby.com. In a recent email, she told the story of singing for Helen long ago, “in the beginning of my fourth grade year at Hackley.” Elizabeth recalls, “She played scales and I sang. Suddenly she turned around on the piano bench and looked me straight in the eyes with an intense look I would later come to know so well. ‘Elizabeth,’ she said, ‘you are a wonderful singer!’ That turned out to be one of the most significant moments of my life. Not only because it was the first time anyone told me I was a singer, but because from that moment on Mrs. Ericson became my self-appointed and invaluable music mentor.” Whether she is the teacher of young children or teenagers, says Elizabeth, “Mrs. Erickson is committed to enriching the musical lives of all her students. She takes students under her wing as a matter of course. It doesn’t seem to even occur to her that she is going above and beyond the bounds of her ‘job.’”

 

While teaching elementary-school kids in the early years of her Hackley tenure, Helen often taught graduate students at night at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary where she is still on the faculty—and where her husband John now serves as Dean. “I’ve taught choral directing there, for many years,” she says. “I’ve been part of a large number of publications in liturgical music. I am a member of the Liturgical Music Department of the Orthodox Church in America, and I’ve written a fair amount about the liturgical role of music in the Church, and done choir workshops all over the country.”

 

Her other role at St. Vladimir’s--as a faculty wife, and now the wife of the Dean of the Seminary--has enriched her life, she says. “It’s a job: it’s being the official hostess, it’s dealing with the interpersonal complications...It’s almost defined traditionally in the Church...There’s definitely a role for the wife of the clergy in the parish, and a certain expectation that she will play a part in the life of the parish.”

 

At St. Vladimir’s, the students often teach the teacher. “What they teach me socially is also remarkable. I’ve had students from Eastern Europe, I’ve had students from Japan, I’ve had students from Africa—these are all Orthodox seminary students—from South America, many Eastern Europeans, from the Middle East. The Bishop of Baghdad. The Armenian Bishop of Baghdad was one of those students. So you get to know a lot about what’s happening in other countries from a very different perspective than what you would get from the radio or press...you have more resonance of what’s going on.” She finds the mix of different cultures “exhilarating,” she says. “I do find it very interesting. Maybe it’s the anthropology part of me.”

 

Her curiosity about others extends to anything, really. Remember her linguistic talent? Several years ago she decided she needed to master another language: Spanish. “I realized about ten years ago that we were well on our way to becoming a bilingual country, and if you really wanted to be a citizen of this country in the future, you have to be bilingual.” Researching carefully as is her wont, she discovered an immersion program in Granada, and signed right up. She spent four summers there.

 

One value of learning a new language as an adult is simple: “You have to be patient with yourself. And I think it’s a good thing for a teacher to do that, because then you start to realize that there are people who don’t learn the same way. So I think it’s a very healthy thing to do.”

 

Her interests are voracious, and follow from one to another rather logically. From Spanish language you can guess correctly that she is keenly interested in issues surrounding immigration and borders, and reads “a lot about immigration, Southwestern history.” Similarly, her summers in Granada triggered a passion for a different kind of music. “Spanish music has the Moorish element, and the Arabic element, in Spanish music—and I find that fascinating because it of course circles around and relates to the Byzantine which was my interest in college, so it all kind of comes together in the end. But I think what you realize is that music has a certain kind of logic, and that logic transcends style.”

 

Since her trip to Spain with a group of Hackley music students in the summer of 2004, she’s become interested in flamenco—the music, in particular, as well as the dance, “and especially some of the crossover flamenco music...jazz crossover, or whatever. It’s a fantastic medium, because it integrates so much. It integrates singing, movement, all the body percussions—all of this sort of coming together” Along with everything else she loves to listen to—opera, chamber music, African music, South American music--she now treks into the city to see what she can of flamenco.

 

Her love of travel, fluency in Spanish, and unquenchable thirst for learning about others—anthropology, if you will—led Helen to jump on board a Casten trip to Cuba in the spring of 2000. While there, she met the well known Cuban composer, Tulio Peramo, and experienced the richness that is the Cuban sound. It may not surprise you, then, to learn that the very next year she brought him to Hackley, for the world premiere of his piece, Leyenda del Bosque, which he wrote for our Concert Choir. Mr. Peramo remained on campus for six weeks as Composer in Residence, coaching the Upper School Orchestra and the Concert Choir as they prepared for the performance of his piece, a cantata, which served as our Centennial Concert. It was a tremendous coup for the School and a fabulous experience for our students.

 

While she learns by experience—Cuba is a prime experience—Helen also learns by quiet osmosis. She is an intellectual’s intellectual, after all. An inveterate reader, Helen admits to juggling “at least two or three books at once”—although when we last talked she was reading six books! Naturally, she reads a great deal about music, and her current jag concerns opera and symphony. As in music, her taste in books is wide-ranging and eclectic. She devours memoirs, oral histories—and anything having to do with education. “I read huge amounts of educational literature every year...That’s because I think education is simply a fascinating subject.” Furthermore, she continues, “I’m very interested in anthropology, both physical anthropology and cultural anthropology. I’m very interested in sociology...if it’s a biography of some sort of interesting person, I always enjoy that...I like reading books on gardening, on architecture; oh, I’m very interested in 20^th Century art, especially landscape art.”

 

She does not limit her interest in gardening to books; “I’m a fanatical gardener,” she admits. “I have been gardening since I was a child. I have always loved plants. I enjoy them as sort of individualists.” Helen will even dig up the plants she loves most when she moves from house to house—transplanting and re-transplanting, according to the whims of Bambi, of course. Some plants she took to her house in Maine, only to find that the deer there were more voracious than here—and so back the plants returned to New York. Nonetheless, her careful nurturing has paid off: “I’ve got a lot of plants that I’ve had probably since about 1978,” she says.

 

“Gardening is a big part of my life,” says Helen. “I like the design process, I like looking at lines and shapes and how things fit together.” I observed that it is probably her math ability coming out. “Could be,” she said. “But also I’ve done a lot of photography”--and proceeded to show me some breathtaking prints she had taken in Alaska, where she worked for a couple of summers at a music festival.

 

The narrative thread of design that connects so many of her hands-on hobbies—gardening, photography—extends to one more. “I’m also interested in interior design.” She sews, painted her entire house last year by herself, and observes, “I love working with color.”

 

That she can paint an entire house and call it “fun” (which she did) might not surprise you. It might also not surprise you to learn that last spring she flew to New Orleans with many of our Habitat for Humanity members (kids and other chaperones) several months after Hurricane Katrina to rebuild two houses. Helen is a dynamo with no “off” switch, and her interest in Habitat did not end with that trip. Last summer, therefore, she spent a week at one of Habitat’s “summer camps,” learning the skills necessary for building a house “soup to nuts,” as Helen put it. “I’ve always been interested in construction, building. I have this house up in Maine that’s always falling down, [and I have to] put it back together.”

 

At that “summer camp,” Helen worked side by side with teenagers, but that was easy for her, since in addition to working with kids at Hackley she has two children of her own, now grown. In fact, for many years she saw life at Hackley through the lens of a parent as well as a teacher; both her sons are alumni of the school. David, now 26, has two M.A. degrees, one in Social Science from the University of Chicago, and one in Education from Mercy College. He works at Hudson River Health, where he is the Manager of Migrant Health Promotion. Paul, now 30, has a Ph.D. in the History of Science form the University of Wisconsin; he is currently a Fellow at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and just won a tenure-track position at Wesleyan. Both David and Paul inherited their mother’s penchant for opera—traveling to Chicago last year for the Lyric Opera’s Ring Cycle—and are talented string players (David on violin, Paul on viola).

 

In her many years here, Helen has shepherded countless students through the music program here—and some have chosen to pursue a career in music. I asked Ken Noda ’80--Musical Assistant to the Musical Director of the Metropolitan Opera, James Levine, and an extraordinary pianist whose performances always garner exemplary reviews--for his thoughts. “I met Ms. Erickson in the fourth grade,” he wrote in a recent email. Along with his classmates, he was introduced to the recorder by Helen.

 

“It was obvious that I had no future on the recorder. I could not play in tune and made a terrible sound on it. One day, I finally lost it. I threw the recorder at her in front of the whole class and yelled, ‘I HATE THIS!!!!!’

 

“It is a tribute to Ms. Erickson that she forgave me and she became one of my mentors. What I grew to respect most about her was her absolutely no-frills, almost monastic approach to music. She fostered in me an understanding of early music before Bach, which was essential because music did NOT begin with Bach.”

 

Like Ken Noda, Morgan Smith ’93 is also a professional musician. An opera singer, he recently sang the title role in Don Giovanni with the Seattle Opera, and this spring sang the role of Ted Steinert in the world premiere of Frau Margot with the Fort Worth Opera. Like Ken Noda, his resume is impressive and deep, and also like Ken Noda he earns sterling reviews for his performances. In a recent email he wrote, “Helen Erickson was instrumental in recognizing my potential as a musician, and helping me develop the kind of focus and organization necessary to achieve the success that I enjoy today.” He continued, “Helen’s nurturing encouragement, and knowledge of the music world helped me realize that singing professionally was not just a possibility, but a career by which I could make a living. Her commitment has inspired me to reach out to other students and young performers, to help them find their voices, and know that a career in opera singing can be more than just a dream.”

 

Pai-Ying Hu ’98 works as an Associate at Credit Derivatives Middle Office at Deutsche Bank. A truly talented violinist—one of her many gifts—she knew Helen well despite never having officially been her student. In a recent email, Pai-Ying wrote, “I still remember every time before I went on the stage to perform, I would tell Mrs. Erickson how nervous I was. She would look at me and say, ‘Pai-Ying, just be who you are and you will be just fine.’ Even until this day, whenever I face challenges and need to stay confident and focused, I repeat to myself what Mrs. Erickson said to me ten years ago. Without having Mrs. Erickson as my mentor and role model, I would not have been able to achieve my goals and realize my dreams. What she taught me over the years certainly exceeds what I could have learned from books.”

 

That comment meshes nicely with the remark Zac Petkanas ’03 made that “Helen Erickson is one of those rare high school teachers that stay with you for the rest of your life.”

 

Staff Assistant to Congresswoman Hilda Solis, Zac is also a talented singer who has sung opera professionally—but whose passion for government proved to be a powerful lure. In a recent email, Zac wrote, “Helen really was the glue that kept the performing arts community so tightly knit...I was part of a core group of students that thought of the PAC [Performing Arts Center] as a second home; we were known as the ‘PAC rats’ and Helen was our leader. She had the unique ability to be both teacher and friend, providing instruction, offering advice, and listening to every excruciating detail of our concerns with empathy and endless patience. A true humanist, she took a profound interest in her students and actively worked to ensure their well being.”

 

As for Helen, she shrugs off such compliments. “I think I have a great department. I think I’ve been lucky in the people that I’ve found around here.” She points to the unique elements of Hackley, including the intertwined nature of the Music Institute—through which students can take private lessons—and the Music Department. The Institute, she says, “gives support for the classroom program.” She calls the music program itself “mind-expanding,” and is pleased that most Lower Schoolers wrote recently that “music was one of the most important things that happened to them in the Lower School.” If you know Helen, you know that meant a lot to her. “Music is essential for civilization,” Helen says. Without it, she smiles, “you won’t be a civilized person.”

 

In fact, she says, “I think people who don’t make music have just turned off a certain part of their creative personality. Just as [for] people who don’t do visual art in some form, some creative switch has been set to ‘off.’...So I think that the creative arts, in terms of education, are really fundamental.”

 

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