Longtime Vermont composer Erik Nielsen turns 75 this year. In celebration, groups around the state will perform the Brookfield resident’s music, including the Vermont Wind Ensemble, the University of Vermont Concert Choir, Counterpoint Chorus, Eleva Chamber Players and the Burlington Choral Society.
But the most meaningful celebration for Nielsen will be one the composer put together himself: a program of three of his string quartets — including one he completed this year — and a clarinet quintet. TURNmusic will perform the program, titled “The Current Beneath: Works by Erik Nielsen,” in two concerts: at the Phoenix Gallery and Music Hall in Waterbury on Saturday, September 20; and the Film House at Main Street Landing in Burlington on Saturday, September 21.
By phone, Nielsen said he was looking forward to celebrating his birthday but joked, “There’s a part of me that says, ‘Jeez, you’re getting old.’” His longevity is remarkable, considering that his older and younger brothers, Karl and Lars, died of brain cancer at ages 63 and 52, respectively. They were one of the main inspirations for the concerts, and Nielsen dedicated his new quartet, String Quartet No. 3 (Three Brothers), to them.
The whole project, several years in the making, has been “a big dream of mine,” the composer said.
Nielsen wrote most of his nearly 200-item catalog since he moved to Vermont in 1988. He has written for orchestra, chorus, soloists and every manner of chamber ensemble; he has also done a film score, wedding music and exercises for piano students. (He is not Vermont’s most prolific composer, he said; that award would go to his friend Dennis Báthory-Kitsz of Northfield, who will record both “The Current Beneath” concerts.)
Nielsen writes operas, too. He revised his first, A Fleeting Animal (2000), for a memorable revival run in 2015. His second, Aliceheimer (2021), is currently being shopped to Oxford Opera Company in the UK. He is working on a third, Fireburn, about the 1878 labor uprising in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, where he has ancestral roots.
The birthday program’s pieces date from the past 24 years. String Quartet No. 3 will be a premiere. The single-movement quartet “That Silent Land” was premiered by a Japanese quartet, Amabile, in 2001. Quintet for Clarinet and Strings was commissioned in 2002 by the National Symphony Orchestra and first performed for a Kennedy Center audience of 500, Nielsen said. String Quartet No. 2 was a 2007 commission for the centennial of the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph and was premiered there by the Chiara Quartet.
Nielsen’s music is wide-ranging in style and emotional scope. In the second quartet alone, a challenging piece filled with trills and pizzicati (plucking) that the Chiara plays admirably in a recording, the outer four of its five movements express a dramatic intensity in a minor key, while the more lyrical middle movement swings from longing to ominous and back again. Nielsen said his influences for the piece were Béla Bartók and Ludwig van Beethoven’s final quartets.
The nonprofit TURNmusic, founded by director Anne Decker in 2014, primarily plays music by living composers. When Nielsen asked Decker if the group’s quartet — violinists Mary Rowell and Brooke Quiggins, violist Elizabeth Reid, and cellist John Dunlop — could perform the program, she immediately agreed.
The new-music advocate first learned of Nielsen when she stepped in last-minute to conduct his original version of A Fleeting Animal. Later, she commissioned him to write her wedding music. He “deserves” a birthday celebration concert, she said, due to his prolific output and extensive teaching history.
Nielsen has impacted countless students. For 18 years he taught composition and theory at the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association, where his students included Dan Liptak, the clarinetist who will play the quintet. He spent 20 years as an online mentor with Music-COMP, helping “hundreds” of young composers, in his estimation, create original works. He taught at the Green Mountain Suzuki Institute in Rochester for 30 years and has taught at the Monteverdi School in Montpelier for the past 13.
For the last decade, he has held a public school residency at Montpelier’s Main Street Middle School and High School, helping both strings program and band students compose and perform their own works. The two-month residency is funded, remarkably, through the district’s music budget.
“We do it because of the process of self-discovery,” Nielsen said of his teaching efforts. “There’s so much power in the creative process. You get to say, ‘I made that. That’s mine.’”
Liptak first performed Nielsen’s quintet while at the Hartt School of Music in Connecticut — where Nielsen earned his master’s degree — as part of an all-Nielsen concert he put together to honor the alumnus. “He’s been a super-big influence on me in my drive to play the music of living composers and be a proponent of new music in general,” Liptak said.
Nielsen’s quintet, the clarinetist continued, is “full of intricate melodies that weave in and out and are passed around, [creating] an interplay between the instruments. He’s a master at that.”
Decker noted that Nielsen’s music can be difficult to play but is melodic and accessible for audiences, adding, “It’s quite soulful; he leads with his heart and soul.”
The intimate chamber works of “The Current Beneath” may be the best window into that soul, a fitting birthday celebration of one of Vermont’s best-loved composers.
Correction: September 22, 2025: An earlier version of this story misstated the year in which Nielsen moved to Vermont. He’s lived in the state since 1988.
TURNmusic presents “The Current Beneath: Works by Eric Nielsen,” Saturday, September 20, 7:30 p.m., at Phoenix Gallery and Music Hall in Waterbury; and Sunday, September 21, 4 p.m., at Main Street Landing Film House in Burlington. $30-50; free for youths and caregivers. turnmusic.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “Party Music | TURNmusic celebrates Vermont composer Erik Nielsen’s 75th birthday”
This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.
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