It is with profound sadness that the CLC announces that Frank Brickle passed away on February 9, 2025.
Frank was born, musically speaking, into high modernism: at Princeton, his chief teacher and mentor was Milton Babbitt, and he worked long and hard to master the esoteric style and techniques of that milieu. Frank’s eccentric path would later lead away from these arcane techniques to a facility with the needs of a much wider range of styles, from high down to low, and much in between. Frank created over eighty-five compositions, and a number of arrangements and transcriptions, for a wide range of instrumental ensembles and media. While many of his earlier pieces employ synthesized and processed sound, later, he concentrated increasingly on writing for instruments and the voice, and came to treasure especially the unique moment when the performers have begun to be comfortable with the score and start making the music their own. And though Frank’s music evolved immensely over more than four decades, he attached great importance to continuity. Rather than rejecting 20th-century modernism, he devoted his efforts to adapting and transforming its methods and techniques into a more personal, expansive, intimate, and inviting dialect.
Frank’s music has been performed internationally by artists such as pianist Beth Levin, the Bowers Fader Duo, Vox n Plux, the Gunnar Berg Ensemble, and the beloved choral group Cantori New York. The Cygnus Ensemble included two of Frank’s works at a concert at the Library of Congress in 2012: his “Farai un vers” (Guillaume d’Aquitaine) and his arrangement (for Cygnus) of Busoni’s “Berceuse élégiaque.” Cygnus and the Roger Shapiro Foundation produced a CD of Frank’s music for Furious Artisans, as well as a video interview with Frank.
In December 2024, Frank’s music was performed at a concert in New York with Benjamin Boretz, an event which he called “the finest honour I have received, especially since it was shared with Ben,” a distinguished mentor and friend to Frank.
Eclectic to the point of polymathy, Frank studied eleven languages, and was a serious reader of poetry, setting the poems of T.E. Hulme, Rainer Maria Rilke, and many others. Frank’s academic publications include works of music theory, mathematics, and psychology, and his varied career included working as a researcher from 1983 to 2000 at the Center for Communications Research at Princeton, where he worked on codes, ciphers, and combinatorial mathematics.
Frank was predeceased by his wife, the psychologist Sandra Leiblum, in 2010. His life and music will be celebrated by friends and the Roger Shapiro Foundation at locations in Canada and the United States; the Canadian Music Centre BC Region has offered to host a memorial performance and reception in Vancouver, Canada, which will be announced in due course.
Frank was a man of crystalline intelligence and formidable wit, but he was as remarkable for his kindness as he was for his achievements. He will be remembered as an inventive, sensitive composer and a dear friend. May his memory be for a blessing.
– Jeremy Stewart
