Ernst Bacon; Author, Composer of Lyric Songs

Ernst Bacon, a prolific composer who for more than 60 years created symphonies, an opera and at least 250 songs and instrumental works, has died of heart failure at his home in Orinda in Northern California.

He was 91 and until his death on Friday had continued to add to the lexicon of lyric songs and instrumental suites that had been his trademark.

Bacon, who won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize and three Guggenheim fellowships, continued to compose music and write books until the day before he died, said his wife, Ellen. Although nearly blind, he wrote a sonata for viola at age 88.

Among his best-known printed works are “Words on Music” (1960) and “Notes on the Piano” (1963). Both are still in print.

His first written work on music had been a brochure--”Our Musical Idiom”--published when he was 19.

Born in Chicago, Bacon studied music theory at Northwestern University and at the University of Chicago with Arne Oldberg. Later, he went to Vienna to study composition. He returned to America and was a pupil of Ernest Bloch’s in San Francisco. He conducted with Eugene Goosens at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in New York and was an assistant conductor with the Rochester Opera Company.

He later moved to San Francisco and became well-known in the Bay Area as the founder of the Carmel Bach Festival. During the Depression he headed the Federal Music Project in San Francisco, where musicians having trouble finding employment gave free concerts for Americans with similar problems.

Bacon’s compositions mostly were orchestral suites and chamber music. He wrote more than 70 settings for Emily Dickinson’s poetry and for other poets, such as A. E. Housman and Walt Whitman.

A collection of his songs, “Grass Roots,” for soprano, alto and piano, was published in 1976.

In his academic career, he was a faculty member and then dean of Converse College’s School of Music in Spartanburg, S.C., from 1938 to 1945; and the director of Syracuse University’s School of Music, in Syracuse, N.Y., from 1945 to 1947.

Besides his wife, he is survived by three sons, two daughters, a sister, 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.