How It All Began
Award winning composer Eric Heilner comes from a storied musical lineage. His father Irwin Heilner, was a life long composer of classical music. In the 1920s and 30s, Irwin Heilner studied composition with Robert Sessions and the legendary Nadia Boulanger, and was a member of Aaron Copland’s Young Composers Group. Heilner’s sister, Deborah Holland, is an accomplished singer/song writer most well-known for leading the group Animal Logic – which included Stewart Copeland, drummer of the Police, and world-famous bassist Stanley Clarke.
As a child, Heilner grew up in a household imbued with classical music. He took piano lessons starting at age 6 and advanced so far as to tie for third place in a New Jersey children’s piano competition at age 13. As a teenager, Heilner abandoned classical piano to pursue girls and other social activities. However, he did not completely give up playing – an accidental exposure to the seminal boogie-woogie piano piece Honkey Tonk Train Blues by Meade Lux Lewis (1927) led to a lifelong passion for playing blues & boogie woogie piano.
In 1967, as a freshman in college, after hearing the Doors song ‘Light My Fire’, realizing that he could apply his boogie-woogie piano skills to both pursue girls and play music at the same time, he took up playing rock and roll. After graduating from college, with his degree in Physics in hand, Heilner was briefly a research assistant at Bell Laboratories. But to the dismay of his parents, he gave up his day job to become a world famous rock and roll star.
In the 1970s, Heilner toured the East Coast with a variety of different bands playing both the club and college concert circuit and “opened up” for the such acts as The Byrds, The Raspberries (remember them?), and the then rising Bruce Springsteen. His closest brush with fame and fortune was when he played keyboards on an album produced by Jack Douglas – most well known for producing John Lennon, Aerosmith, etc, etc.
However, after turning 30, he gradually retired from the music business, tucked his electric piano in the corner of the attic, and become a respectable member of society. Until his recent retirement he worked for a software company and developed applications used by big business, government institutions and hospitals.
One evening in 2003, he was attending a show of a comedy improv group called The Lunatic Fringe. The regular piano player did not show up. Heilner was rudely yanked out of the audience as a substitute and thrust back in the limelight. With the encouragement of his wife and family, Heilner slowly came out of musical retirement and started playing R&R and R&B. Heilner now appears regularly with some of the top blues and rock groups in the North Jersey area.
In the early 2010s, with his children grown up, Heilner found that he actually had free time on his hands. He was drawn back to his classical roots, he rediscovered Mozart, Bach, and Chopin – and started studying piano at the Evening School at Juilliard. However, he was increasingly drawn to composition. Musical themes – entire pieces – would play through his mind as he walked down the street. Realizing the change it would make in his life, Heilner resisted it as long as he could, but he eventually gave in to internal peer pressure and in the fall of 2014 took up studying composition at the Juilliard Extension. Within a few years, Heilner was composing fully developed pieces for chamber ensembles. He joined several New York based composer societies and has had public performances of his compositions at various venues in New York City and most recently in Moscow.
In October 2020 Heilner completed the most ambitious project of his career. With the encouragement of his composition professors and fellow composers, Heilner reconnected with producer Jack Douglas and together they recorded an album of his compositions. The album – Modern Sounds in Classical Music – is a unique synthesis of classical music, rock & roll, R&B, jazz, and African tribal music – and points to a new direction music can take in the 21st century. The album has gotten excellent reviews and was featured in an article on Baristanet (a local news web site). The album is available for streaming on all the popular digital platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.
In September of 2021, with the encouragement of his daughter, Heilner released a novelty single Sticky Glue – which was originally written and recorded in 1983. Sticky Glue has gotten airplay on local college radio stations.
Throughout the COVID pandemic, Heilner has continued to compose – he has completed a large scale work for string orchestra as well as assorted pieces for orchestra, chamber ensembles and a new high energy piece titled Rumble for Two Pianos. With the opening up of concert halls, his pieces have been performed in New York, Moscow, Lviv, Milan, Vienna, and Los Angeles.
Heilner has also had significant successes in the international competition arena. His composition Excursion for Piano Trio #4 recently won first place in the prestigious Vienna Classical Music Academy Competition. In 2022 his Suite for Strings, Episode 2 won 3rd place in the ‘Città di Barletta’ International Composition Contest; and his composition Variations on Aria of Asker won an honorable mention in the International Composition Competition of the Vienna Classical Music Academy.
Meanwhile, Heilner has not abandoned his boogie-woogie roots. He continues to play rock & roll keyboards in his favorite local haunts in North Jersey. In January 2024 he represented the North Jersey Blues Society in the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee. In addition Heilner just released a new album of his unique interpretations of the blues piano tradition – Blues Phantasia – which is available on all popular streaming platforms.