Biography
Electronic music trailblazer Donald Erb is chiefly recalled for Reconnaissance, the 1965 chamber work that ranked among the earliest pieces scored for live synthesizer alongside acoustic instruments. Born January 17, 1927, in Youngstown, Ohio, he performed trumpet with his high-school dance ensemble before enlisting in the U.S. Navy for World War II service. Upon discharge he balanced professional jazz trumpet gigs with coursework at Kent State University and later pursued composition studies with Marcel Dick at the Cleveland Institute of Music, supplementing his training with a short period under Nadia Boulanger in Paris. In 1952 he joined the Cleveland Institute of Music faculty, where he would instruct composition for more than forty years while also holding posts at Southern Methodist University, Indiana University, and Melbourne University. His formative output encompassed the 1958 chamber piece Dialogue for Violin and Piano, the 1959 solo-piano Correlations, and the 1962 orchestral Bakersfield Pieces, yet his focus gradually shifted toward electronics, culminating in the 1965 completion of Reconnaissance. The score received its premiere two years later at New York City’s Music in Our Time series, with Robert Moog handling the synthesizer. Erb continued to alternate between orchestral and electronic domains, gaining notice for subverting traditional instrumental roles by directing players into atypical registers or techniques such as mallet strikes on piano strings or mouthpiece removal from trumpets. Among his catalog the 1969 orchestral score The Seventh Trumpet proved most enduring, accumulating more than two hundred performances by over fifty symphonies throughout the United States and internationally; it also served as the U.S. entry for UNESCO in 1970. A cardiac arrest in 1996 limited his composing and lecturing, though he retained the title of Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music until 2000, when retirement prompted both a dedicatory concert and the establishment of a scholarship bearing his name. Erb passed away at age 81 on August 12, 2008, at his Cleveland Heights residence.
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