Donald Erb

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (1" top seam split)

Donald Erb was one of the most inventive and technically daring American composers working in the space between electronic music, extended instrumental technique, and orchestral composition across the 1960s and 70s. He had studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and later with Nadia Boulanger, but the decisive influence on his mature style was the period he spent at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the mid-1960s, which gave him access to synthesizers and tape manipulation at the highest technical level of the era. Rather than abandoning acoustic instruments for electronics, he developed a practice of combining them - writing for conventional ensembles while incorporating electronic sound sources, extended playing techniques, and unconventional notation that pushed performers into new territory. The Concerto For Solo Percussionist is an especially significant work within this practice, treating the solo percussion ensemble as an orchestra unto itself, a vehicle for the expanded rhythmic and timbral vocabulary that was one of the era's most productive compositional territories. Issued on Turnabout.