Solo repertoire
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Erb Donald
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Music for Mother Bear for solo alto flute
Music for Mother Bear for solo alto flute
Donald Erb: Music for Mother Bear for solo alto flute was written in 1970 as an unmeasured melody line with chromatic runs and integrated sound effects.
It was premiered during the early 1970s as part of Erb's tenure at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he was a leading figure in the American avant-garde scene.
The work is famous for its extended techniques, including flutter-tonguing, key clicks, and vocalizations while playing.
In 1970, Donald Erb was at the height of his "experimentalist" phase. He was heavily involved in integrating electronic sounds with acoustic instruments, a hallmark of his style seen in works like In No Strange Land (1968). Erb was a primary faculty member and composer-in-residence at CIM, where he influenced a generation of brass and woodwind players to adopt modern notation and performance practices.
His music from this year often reflected a blend of jazz-influenced spontaneity and rigorous modernism. Music for Mother Bear captures this by allowing the performer a sense of improvisatory freedom within a carefully structured set of "sound events."
Erb Donald
Donald Erb (1927-2008) was a cornerstone of the American avant-garde, renowned for his "unabashedly eclectic" style and early advocacy for electronic integration in orchestral music.
Born in Youngstown, Ohio, Erb’s musical foundation was unconventional for a classical composer. He spent his youth as a professional jazz trumpet player, a background that profoundly influenced the rhythmic spontaneity and "instrumental theater" of his later works.
Following high school, he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, playing in a Navy band. He earned his Bachelor's from Kent State University (1950), followed by a Master's from the Cleveland Institute of Music (1953), and a Doctorate from Indiana University (1964). His primary mentors included Bernhard Heiden, Marcel Dick, and Nadia Boulanger.
Erb spent the majority of his career at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), where he served as Composer-in-Residence and department head.
His music is characterized by the use of extended techniques (such as the vocalizations in "Music for Mother Bear"), aleatoric (chance) elements, and the juxtaposition of acoustic instruments with synthesizers. Erb was noted for his ability to write music that was technically "modern" yet visceral and communicative, he was one of the first major composers to treat non-traditional sounds (like key clicks or whistling) as essential melodic material rather than mere gimmicks.