Donald Erb

with Vincent Plush

Dallas, Texas

April 13, 1983

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Side a:                                                                                                                        pp. 1-25

Childhood in Youngstown, Ohio--musical great-aunt--Ives influence--Navy--playing

with jazz band--Kent State University--Kenneth Gaburo--influence of Bartok and

Hindemith--Cleveland Institute of Music--Marcel Dick--serial music--studying

with Boulanger--disappointment with Europe--teaching theory in Cleveland--

juvenilia--Correlations--musical life in Cleveland--Herbert Elwell--Symphony

of Overtures played by Seattle Symphony--local Cleveland composers.

Side b:                                                                                                                       pp. 25-49

Indiana University--Bernhard Heiden--composer-in-residence in Bakersfield,

California--Symphony of Overtures--acting, theater--Ionesco, Beckett--Bowling

Green, Ohio--Case Western--electronic music--Reticulation--Reconnaissance--

Kyrie--Klangfarbenfunk--And Then Toward the End--Stuart Dempster--The Purple-Roofed Ethical Suicide--Varèse--Dallas Symphony--The Seventh Trumpet--Rostrum

of Composers--coloristic development in music.

Side c:                                                                                                                                    pp. 49-70

Christmasmusic--Music for a Festive Occasion--glass harmonica--New England's

Prospect--use of narrator--concertos for percussion, cello (for Lynn Harrell),

trombone (for Stuart Dempster), piano, trumpet--use of non-Western music--turn

away from writing orchestral music--opera--difficulty of experimenting with

big institutions like orchestra or opera.

Side d:                                                                                                                       pp. 70-90

Need to travel from Midwest and keep in touch--New York vs. Los Angeles music

scene--New York as seat of music business--obligation to work for "republic of

music"--American influence on Europe--Ives in Europe--development of "world

music"--"me" culture--quality of students today--regional differences in music--

Texas--orchestra piece in progress (for St. Louis)--desire to write chamber

music--need to refine innovations already discovered--quintets--turn away from

using music as an arm of political action--need for sense of history, humanist

tradition.