Donald Erb: Widely performed avant-garde composer who added synthesisers and tapes to traditional elements

"A true American original" was how the conductor Leonard Slatkin described the composer Donald Erb, whose music he championed over four decades. Erb was among the most widely performed of all modern American composers.

Robert March, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, described him as "oneof the most vigorous, vital and constructive forces in American music today. He knows how to write a tough piece, the sort of music you might expect born in a town best known for steel mills. He is not afraid of giving form and substance to his work by using the conventions of tonality, but his writing is harmonically very free and imaginative".

One of the reasons for the effectiveness of Erb's music was the catholicity of his taste: everything was grist to his mill. In The 7th Trumpet, for example, premiered in 1969 (since when it has clocked up hundreds of performances), Erb included parts for harmonicas and synthesisers, as well as glasses and jugs filled with water; in other works he pulled in wind-chimes, chopsticks and whistles, and left room for improvisatory elements, reflecting his background in jazz, and for audience participation.

The energy that informed his music could erupt in explosive dissonance, not least when he was expressing his opposition to the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, as in the choral Fallout (1964) and The Purple Roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor for wind instruments and tape (1972). He was, one reviewer felt, "almost obscenely skillful at forcing the listener to sit up and take notice".

Indeed, Erb was one of the first composers to experiment with mixed media: in the premiere of Reconnaissance in 1967, a violinist and double-bassist joined the electronic pioneer Robert Moog on the synthesiser; Fission of 1968 is written for soprano saxophone, piano, tape, dancers and lighting; two years later Souvenir enhanced an instrumental ensemble with electronic music on tape, and lighting. But Erb wasn't simply an inquisitive magpie of a composer: he pulled these diverse ingredients into a coherent individual style, as Slatkin attested: "Whether one thought of him as a great composer or not, the fact is that he had his own, identifiable language. Within one minute of virtually any piece he wrote, you could always tell it was by Don. He stayed true to the musical values he espoused all his life."

Those values included a basic tonal framework for his compositions – even if his tonics could fluctuate freely – and a focus on the basic building blocks of music within it, developing motifs, rhythmic patterns, timbre and gestures to give his music a shapeliness and sense of purpose that other avant-garde composers often neglected.

Craftsmanship was important, Erb argued, but it was not enough: "A craftsman can create entertainment, but you need more than that to create art. You need an emotional, inspirational quality, because, in and of itself, craft means nothing. There has to be something inside you pushing out or all a person will ever write is a craftsman-like piece. And that's not quite good enough."

Erb was very much a Midwestern composer. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, then an industrial hub halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, he played trumpet in a jazz band while still at high school; after a wartime stint in the US Navy (on USS Baltimore) he earned his living as a jazz trumpeter for a while.

Academic credentials followed: after a bachelor's degree at Kent State University in 1950, a course in composition with Marcel Dick at the Cleveland Institute of Music led to the degree of Master of Music in 1953. He then took the path polished by many earlier American composers – to Paris, to study with Nadia Boulanger. Eleven years later, studies with Bernhard Heiden at Indiana University, Bloomington, brought a doctorate.

By then Erb was already an esteemed teacher. He joined the staff of the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1952, advancing to a distinguished professorship in composition in 1987 before retiring as professor emeritus in 1996. In parallel he held the position of composer-in-residence with a number of groups, not least the Dallas and St Louis Symphony Orchestras. During those years he took time out from Cleveland to teach at a number of other institutions, among them Southern Methodist, Indiana, Bowling Green State and Melbourne universities. If one adds appearances as guest lecturer and conductor, Erb taught at around 150 academic establishments.

"As a teacher," Slatkin reflected, "he was exemplary, with a solid foundation in the building blocks of composition." As a result the composition departments of American universities are well populated with Erb's own students. His easy-going manner broke down barriers and encouraged affection, as Michael Leese, then a student composer, discovered when one of his own compositions was programmed with one of Erb's.

"I was completely intimidated by the pairing of these works (mine first, his second) and I agitatedly told him such before the concert started," he said. "He just laughed and said, 'It'll be OK. Trust me, kid'. The concert came and went, without a hitch, and there was a nice reception for my song cycle. Afterwards, Don came up to me, put his arm around my back to my shoulder (he was a big guy), squeezed, and said, 'See, I told you it'd be OK!'"

Being a former professional trumpeter, Erb had a natural fondness for brass instruments, the results running from a generous quantity of chamber works to the Concerto for Brass and Orchestra premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1986. Nine other concertos – including one for cello, first performed by Lynn Harrell in 1976, and for clarinet, which Richard Stolzman unveiled in 1984 – push the virtuosity of their soloists beyond established boundaries.

In Erb's last productive period, before a heart attack in 1996 drastically curtailed his composing, more traditional elements – such as chorales and hymn tunes – began to make their way into his music. One of his last major orchestral works, the explicitly autobiographical Evensong (a 75th anniversary commission from the Cleveland Orchestra in 1993), contains musical portraits of some of his friends, as Elgar's Enigma Variations does. And like the Elgar it ends with a self-portrait: the final movement, "Old Badman", Erb's programme note explained, "is me. In the last 40 years, it seems that I have joined the mainstream of music, whatever that means. I still, however, like to think of myself as at least a little bit irreverent."

Martin Anderson

Donald Erb, composer and teacher: born Youngstown, Ohio 17 January 1927; married 1950 Lucille Hyman (one son, three daughters); died Cleveland Heights, Ohio 12 August 2008.