The nation is mourning one of its premier avant-garde composers, Gorn Erb, who passed away November 1st after complications from a recent stroke. He was 103. Although largely forgotten for decades, new research has shown that Erb’s musical efforts pre-date nearly every important sonic experiment of the 20th century.
Born in Varaklani, Latvia, Erb immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1911, where they settled in the Rockaway section of Brooklyn. According to his unfinished memoirs, the young Erb tired of school almost immediately, eventually stealing away one winter night aboard a freight train. The next few years were spent as a transient, until 1917, when he mysteriously reappears in a Los Angeles photo as an assistant to Jesse Lasky, future boss of Paramount Studios (“I remember nothing from that period,” Erb said.)
His memory notwithstanding, records show that Erb had somehow learned to read and write music exceptionally well, having staged, arranged, and conducted performances of avant-garde works by Schoenberg and Webern in the Los Angeles area as early as 1923. However, in 1925, in a half-page manifesto published in the Hollywood Citizen-News, Erb declared chamber music “dopey” and that “The future of American music lies in the sound of metals….clashing metals.”
Erb’s life changed in 1927 with the premiere of his first major work, Typhus, an hour long composition in which an actual bulldozer plows through the orchestra pit during the second movement. It’s one and only performance caused a small riot. Ira Gershwin, visiting from New York, suffered a slipped disc during the melee, apparently in an attempt to free his companion, Mary Pickford, from under a sheet of dislodged plywood.
Despite the controversy, Erb was now in demand. He traveled to Paris the following year to present his Three Movements for Brass Band and Wire Recorder. Although no accounts of the performance exist, it can be considered the very first electronic music composition, predating by decades similar works by such luminaries as Halim El-Dabh and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Only the concurrent experiments by inventor Léon Theremin in New York City can remotely compare, although Erb himself thought little of his rival, calling him a “tin-eared, small-minded peasant” in a letter to the Times.
Meanwhile, Erb spent the early 1930s in Brazil on a grant, creating a series of microtonally tuned instruments out of coastal detritus. Microtonal compositions performed on homemade folk instruments were thought to have been the brainchild of American “outsider” composer Harry Partch. However, new evidence suggests that Partch may in fact have been influenced by a pictorial account of the Brazilian premiere of Erb’s mammoth work, Slums of the Obsessed, a three-day “pageant” in one lengthy movement which utilized the aforementioned instruments, a “chorus of boat horns,” numerous sopranos whom Erb had shipped to Rio de Janeiro, and, most significantly, a dozen radios. Although reports confirm that the piece was recorded, no copies have surfaced. “Radio is not the future. Radio is the past! Radio is not information. Radio is music! Man, I’m thirsty.” – Gorn Erb, 1932.
The years 1933-1951 were the most prolific of Erb’s career. Subsiding on the generosity of patrons from five continents, Erb produced hundreds of compositions, and oversaw at least eighty performances of his works – most of which prominently featured the shortwave radio. Erb found his instrument in the shortwave, manning several of them from behind a center-stage console during his elaborate stage shows, which took weeks of rehearsal and left musicians exhausted. Most famous of these pieces was Threnody for the Burning Supermarket. Aaron Copland, after witnessing Erb conduct the piece in Mexico City, said, “At one point a singer…it was a tenor, I think…actually tackled Mr. Erb from behind his console. Mr. Erb followed with a roundhouse kick – it was very powerful, I don’t mind telling you. Right to the tenor’s neck. It laid him out cold, and they continued to play while he lay there moaning and bleeding…Despite the interruption, I am quite convinced that shortwave radio is here to stay in important, modern music. It is vital!”
Although he embraced the sounds of technology, Erb himself eschewed the phonograph, preferring instead the essential experience of live music. Few of Erb’s works from this period were captured on record, and those that were released were pressed on 78rpm in extremely limited, hand-painted editions on his own private label, Oscillation Records. As if to voice his negative opinions on mass-marketed music, Erb’s works began to take on an element of theatricality during the 1950s, which distanced himself somewhat from his followers in the press. Causing another storm of debate was the historic New York premiere of Sonata for Woodwinds and Erratically Flying Hatchets. Erb liked to mention that John Cage, in the audience that evening, was so moved by the piece he had to run from the theater. Cage’s diaries do not mention the concert, although an entry for that week does mention a visit to a Greenwich Village hospital for cuts and bruises.
Perhaps sensing the mammoth popularity of youth-oriented rock music that was to blossom, Erb went into semi-retirement in 1960, settling into a cottage in Brattleboro, Vermont. Although he occasionally acted as an anonymous producer (Ligeti’s Atmospheres; The Leaves – Hey Joe), Erb began composing at home using only sound samples from his massive collection of recordings. Editing on magnetic tape, Erb became the father of The Sample, sometimes creating ten minute pieces culled from drum fills on big band 78s, which he would play to visitors. Poet Frank O’Hara remembered one such piece, saying “It was a drone, an undulating groan that went on for hours – later, he told us that it was one note from a Gene Pitney song slowed down fifty times. What a card!” Unfortunately, that piece and hundreds of other tapes were destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1985.
Erb was not a fan of rock music per se, despite his experiments. In 1976, for instance, he caused a ruckus backstage during an Emerson, Lake and Palmer concert in San Antonio for trying to electrocute Keith Emerson after the keyboardist purposefully destroyed a Korg Lambda ES-50.
Gradually, his composing stopped, and Erb seemed to prefer the simple pleasures of his rustic lifestyle. He would lecture occasionally at nearby Bennington College, tend his garden, and write letters. In 1990, music historian and author Nicholas Sloniminsky coaxed Erb out of retirement for a four-day festival of his work in Bremen. Erb was in rare form, taking time to visit Latvia and his home town of Varaklani where he was greeted with a parade. The festival concluded with Erb’s last commissioned work, One Final Opera For You People, conducted by guest conductor John Adams.
Gorn Erb spent the rest of his years in seclusion, although neighbors maintain he was content. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes have been sent to Ron Popeil.
