Don Robertson

Who is Don Robertson?

Don Robertson is an American composer.

Don Robertson was born in 1942 in Denver, Colorado, and began studying music with conductor and pianist Antonia Brico at age 3. He attended Colorado University, the Juilliard School of Music, and the Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, and has studied composition privately with composer Morton Feldman, counterpoint with Leonard Stein, tabla with Swapan Chaudhuri and Shankar Ghosh, and ragas with David Trasoff.

As one of the first wave of U.S. students of North Indian classical music, he wrote the first instruction book for tabla, published by Peer-Southern International in 1968. At that time he also discovered the base chord for negative music that he named the duochord; based on this discovery, Robertson recorded his first album on Limelight Records the following year. Called Dawn, it has been called the first album of what would later become the New Age music genre. The album, produced by Abe "Voco" Kesh, also incorporated music based on the duochord along with some of the first heavy metal music recorded. Dawn featured positive music on side one of the album, and negative music on side two. A collage, created by Robertson for the back cover, intended to represent the polarization of dark and light in the U.S.