Kenneth Gaburo (1926 – 1993) was an important spirit in modern American music, even though he wasn’t as well known as he deserved, outside of the art music community. Gaburo was a teacher, pioneer of electronic music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher and proponent of compositional linguistics. He was totally individual in the shaping of his own art, much the same as Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage or Harry Partch were, even though Kenneth Gaburo never reached the fame of the aforementioned.

Gaburo had an extensive formal musical education, but he went his own way, and as early as 1955 he began mixing concrete sounds on tape with live performers, which he kept up all his life. After studying linguistics he formulated the term Compositional Linguistics. 1965 he formed the New Music Choral Ensemble, and started performing avant-garde music for voice by composers like Pauline Oliveros, Mauricio Kagel and Luigi Nono. He combined different kinds of media, like electronics, films, slides, tape, computers etcetera, into a true multimedia circus.

This CD – “Winded” – has a subtitle; “Works for organ and tape by, of and for Kenneth Gaburo”.

The first piece – “Recitative/Tracing (On Guns and Cock Fighting)” by Warren Burt, was written by Burt as a memorial to Kenneth Gaburo at the request of organist and composer Gary Verkade. In 1987 Gaburo recorded a linguistics composition called “Pentagony (On Guns and Cock Fighting)”, and Warren Burt decided to use Gaburo’s voice from that piece, utilizing the “scatter” technique that Gaburo invented, where the residue of a physical process is used to produce all the aspects of the composition. Burt used the “Pentagony” recording as the scatter in this piece. It may be of interest to explain a little about the scatter process in this particular case, so I cite Warren Burt from the CD booklet:

“The recording of ‘Pentagony’ was fed into a Pitch-to-MIDI converter, and the pitches and rhythms of Kenneth’s reading were then read and turned into a sequence of pitches and rhythms the computer could understand. Five words or phrases from the tape were used. They were also sampled and analyzed with Fast Fourier Transform software. This gave me the harmonic spectra of those words as Kenneth spoke them. I used those spectra to determine the timbres of the electronic tones the tape used. The tape part has these electronic timbres playing the exact rhythms of Kenneth’s voice. The organ is slightly out of sync with the tape, playing quantized speech rhythms. After some initial chords (also derived from the harmonic analysis of his speaking voice), the organ and the tape double the single melodic line produced by the reading, a kind of recitative made by tracing, where the fused timbres of organ and tape are reminiscent, but not imitative of, the timbres of Kenneth’s voice.”’

And what about the end result; the listening experience? Well, it helps to get the background provided in the booklet, but the sounds produced are interesting enough in themselves, in their appearance as humanoid organ voices out of some cross-dimensional passage. Burt’s work reminds me somewhat of pieces by for example Paul Lansky (“Idle Chatter”), Paul de Marinis (“Music As a Second Language”-CD) and some works by Lars-Gunnar Bodin. There is a meditative and introspective atmosphere about this recording, and it is beautiful. The way the music was made adds extra spice to the experience.

The second piece – “Antiphony X (Winded)” – is Kenneth Gaburo’s own piece. You’re supposed to listen to it in a special setting, in a church. On one side you should have the soloist and the organ, and on the other side eight acoustic speakers. Gaburo wrote this in connection with the piece:

“Essentially, the metaphor, (Winded), is about my (our) recognition that I (we) am (are) a part of history, and come from it. I acknowledge it, but have no reverence for it, - nor am I sustained by it. Given the continual noise, - violence -, about us, it is clear to me that Aristotle, (et alia), can no longer help resolve our problems for us. History has to be deconstructed; - sup-planted by new voices in, from and for our time. Antiphony X puts forth one such voice”

This is a more violent, chaotic organ-and-tape piece, showering the listener with fast-moving events, in instances reminding you a little of certain events in pieces by György Ligeti, but then getting well ahead of that, into a quite breathtaking wall of jungle-like sounds, penetrating your brain. This is a long piece – more than 33 minutes – and is divided into seven parts by Gaburo:

1. Playful, Assertive, Searing.
2. Aggressive, Delicate, Hollow.
3. Human voice-like, Driving, Growling.
4. Arrogant, On Fire, Weakened.
5. Pain, Pushing, Piercing.
6. Wounded, Pseudo-joyful comeback, Weeping.
7. Breathy, Noise, Dread, Winded.

The last piece, by Philip Blackburn, is called “P.P.S. for Organ & 2-Channel Tape”. It uses the voice of Kenneth Gaburo as a basis, from a “recorded letter” that Gaburo once sent to his beloved Italian composition teacher Geoffredo Petrassi, when he had gotten ill and could no longer read. Gaburo speaks in his rusty mother tongue, Italian. In the spoken letter Gaburo recounts his life in the decades that he and Petrassi had no contact. In his piece, which is a post-post-scriptum to Gaburo’s recorded letter, Blackburn also uses some vocalizations from a singing lesson in the last week of Gaburo’s life.

Associations here could go to some of the spoken and mumbled pieces by John Cage. It also reminds me of some of the more beautifully startling pieces by Alvin Curran. The room reverberations are similar to the sounds on Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In a Room”, though the spoken words do not deteriorate in the manner they do in Lucier's piece, but remain at the same level of reverberation.

There are some technical notes to this piece too, but I won’t go into that. I'll just state that this is an extremely interesting and listenable piece, generating a sense of hypnotic peace through Gaburo’s voice in Italian and the organ played by Gary Verkade.