Five Works for Voices, Instruments, and Electronics

Kenneth Gaburo - Five Works for Voices, Instruments, and Electronics

Performers:

Antiphony IV (Poised) (1967)

for voice, piccolo, bass trombone, double-bass and electronics

Members of the University of Illinois Contemporary Chamber Players:

Thomas Howell - piccolo

James Fulkerson - bass trombone

Thomas Frederickson - double-bass

Barbara Dalheim - voice (on tape left channel)

Kenneth Gaburo - conductor

String Quartet in One Movement (1956)

Walden String Quartet

Mouth-Piece: Sextet for Solo Trumpet (1970)

Jack Logan - trumpet

Antiphony III (Pearl-white moments) (1962)

for sixteen voices and electronics

New Music Choral Ensemble: Barbara Dalheim, Shirley Panish, Douglas Pummill, Lawrence Weller, Janet Pummill, Miriam Barndt, Brian Winter, Philip Larson, Rosalind Powell, Marcia Swengel, William Brooks, David Barron, Jean Geil, Bonnie Barnett, Albert Hughes, Richard Hanson

Kenneth Gaburo - conductor

The Flow of (u) (1974)

for three voices

Elinor Barron, Philip Larson, Linda Vickerman

Excerpts from liner notes:

Kenneth Gaburo was born in 1926 in Somerville, New Jersey; saw service in the U.S. Army from 1943-45; attended the Eastman School of Music, the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, Rome, and the University of Illinois.

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In 1968 he moved to the music department at the University of California, San Diego, where his colleagues included Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, John Silber, Keith Humble, and Roger Reynolds. He was also acquainted with Harry Partch, who was living in San Diego at the time, but was not associated, except briefly, with UCSD.

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Although he was intensely collaboratory in his work methods, Gaburo's sense of individuality always marked him out, even in the hothouse environments of Illinois and UCSD in these periods.

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Gradually, over the years of the 1960s and 1970s Gaburo experienced a greater and greater alienation from the academic environment, until in 1975 he left UCSD, surviving as a freelance composer, teacher, and theater director (he directed the 1980 production of Harry Partch's The Bewitched for the Berlin Festival). During this period, he also left urban living, and moved to Ramona, California, where he lived in its semi-desert until 1983, when he joined the music faculty at the University of Iowa. At Iowa, he founded the Seminar for Cognitive Studies, which was a freewheeling, intense, cross-media seminar open to creative people in many disciplines.

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Kenneth Gaburo died in 1993, in Iowa City, Iowa.

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He composed works for instruments, voices, electronics, multi-media, theater, and a variety of other resources. Foremost among his many interests was a concern with the voice and with language - how we shape language and how we are shaped by it - and with making works that existed somewhere between the boundaries of music and language. Of the works on this CD, three are intensely concerned with what Gaburo termed "Compositional Linguistics" (Antiphony III, Antiphony IV, and Mouth-Piece), while concerns with balance and perceptual edges seem to be his foremost concern in the other two [String Quartet in One Movement and The Flow of (u)].

Tracklisting:

1. Antiphony IV (Poised) {9:41}

2. String Quartet in One Movement {9:04}

3. Mouth-Piece: Sextet for Solo Trumpet {5:51}

4. Antiphony III (Pearl-white moments) {16:31}

5. The Flow of (u) {23:01}

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Electronic Pioneers

various artists compilation - Electronic Pioneers

Originally posted on July 22, 2006

From the back cover:

The music on this record was produced at the original Columbia University Tape Music Studio and its successor, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and at the University of Illinois Electronic Music Studio. It includes some of the earliest electronic music released on commercial records, and is reissued by CRI after its deletion on the Son Nova and Heliodor labels. The tapes used in this reissue are all freshly mixed from the original materials.

Three fundamental types of electronic music are represented: (1) tape music composed from materials created from 'natural' (concrete) sounds such as gongs, voices, and instruments; (2) tape music composed from sounds which were generated by electronic instruments such as audio oscillators and manipulated by diverse processing devices; (3) tape music composed from mixtures of concrete and electronic sound sources.

In all of the compositions, the composers employed the customary techniques of manipulating basic source-sounds recorded on magnetic tape. For example, complex sounds were constructed by splicing together short pieces of tape cut from recordings of various basic sounds. the ear perceives a total impression of complexity without being able to distinguish each of the simple components. This mosaic-like technique, which demands considerable patience on the part of the composer, was, in the early days of tape music sometimes regarded as sufficient to the completion of a tape composition.

In these works, however, the composers found it compositionally desirable to further process basic sound sources by way of semi-automatic devices. For example, tape recorders and associated equipment were used to develop continuous patterns of sound, usually characterized by certain rhythmic rigidity, but nevertheless useful. Between, the extremes of handicraft and machine work, the composers used a variety of other specialized techniques, made possible by the flexibility of tape and the versatility of electronic equipment. For example, varying speed was used to produce different pitches and timbres; filtering was used to suppress some of the timbral characteristics of a given sound; reverberation to let the echo add color, liveliness, and a sense of spaciousness.

Tracklisting:

1. Mario Davidovsky - Electronic Study No. 2 {6:10}

2. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Linear Contrasts {3:35}

3. Bulent Arel - Electronic Music No. 1 {8:23}

4. Kenneth Gaburo - Lemon Drops {2:44}

5. Kenneth Gaburo - For Harry {4:39}

6. Vladimir Ussachevsky - Metamorphosis {5:04}

7. Bulent Arel - Music For a Sacred Service: Prelude and Postlude {6:32}

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