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CD
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POGUS 21047
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"The work and thought of the American composer Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) exhibited many striking changes during his lifetime. In fact, while the world of commercial endeavor still insists that artists develop a recognizable personal 'style,' Gaburo's life-work can be seen as one of continual change and exploration, rather than one of codification and promotion. Some of these changes are beautifully illustrated by the two works on this CD, 'Maledetto,' for seven speaking voices, from 1967-1968, and Antiphony VIII (Revolution), for percussionist and electronic tape, from 1982-1983. Both are intricate and powerful works, both take their inspiration from 'non-musical' materials, and both require virtuosity of a most uncommon order. However, beyond that, the two works could not be more different. 'Maledetto' is a wild choral piece, a great complex cry, a work that, while reveling in a surface texture of innuendo, word play, and pseudo- and real- history, spoken/shouted/sung by 7 amazing speakers, contains within itself a deep and profound celebration of the body, the physical, the sexual. It is one of the earliest of Gaburo's works where his concern for holistic thinking and art-making comes to the fore. Speaking voices also figure in 'Antiphony VIII,' but here they are the voices of people giving their heartfelt reactions to the notion that nuclear war has made their lives expendable. This work was created at least 15 years after 'Maledetto,' and the boisterous energy of the Sexual Revolution, one of the earliest counter-cultural movements of the mid-1960s, has given place to the grim organizational determination of the various anti-nuclear movements of the 1980s."
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CD
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NW 80585CD
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"Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) 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)]. In Antiphony IV (1967), for three instruments and two-channel tape, the two channels are literally separate-vocal sounds (each phoneme, in order, of the source poem) on the left channel, and electronic sounds on the right channel, with the instruments in the middle. In Mouth-Piece (1970) the trumpeter attempts to present six contrapuntal lines simultaneously and to maintain a sense of coherent timbral identity with each. For Antiphony III (1962), for sixteen voices and electronics, a poem by Virginia Hommel again provides the basis. Here, however, it is articulated contrapuntally, one word at a time, by both the chorus and the tape. The Flow of (u) (1974) consists of one note sung by three singers for twenty-three minutes."
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