Winded: Works for Organ and Tape By, Of and For Kenneth Gaburo (review)

Winded presents the music of Kenneth Gaburo, Warren Burt and Philip Blackburn, as performed by organist Gary Verkade. The three works, all for organ and tape, were written at the request of Verkade, the Kenneth Gaburo piece as a commission and the other two in memory of the late Gaburo. While the Gaburo piece draws heavily on the organ for sound material, it is not surprising, given Gaburo's life-long involvement with the human voice, to find that the other two pieces utilize the voice of Gaburo himself as material for their composition.

Warren Burt's "Recitative/Tracing (On Guns and Cock Fighting)" is a highly personal piece with a very limited form of expression. In writing a memorial to his teacher and friend Gaburo, Burt used as source material a recording of "Pentagony," a spoken piece by Gaburo recorded in 1987. Through pitch-tracking and FFT analysis, he extracted rhythmic and pitch material from Gaburo's speaking voice. This potentially fruitful compositional technique has been employed for many years by composers working in computer music and text-sound composition. Unfortunately, in Burt's piece the resultant material creates a one-dimensional listening experience. The tape material and live organist follow the rhythm extracted from the reading in slightly asynchronous melodic versions, creating an almost 17-minute "recitative through tracing," undoubtedly very meaningful to the composer, but of much less significance to a listener.

Gaburo's "Antiphony × (Winded)" is the tour de force of this recording. At almost 34 minutes, it gets out of the organ "everything that was left after many centuries of organ composition and context-loading. Every last wheeze was to be coaxed, and if incapable of being coaxed, forced out of it. It was to be exploited of every conceivable possibility remaining" (Verkade, in the liner notes). As Gaburo says, "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. History has to be reconstructed . . . supplanted by new voices in, from, and for our time."

The composition was commissioned in 1985, but it was not until 1990 that the tape portion was completed. The work consists of live, imitation and manipulated acoustic and digital organ sounds but this description does nothing to suggest its impact. It is perhaps more a battle than a musical composition. The organist sits opposite a bank of eight loudspeakers, with the audience caught between himself and the loudspeakers, and for the duration of the piece performs music that confronts and counters the tape sounds, leading to a state of total exhaustion of both instrument and player—the pipe organ's embodiment of cultural history is vanquished.

After "Winded," Blackburn's "P.P.S." is a subtle and beautiful moment of peace and recollection. Using a recording of Gaburo reading a letter in Italian to his teacher Goffredo Petrassi, Blackburn creates a meditation on Gaburo that is both haunting and moving. In this work we finally hear the voice of Gaburo. The organist sustains soft, shimmering clusters of sound drawn from the resonant frequencies of Gaburo's voice. The performer is removed from the instrument, playing as a disembodied presence from a writing desk some distance from the keyboard. The organist alters sounds by pulling strings that have been attached to keys and stops on the instrument. Even without the theatrical element, this remains a simple and beautiful piece.

One small comment about the format of this CD: in approaching new works, a listener often finds liner notes to be of immeasurable value in providing insights into the composer and performer's thinking. The visual quality of the presentation can also give insights into what a listener might expect from the music within. In the case of this CD, the liner notes (well-written and informational) and the visual graphics (complex and fascinating) are...