Gaburo - Notes On....

GABURO-NOTES

ON ...

te?7f PAULPACCIONE

WHY DO YOU WANT TO STUDY WITH ME?

NE DID NOT STUDY with Gaburo: (a) in order to make "connec-

tions," (b) to meet curriculum requirements, (c) because there was no room in another teacher's load, (d) to "sample" a different approach to composing, (e) to write award-winning works, (f) because it was fashionable, (g) because he won the Pulitzer, (h) because he just happened to be around....

One did study with Gaburo: (a) in order to be free from all of the above....

The subject was composition: its processes, meanings, histories, possibilities, failings, but never its limits. Composition was both selfexpression and critique: the exploration of the self through sound. With

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Gaburo-Notes

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Gaburo, the conventional evaluations were suspended, and the established classifications of expression (music, painting, linguistics, poetry, theatre) were no longer "in play." Composition was influence, metaphor, notation, idea, method, rehearsal, performance, reception. One did not only bring one's work to the lesson but oneself: one's history, dreams, fears, desires, body. Everything was a part of the work.

WHAT Is COMPOSITION?

Twenty-one years old, just arrived in San Diego, first time away from home and New York City, everything new and strange, I met Gaburo at his home in La Jolla. Large ranch-style house, on top of a hill, overlooking La Jolla. We sat in lawn chairs in his yard, facing each other. Large garden, well cared-for, slate paths, Japanese rock garden, handmade wooden deck and outdoor brick grill-a New Jersey Italian's back yard.

Gaburo talked about how everything was composition. Everything you did, experienced, observed. Everything he said was punctuated by a hand gesture (Roman Italian), projecting toward you. It was assumed that every statement would require a response, argument, question. Gaburo took the modernist's adversarialstance. Nobody has thought more about what composing is.

Reading list: Towards a Poor Theatre, Jerzy Grotowski; The Empty Space, Peter Brook; The Savage Mind, Claude Levi-Strauss; Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,Jacques Maritain.

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Perspectivesof New Music

LESSONS Gaburo's office at UCSD's Music Department: bare cement-block walls, a waste basket, one empty file cabinet, two chairs, and one grey metal desk. Filled with crushed cigarette butts, the drawers of the desk served as ash trays. One semester of lessons here. Gaburo leaves universitystarts Lingua Press-lessons move to his home. Home studio: A-frame barn, away from the rest of the house, beamed ceiling, sliding glass doors, tape recorders, drawing boards, drafting table, film projector, microphones, books, scores, tapes (labelled in his thick black ink handwriting), and sketches. Much work done here.

There was no time limit on lessons-anywhere from two to four hours.

We knew it was time to end the lesson when the room was so full of smoke we couldn't see each other. Lessons would begin in the garden (same lawn chairs), discussing week's goings-on, work done, work left to do-questions. Lessons move to the studio, getting down to specifics.

Compositional decisions were moral ones. Always questions, sometimes no answers. What was important was the continual questioningwhy this and not that, what other alternatives were there to be considered-"We do not proceed from definition; we work toward definition."

NOTES-

Compositional Thoughts Could Be: simple complex simple complex

Composition Could Be: simple complex complex simple

You begin with an orderly system (a known) and fulfill it (a known).

You begin with an unknown (discover order within) and fulfill it (a known).

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Gaburo-Notes

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SMOKING

Those were the days when everyone smoked: me, Ginny, Molly, Ken, everyone. But Gaburo was different: he meant business. Nicotine stains on fingertips and beard. He'd hold the cigarette between his thumb and index finger and take a heavy drag, followed by an equally emphatic release of the smoke into the air-very theatrical. Examining my scores, peering over the tops of his glasses, quickly inhaling and exhaling (what did he see there that I didn't?) he'd bounce up and down in his chair without a word. Finally,he'd turn to me-"So....."

"MAKE IT NEW"

Familiarity-so necessary on one level-can also null composition on another.... Nuance needs to be the antagonist of familiarity.

Privacy Two... My, My, My, What a WonderfulFall...

Lingua Press, 1974 (acquired by Frog Peak Music, Lebanon, N.H., 1995) Gaburo's great gift as a teacher was that, no matter what you showed him or what he heard, he always listened and reacted as if he had just seen or heard it for the first time. And certainly he had seen or maybe heard it all before.

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Perspectivesof New Music

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LESSONS (LINE STUDIES)

Assignment: 1. Generate a source set (small) 2. Generate a source idea 3. Operate on source idea

Projections Extraction

3a. A new source idea 4. Displace the new source idea 4a. Consider the displacement as a new source idea 4b. Extract / 4c.Displace 5a. New source 5b. Extract / 5c.Displace With your last transformation (= source idea), set an array of source sets-construct a musical phrase based on the transformation/set array.

AFTER HOURS

Sometimes lessons ran late into the evening. I remember once waiting quite a while outside in Gaburo's driveway for an after-lesson lift. No street lights, pitch-dark, silent. A few flickering lights down the street in other houses.

"Hey kid-your girlfriend called-she'll be late. You wanta wait inside?" I turned around and Gaburo was standing there, just out of the shower, long wet hair tied back, silk bath robe, slippers-the monster comes out from his shell!

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Gaburo-Notes

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LESSONS(EXTRACTION)

1. To what extent are you influenced by the arrangement of material on the page?

2. To what extent are you influenced by the invariance of compositional material (of opening chord)?

3. Augenmusik

NOTES ...

[scorrevole] ... scale of activity (energy) in context of piece ... instrumental activity (movement) ... maximum energizing ... take things out (the well) instead of more information . . . superabundant source composition ... presence of the elements that are connected in space ... what is there is also what is not there . . . tap the constructed energy ... space as substitute for sound (another way of residing in piece) ... both happening and not happening, but always for you!

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Perspectivesof New Music

FALLING

"One cannot flirt with falling. One either is, or is not. As it turns out, it is not like flying at all; its like falling."

6 March 1975: opening of Mandeville Recital Hall, UCSD. There were no seats left for the first performance of ". . . My, My, My, What a Wonderful Fall .. ." In the center of the hall, lit only by a few spotlights, was a large gymnastics mat. On the mat were five dancers in plain leotards, their shadows cast on the walls, endlessly falling and rising and falling. Gaburo's voice could be heard, reading in a near-monotone, a text, the words of which also seemed to fall over themselves.

My. fall downs notfixed.

And I was thinking: For But my, my'my what which?

-One, but now, who?from, then?

Foolishwhich, what, For come?

-my what, For my -myself who waste made

full-wide-ditching now, up, CADERE Like Pollock, whose canvases stretched on the floor like a mat, Gaburo saw composition as an arena, where the battles with the self (and others?) were often fought and sometimes lost.

Despite my own initial confusion over the meaning of the piece, I never forgot its image. Someone once said that Gaburo's falling piece was like going to Mass-you kept waiting for it to be over. True enough, and on several levels: like the Mass, it too was about falling and rising. And for Gaburo, the fall itself was a reason for celebration.

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Gaburo-Notes

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RESURGERE"

Excerpts quoted from ... My, My, My, What a WonderfulFall . . , Lingua Press, 1974 (acquired by Frog Peak Music, Lebanon, N.H., 1995)

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LESSONS(ORCHESTRATION)

Paul: these versions are better, but not careful enough.

A. Include all details omitted from the piano score.

B. Correct all mistakes.

C. Circle those technical (instrumental) elements you are unsure of.

D. Consider the linearity of each part in your scoring. Do they make linear (melodic) orchestral sense? Are they interesting enough?

E. Consider the adjacency of each part in your scoring. Do adjacencies make linear (melodic) orchestral sense? Are they interesting enough?

F. Save all your versions of this scoring. We will refer to them later (e.g., number or date them).

G.Do not make a new version this week. Study these two versions against the piano score.

GESTURE-NOTATION-PITCH

For Gaburo, the beauty was in the gesture/the line. Its shape, sonority, intensity, direction, nuance. Notation was drawing-a tracing of its existence (a sign). Pitch was the consequence of gesture, a mapping out of the remains. Gaburo's language was a gestural one, beginning with Line Studies and ending with Antiphony IX. The room was made as dark as possible. I sat at the table, pricking the paper with my penpoint. My eyes were closed. I had little sense of direction, time, page space, distribution, or much else except for sound, motion, pen contact, and my aching back.

LA: Sound-as-Spirit,Lingua Press, Iowa City, 1987 (acquired by Frog Peak Music, Lebanon, N.H., 1995)

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IT WASHIS SENSIBILITY Lingua Press began in Ken's garage. We went to the lumber yard for wood. Backed out the old Mustang. Built shelves and tables along the walls (surprised at how good with a hammer and nail he was). Collection One: Gaburo's work. Collection Two: various composers whose work Kenneth felt close to. One collective composition. No two composers alike. Gaburo's breadth of appreciation for other types of expression was profound. Lingua. An effort to create a culture, an environment. Nothing was taken for granted: choice of paper, choice of ink, packaging, layout. I did the woodcut inking in the corner of the garage. Gaburo's attention to detail was tireless. Just out of school, no job, I helped with the Press and did Ken's gardening in exchange for lessons.

Those were different times. Looking through the catalog now: how many are still composing? Many are not: death, neglect, just quit, better things to do, burn out. Some still working (obscurity). Where does all this music go now? Here's the real history of American music.

GOING EAST

Molly and I were leaving California. Our last night in San Diego, Ken and Ginny threw us a farewell party. Laughter, smoke, good talk, good food. Three interrelated generations of composers: Kenneth, Harley, myself (Bloom's anxiety of influence, cooking out). Too many goodbyes, some silent. One conversation continued many years later at Ken's funeral.

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OTHER COMPOSERS

About another composer's work he once said "It's my strong rejection of that type of compositional stance that compels me to continue to do what I'm doing. I'm glad somebody else is writing that stuff and not me.

I respect that."

PENETRATION

Molly suggests that publishing for Kenneth was gestation-a bringing forth-not just about him. So much of the context in which he worked as a composer was phallocentric (Maledetto, Dante's Joynte, Inside, et cetera). The balance was a saving grace.

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LINGUISTICS] [COMPOSITIONAL (Program note, New Music Festival 1992, Western Illinois U.) For me, the act of composition, (more precisely, "composing language by language"), has always involved endless questioning. This searching has provided a profound syntactical, acoustical, physiological basis for integrating elements in desired multidimensional works;-and it has been particularlyenriching to the self, by the self.

Somewhere during 1959-60, I formulated the expression "compositional linguistics" as the conceptual domain for this kind of work.

NOTES...

-the mapping of linguistic characteristicsonto musical ones signifies the transformation of the former by the latter.

SENSES Text-Setting-

the text and the music maintain separate identities

[Text]-Setting- the text is consumed by the music Text-[Setting]-

the music is consumed by the text

[Text-Setting]- both text and music consume each other Text/Setting-

the text and the music mirror each other

Textsetting-

text and music are one and the same thing

What basis(es) is (are) there for [pulling] the text [apart]?

What determines the [length] of the phrases which are separated by [pulling] them apart?

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Perspectivesof New Music

EXTREMES

"Kenneth could argue for hours about how there was no such thing as gravity-all the while standing with both feet firmly on the ground."

(Harley Gaber) 50s machismo/60s openness to change East Coast aggressive/West Coast "laid-back" Composer/publisher Academic/primitive An intellectual uncomfortable in the university A professional distrustful of other professionals Perfectionist/also liked accidents Health food/unfiltered Pall Malls Classicallytrained/preferred "art brut" Pro-worker/anti-union Dedicated teacher/absent father A performer who antagonized other performers and thought it his duty Generous/self-centered Earthy/sublime

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Gaburo-Notes

"You MUST NOT FORGETANYTHING"

IIIl

on .. .

(Philip Roth, Patrimony)

The last time I saw Kenneth was in Keokuk, Iowa-a small river town on the Mississippi. I had invited Kenneth to the university where I teach to be the featured composer at our New Music Festival. I was now putting him on the Greyhound to Iowa City, his current home.

It had been almost fifteen years since the farewell party he and Ginny gave us in San Diego. Much had changed. He and Ginny divorced, Harley stopped composing and started painting, I've been teaching. In the intervening time, Kenneth and I had had our share of arguments, disagreements, misunderstandings, and reconciliations. There were periods of silence and times when neither of us understood what the other was doing with regard to our composing.

I had noticed during the three days of the Festival that he often seemed confused over simple routine things and that he often seemed tired. But, during the thirty-mile drive from Macomb to Keokuk, everything seemed good. He planned to get out of Iowa City and move to Santa Fe. Keep the press going. Come out with a new Collection,including some of my pieces. Compose a new clarinet and tape Antiphony for Molly.

We talked about women. "I have no problem finding them. It's holding onto them that I can't seem to figure out," he said.

When we got to Keokuk, we found that there was no Greyhound terminal. Tickets were sold by a local farm kid from behind the counter of a jewelry store that sold only the hand-made costume jewelry of the store's mysterious owner, said only to be "out West" somewhere. There didn't seem to be much of a market for this sort of thing in Keokuk, so we felt a certain kinship with the absent owner. Looking at the jewelry in the glass case was the last thing I did with Kenneth. When he waved good-bye from the bus, he was laughing.

In the months that followed, we wrote, spoke on the phone, and continued to make plans for the future. He never spoke of his health.

Then it was winter and, suddenly, Harley was on the phone, telling me that Kenneth was very ill. Two days later, the night before Molly and I were to see him, he died.

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LETTERTO MOLLY, 8-24-92

"... I really appreciated your observations (and of course Paul's) and wonderful comments about the nature and quality of my tape work. It means very much to me to know that there are a few who 'get it.' I never have any doubts, but sometimes I wonder if I'm doing anything of value to others or am I just jerking off?

Much love, Kenneth"

KENNETH (HIMSELF)

(Program note, New Music Festival 1992, Western Illinois U.) I have composed numerous works for multiple voices: for womenfor men,-both; sacred, secular, a capella (such as those being performed tonight); experimental (such as the Antiphonies with tape); and some with no text (working with phonetic language instead).

But no matter the how, why, or what of it, they all celebrate my love for the voice: its endless richness, fundamental humanness, staggering spirituality,and expressive quality. And-no matter how simple or complex-the voice has always been equal to the work. Ultimately, it has soared beyond any challenge to it which might have appeared-on the surface-to prevent it from flying.

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