Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. Over the course of a dedicated career, his uncompromising work carved out its own patch in the territory of American experimentalism. But despite being sought after for his radical work in the fields of music composition, teaching, publishing and writing, and having had a profound influence on a generation of musical thinkers, Kenneth Gaburo remains an undersung hero.
Born in 1926 in Somerville, New Jersey, to an immigrant Italian
family in the laundry business, Gaburo excelled at musical studies,
playing the piano and singing in choirs at an early age. As a
child he was familiar with the New York jazz scene, and an underlying
jazz feel can be sensed in even the most experimental of his later
works. His time at the Eastman School of Music which began in
1943 was interrupted by service in the army. Initially stationed
in the Philippines as a strafer bomber his musical skills were
soon recognized. He spent the remainder of the war travelling
with a jazz band around the Pacific as pianist and arranger.
After returning to complete his M.M. degree at Eastman with Bernard
Rogers, Gaburo taught at Kent State University, Ohio, and then
McNeese State College, Louisiana. A Fulbright Fellowship in 1954
enabled him to travel to Rome to study composition with Goffredo
Petrassi at the Conservatorio de Santa Cecilia. In 1962 he completed
his D.M.A. at the University of Illinois, studying composition
with Burrill Phillips and Hubert Kessler. He remained there on
the faculty until 1968. During this time he was an active organizer
of the annual international Festival of Contemporary Arts. In
1955 he began to work with combining concrete sounds on tape with
live performers; an interest that was to continue for the rest
of his life-the series of ten Antiphonies featuring live instruments
and pre-recorded tape were made from 1958 to 1991.
Growing from a concern for music-as-language and language-as-music
Gaburo started formal studies in linguistics in 1959, formulating
the term Compositional Linguistics.
In 1965 he founded the New Music Choral Ensemble (NMCE) one of
the first choirs in the U.S. to perform avant-garde music for
voice. This group performed over 100 new works in the decade of
its existence, from the choral music of Schoenberg, Nono, Oliveros,
Kagel, and Messiaen, to the theater works of Becket and Albee.
Improvisation was combined with electronics, body and verbal linguistics,
computers, dance, mime, film, slides, and tape. For his work up
to this time Gaburo had received awards from the Guggenheim, UNESCO,
Thorne, Fromm, and Koussevitsky Foundations.
In 1967 he joined the faculty at the new San Diego campus of the
University of California where in 1972 a Rockefeller Foundation
grant enabled him to start NMCE IV, this time with one singer,
one actor, one speaker, one mime, and one sound-movement-instrumentalist.
Until his resignation from UCSD in 1975 he produced a large number
of integrated theatrical works, such as the collection Lingua
and Privacy.
In 1974 Gaburo founded Lingua Press Publishers, dedicated to putting
forth unique artist-produced works in all media having to do with
language and music. Many of the publications have been exhibited
in book art shows throughout the world. Gaburo lived in the Anzo-Borrego
desert writing and teaching from 1980 until 1983. In 1980 he was
artistic director for the first "authentic" production
of Harry Partch's The Bewitched for the Berlin Festival (recorded
on Enclosure Five: Harry Partch, innova 405). His understanding
of Partch's concept of corporeality has deep connections with
his own concern for physicality and how it informs compositions.
His 1982 tape work, RE-RUN, for instance, was generated after
a 20-hour sensory deprivation exercise.
He became Director of the Experimental Music Studio at the University
of Iowa in 1983. The studio put intensive focus on composition,
technology, psycho-acoustic perception, performance, and the affirmation
of the uniqueness of the individual to create his/her own language
reality. At the studio he founded the Seminar for Cognitive Studies,
a forum for discussion of the creative process. His concern for
the investigation of music as legitimate research, and composition
as the creation of intrinsic appropriate language, led to a series
of readings in compositional linguistics for solo performer.
Antiphony VIII: Revolution, for percussion (Steve Schick) and
tape, Antiphony IX: A Dot for orchestra, children, and tape, and
Antiphony X: Winded, for organ (Gary Verkade) and tape, continued
his series of works for live instruments and tape as well as the
use of graphic notations and random processes to generate small
and large scale events. Gaburo's archive is housed at the University
of Illinois Music Library and Lingua Press is represented by Frog
Peak Music.