Books

CDs

Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

Gary Verkade, organ.
Innova Recordings 524 (www.innovarecordings.com),
American Composers Forum, St. Paul, MN, 1999.
Reviewed by Robert Coburn, Conservatory of Music, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA., U.S.A. 95211.
E-mail: rcoburn@uop.edu


"Winded" presents the music of Kenneth Gaburo, Warren Burt, and Philip Blackburn as performed by organist Gary Verkade. All three works are for organ and tape and were written at the request of Verkade, the Kenneth Gaburo piece as a commission and the other two in memory of 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 Kenneth Gaburo, Warren Burt used as source material a recording of Pentagony, a speaking 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 is used to create 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 seventeen minute "recitative through tracing", undoubtedly very meaningful to the composer but of much less significance to a listener.

Kenneth Gaburo's Antiphony X (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, 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 --- sup-planted by new voices in, from, and for our time."

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

After Winded, Philip 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 compact disk. 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 overlaid so that they conflict with each other and make reading difficult at best. The composers and performer would have been better served if they had considered the readability as well as the aesthetic impact when designing the accompanying material.

There are few organists who commission, perform, and record challenging new work and certainly even fewer of the caliber of Mr. Verkade. His playing which demonstrates a deep understanding of these works is remarkable. Although the music on this cd is of uneven quality, this recording stands as an important collection of new work for the historical king of instruments.

top