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CD
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RZ 1022CD
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Edition RZ releases works circa 1972-1974 from American composer Harley Gaber. "Both works on this CD form, in a manner of speaking, bookends for another piece of mine, The Winds Rise In The North. The first of the two, 'Sovereign Of The Center,' was my initial attempt at putting a new musical way of thinking into an ensemble rather than solo form. The second, 'The Realm Of Indra's Net,' builds on musical 'discoveries' I made in the course of revising The Winds Rise In The North. It is a hybrid work in as much as it is an 'acoustic-tape piece' (not musique concrète). There are four tracks of solo violin mixed down in different track combinations (the one heard on this CD is a full-track mono version of the work). Both of these pieces reflect a general shift in my musical thinking, which occurred in 1968 with 'Chimyaku' (Japanese for 'barely moving') scored for solo alto flute. It was with that work that I began to compose 'slowed-down' music, like slow-motion images in film, not merely slow music such as that of Feldman." --Harley Gaber, July 2009 Performed by Linda Cummiskey (violin), Steve Reynolds (viola), Barbara Riccardi (violin), and John Dexter (violin).
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CD
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INNO 231CD
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"Just over one hour and five minutes, Harley Gaber's I Saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji (2009, for tape and processed violin and alto flute) offers proof of music's power to transport (the listener) in ways generally associated with film and literature. Fuji's Kaidan-like atmosphere -- the Japanese world of ghosts and spirits -- unfolds slowly in its process of uncovering and revealing a deeper and different spirit world in what might be termed a spiritual journey: The ascension and transformation of the human spirit into pure energy expressed in the form of both musical and non-musical sounds. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Gaber found his own unique compositional language that combined the intensity and extra-musical framing of certain post-war, European Modernism with sparser, more obviously spiritual evocations of Eastern aesthetics, as made manifest in such diverse expressions as Haiku poetry, Sumi-e painting, and even martial arts forms. In 1978, he moved from New York City to La Jolla, CA and stopped making music. Following a two-year hiatus from the arts, he commenced on what was to become a twenty year period of creating an immense body of work in the plastic arts and photography. Much of the work done during that period was informed by his musical instincts and focused, as did much of his later music, on the unity and interrelatedness of things. His predilection for collage work in general reflects and confirms that focus. The years of making art culminated with his largest artistic and personal undertaking in the construction of Die Plage, a photo-collage work of some 5,500 (20 x16 in.) canvases detailing German history in the first half of the 20th Century. With the completion of Die Plage in the early part of 2002, Gaber turned to writing about the project and to filmmaking, first using images from Die Plage for his films and eventually moving on to other subjects. His return to music began with the creation of soundtracks for all his films. Initially, the soundtracks were (again) in a collaged form using, for the most part, music of others, but also incorporating his own music from old recordings and taped performances. His real return to music composition came in 2008 with his original soundtrack for Mein Kamps: Akt V (filmed in Berlin and named after the Berlin bakery chain Kamps). That original soundtrack (existing apart from the film as a strictly musical composition is titled 'Berliner Strassen Gesang') demonstrates a richer, more complex approach to crafting and shaping sound made possible by the use of the computer in composing the work along with the twenty years of rethinking his artistic outlook in general, and his musical thinking in particular. And now, with I Saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji, Gaber has returned to music composition. This new work is at once a processing of untimely deaths in his family and a reconsideration of earlier compositions -- Michi for solo violin (1972) and Chimyaku for solo alto flute -- which, in their processed and altered form and in conjunction with an entirely new tape part, project a new level of insight into the essential spiritual nature of sound and its physicality; '...both transcendentally abstract and distinctly human,' as the composer puts it. The ascension of Mount Fuji is a meditative journey, a spiritual odyssey perhaps, as real as it is imagined or metaphoric. The composer, however, leaves those distinctions for each listener to decide for his or herself."
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2CD
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RZ 4008/9CD
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Edition RZ reissues The Winds Rise In The North by American composer Harley Gaber, originally released on Titanic Records in 1976. Interpreters: Linda Cummiskey (violin); Malcolm Goldstein (violin); Kathy Seplow (violin); Stephen Reynolds (viola); David Gibson (violoncello). Screeching, minimal string-dronology of the highest order and an absolute classic.
Questions:
How endlessly the heavens turn.
And yet the earth remains at rest.
Do the sun and the moon quarrel as to their positions?
Who rules over and orders all these things?
By whom are they in harmony?
Who effortlessly causes and maintains them?
Is there, perhaps, some hidden tension
that prevents them from being other than as they are?
Must the heavenly bodies move as they do, powerless to do otherwise?
Look how the clouds drop the rain!
And how the rain rises again to form the clouds!
Who moves them to this abundance?
Who effortlessly produces the primary orb and stimulates it?
The winds rise in the north and blow to the east and west.
Others move upward uncertainly.
Whose breath moves them?
Who effortlessly causes them to blow?
What is the cause?
--Chuang Tzu
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