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Listening to Ten Tape Works by Kenneth Gaburo
by Warren Burt
Over his career, Kenneth Gaburo produced a lot of electronic music. Much of this was in the form of tape ports for his ten Antiphonies for instruments and tape. Other electronics appeared in parts of multimedia works. In the late 1980s, in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Andrew McLennan, he produced, as well, three works for radio incorporating recordings of acoustical works: Testimony, La ... Antiphony IX {... a Dot], and ENOUGH! —(not enough)—. However, works for tape alone are fairly rare in his output. Still, over about a thirty-year period, ten works for solo tape were produced. (Eleven, if one counts The Flow of <u>, but that would more likely be considered a tape recording of a live performance by three extraordinary singers rather than as a tape piece per se.) I've been listening to these works a lot recently, trying to come to terms with them, to listen both sympathetically and seriously, giving my full attention to them, to respond to them in some non-trivial way, for these are all non-trivial pieces.
Tape was a medium for which Kenneth had a lot of respect. He regarded it as that medium in which one had to, literally, face the music. In his long paper ISIT, published in the International Synergy Journal no. 2 11986), he wrote about 'the tape piece' how, since there are no scores, anecdotes, or tradition to fall back on, one has to deal with the sound, the music, on its own terms. Well, for me, not quite. Because I knew him, and I knew most of these pieces, and had talked with him about them, I had a bit of a head start on listening to them. Or so I thought until I started listening again. And suddenly, a hundred questions I would have liked to ask, and which now it's too late to ask, surfaced. My listening, in fact, became quite distracted by my incessant wondering, "how did he do that?" I became obsessed with the how of the pieces, rather than with their what. And so I plunged into the very analytical headset these works, especially the later ones, seem to want to deny, and I had to learn to listen again.
I remember when, in the spring of 1972, a: part of an analysis class at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), Kenneth had us analyze Charles Dodge's Changes. Changes is a computer piece which is concerned, on one level with pitch. But Kenneth's analysis assignment was, without transcribing the piece, to analyze it purely in terms of the heard sound. That is, without dealing with an idea of pitch relations in the piece produced by transcription,
as there any other way we could penetrate to some sort of essence of the piece? A difficult assignment, which we all expended mugK energy on, but one which got us listening in ways we might not have done otherwise.
Of the ten tape pieces, five were created in the mid-1 960s at the University of Illinois, one was created in 1974-5 in his home studio in La Jolla as a farewell gesture for the University of California, San Diego, and four were made in the experimental studio at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, which he directed during the 1980s and early 1990s. Not surprisingly for a composer whose stated aim was to blur the distinctions between language and music, six of the ten works feature an overt use of the voice, while two of the "purely electronic" pieces use timbres that are so vocal in character that one is constantly thrown back onto a consideration of Kenneth's main obsession, the voice. Only two of the pieces, both from the Illinois period, seem not to deal with the voice in any way.
As for techniques, certain ones are obvious. The use of a short tape delay with feedback appears in six of the pieces, used for a variety of purposes. Tape speed up, especially of vocal and percussion loops, appears in half the works, and in the early works, the use of what appears to be a high-pass filter is prominent. Use of antiphony between independent stereo tape channels appears in al! but one of the pieces; in fact, only two Wine pieces appear to have sounds mixed within the stereo spectrum at all.
But beyond these easily-heard, surface aspects is a different issue, one t to address. That is, Kenneth once said to me that each of his electronic works of the 1970s and 1980s was produced by a unique process that involved some sort of physicality, some unique way of involving his body in the production of the sound. For ReRun, he described the process as one of staring at the synthesizer, for hours, until totally exhausted, and then, , using the energy of exhaustion, patching and performing the patch on several tracks of a multi-track tape recorder without referring to the a I ready-recorded channels. Tapping into the subconscious through exhaustion was one of the central ideas ReRun. He said to me that each electronic piece was made with a similar, but different, process, and promised to tell me about some of the others someday. But, of course, on the rare occasions, in Australia or America, that we got together, other matters always seemed more urgent than mere studio tech talk. As, indeed, they were. So if I do find out more about his processes, it won't be directly from him. Also, for a guy ' who could talk for hours, he was, on occasion, maddeningly elusive when asked to explain some of his technical procedures. As an example of my own inept studentship, I finally gave up trying to understand the process that produced the degenerating nursery rhyme in Kyrie, after Kenneth's third attempt to explain it to me. It was something about listening over headphones • while the voice was delayed and equalized in a certain way, trying to imitate each generation's subsequent degeneration in sound quality with the voice, but I never got further than that with it, and was so frustrated with Kenneth's attempts to explain it to me that I thought 1 would let the matter rest. I figured if I ever needed to reconstruct the process, with the information I had, I could. I was wrong.
Recently, Robert Paredes said to me that he thought that because Kenneth used so many processes that drew on the subconscious to make his pieces, often he couldn't actually speak with complete technical accuracy about them after the fact. Then too, he added, sometimes he felt that Kenneth actually enjoyed the sense of mystery that resulted from his work methods. I agreed with that, for I have the feeling that Kenneth's works often resulted from an intuitive understanding he had of the studio he was working in, and that there was often far| more intuitive composing in his pieces than people suspected.
AH (5 early pieces] are concerned with aspects of timbre (e.g., mixing concrete and electronically generated sound) ; with nuance: (e.g. r extending the expressive range of concrete sound through machine manipulation, and reproducing machine rigidity through flexible compositional techniques); and with counterpoint (e.g.,
/em>stereo as a contrapuntal system).-K.G.
Fat Millie (rausu Squash her tuh [what? I Every time she sits
——— I think
tuh tuhtuhtuhtijhtuh
At the University of Illinois in the mid-1960s, a woman named Margaret Fletcher launched on attack on new music (once literally, in the form of music stands thrown from offstage). Kenneth always welcomed an aesthetic argument, and when this was coupled with his intolerance of intellectual stupidity, the result was sure to be a musical donnybrook of impressive proportions. This piece is the tracing left by that process of disputation. I'm only speculating here, but I get the feeling that perhaps Kenneth made the piece by using every criticism of Fletcher's as a specification for its construction. That is, the idiocy of her criticisms would be revealed by making a piece which conformed to her specifications but which she would still be appalled by. At least that is the kind of gesture I would have expected of Kenneth. Maybe, instead he simply had fun in the tape studio.
The piece is a collage, mostly of loops of percussion and voice sounds. Often the treatments are very bare. I count the use of a very simple rising jazz vocal track at three speeds during the main body of the piece, and once at a faster speed just before the end. But recognizing the use of very simple tape manipulations can be misleading. Kennelh's textures are always a lob more complicated than they first seem. The closest visual analogy to the texture that opens the piece would be to the densest of Rauschenberg's collages.
Curiously, in the mix David Dunn supplied to me there is a very prominent sound, the first one in the piece that does not occur on the Nonesuch record that the piece first appeared on. This is a very distorted sound that sounds like some kind of percussion loop put through o ring modulator or some other kind of distortion device. And this sound appears in the reprise at the end, so I'm led to the speculation that this was a sound that Kenneth either added at a later date, or a sound that was originally there which for some reason, he preferred to leave off the record. In any case, the sound makes the opening lecture even more aggressive, and more complicated, than the version that appeared on vinyl. [And as an afterthought, this sound very much the kind of sonic spillage you get when you overhear someone listening to percussive pop music on a Walkman. Given Kenneth's hatred of sonic pollution, could he have added this sound at a later date to refer to one more kind of sonic/aesthetic garbage?]
The piece has a very simple ABA form, just about the only time I've seen this in any of Kenneth's pieces, which makes me think that structurally, as well as many other ways, he was having a very deep dig at Fletcher and her criticisms. As he said in the liner notes to the Nonesuch record, "she has no business sitting (in) on the affairs of serious people." The B section here is a quote from his colleague Morgan Powell's big band piece Odomtn, but thickened by being processed through a short tape-head delay, with a slightly delayed version appearing on the second channel. Because most of the sounds in Powell's piece are sustained, this means that usually the sound is only thickened a bit, but when articulated riffs occur, they seem to bounce across the channels supported by a bed of big-band chords. The explosion of could lie have added this sound at a later date lo refer to one more kind of sonic/aesthetic garbage?]
The explosion of Morgan's piece, timbrally so different from the high filtered texture which opens and closes the piece, reminds me of nothing so much as a big ionic orgasm. "Bango," Kenneth would later write, in Pent/agony, his attack on the linkup between military thinking and male sexual politics. Was he, in the exploding sonic "climax," making a first attack on the embarrassing nineteenth century aesthetic linkup of the musical climax with clichéd notions of male sexual response?
The Wasting of Lucrecetzia
This is a tape collage, one of two companion pieces which use collage as a medium for
denunciation, the other being Fat Millie's Lament. Both pieces were later used as exit musics for
concerts of the New Music Choral Ensemble, the group Kenneth led, in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Lucrecetzia is a crazed, wild piece, and is made mostly of scraps of screaming,
percussion loops, and sax playing. Are these found scraps, or did he record them specifically for
the piece? In liner notes to the Nonesuch recording on which it first appeared, Kenneth
claimed they were his own scraps, from his own bag, indicating a kind of covert complicity, or
at least grudging participation in the culture the piece is critical of. The piece seems to embody
a kind of distaste also expressed by Harry Partch, for the “Joe College” of the
1950s and 1960s, which was where so much new music, at least in America, had to exist then.
The screams, and especially the sax sounds, seem lo call out for the harmonic support of a bass
line, which would turn them Into “real” jazz, which Kenneth rigorously denies them. This
forces them to refer to their origins, but to float unsupported and in that floating lo denounce
them. And do I hear one of sped-up voices, shouting “Millie!” about halfway through the
piece, as blocks of luscious noise-bands create created by ring-modulating the sped-up screams and
percussion ore suddenly brought in and out? This is a delicious and thrilling piece. I certainly
remember it being an inspiration to me when I' was an undergraduate, in that I used it to give
me permission to try similarly loud, crass, bad-taste pieces stick their tongue out with enunciatory glee.
For Harry
"Harry" is Harry Partch, whom Kenneth knew in Illinois and, later, in San Diego. Someone who knew them both will someday have to write about their relationship, but it seems that despite any and all disagreements, Partch and his work had an enormous impact on Kenneth. He directed Partch's The Bewitched for the 1980 Berlin "Fur Augen und Ohren" festival, and one of Kenneth's late papers was on physicality, subtitled "In Search of Partch's Bewitched."
Here, and in Lemon Drops, we're in a very different world from the first two pieces. If those are Kenneth reacting to things he despises, here he's dealing with things he loves. Also, these two pieces are the most pitch oriented of the tape works. In For Harry, very beautifully shaped electronic tones alternate with what sound like recordings of one of Partch's stringed instruments but were actually derived from a simple monochord instrument that Kenneth constructed. Partch maintained, until just before his death (when he expressed enthusiasm for the Scalatron microtonal organ), that his work and electronics were incompatible, because electronics were too primitive to serve his purposes (hence his gratitude for Kenneth's musical tribute was muted). In this piece, Kenneth purposefully bridges the gap, showing how Partch's timbral and pitch world could be derived from a single vibrating string with electronic transformation. There are also some very simple musical gestures in the piece, which cut across the elegant pitch filigree which seems to be the work's main substance. For example, the long-rising tremolo about half way through the piece cuts across all the short pure and semi-distorted electronic tones quite beautifully. And this happens just before the curious high texture of sped-up and short-delayed sound fragments which occurs in the middle of the piece. In sound type, this texture seems to relate more to Millie and Lucrecetzia than to Partch, but the sound sources give the illusion of being mangled quotes from Harry's music.
I think For Harry is very beautiful, but I don't find it an easy piece. It leaves me curious, asking lots of questions. To plunge into this contrapuntal web of notes, sounds, and references requires wide-open ears—total attention. And every time I hear the coda, with its very long silences and subtly processed plucked string sounds, I wonder, why did he do it that way? It's a coda which I enjoy because it makes no sense to me.
But if the poetry of ANTIPHONY III may be seen as a most subtle, “unnamed” expression of real love possessing the quiet beauty of a pearl, but potentially corrupitible by metaphoric salt, then The Wasting of Lucrecetzia must be seen as its most grotesque opposite. Although the phenomenon is widespread, I cannot subscribe to the assumption of equivalence between shades and actor, between grass-acid and poet-philosopher, between available synthesizers and composer, and therefore, I am as revulsed by the existence of the poisonous rape mentality-which makes tame by comparison the corrupt deeds of Sextus Tarquinius (THAT son-of-a-Superbus) and Lucretia Borgia - as I am by the testimony of pseudo-cyberneticists who validate this mentality with their sweeping scientific (sic) generalizations about the equivalence of things.
It's all so simple if you lat it on a scrap-pile and label it social reality on the rock(s). Lamentably, that rock is not peter-neither is mine, but I am drawn into that heap to at once characterize the waster and to waste him without discrimination and in his language, allowing myself the smallest pleasure (I think also a distinction) of knowing I have used my own scraps - in my own bag - then OUT! But art isn't as simple as all that because I go for complexity.
Lemon Drops
I remember Kenneth one day saying that in lemon Drops he wanted to sho1" that tape splicing could sound as fluid as improvisation. The tones, made with James Beauchamp's harmonic lone generator, have an almost mordant, electric-piano fee! about them. The piece speaks itself, full of jazz:-like scale licks, existing neither as half-jazz or half going-for-it serious, but as its own unique identity. Kenneth scorned the idea of "cross-over" pieces as an intellectual weakness. But he always seemed to be asking questions about thresholds. How for could you go stretching one timbral, or linguistic, or stylistic identity, before it was no longer perceivable as that identity? Here it seems that that question is being asked about a late-night smoky blues electric-piano solo, or is it being asked about a totally organized pitch-oriented electronic music piece3 How does this work live on that perceptual boundary made possible by tape splicing? Later in his life, Kenneth would come to distrust conceptions of music based on the "lick," but here, it seems, his concern for melodic gesture and contour is in full flower.
Dante's Joynte
This is one of the two tape pieces which also work as parts of larger works, fine other is Re-Run, which was used by choreographer Lou Blankenburg.) In 197) I remember seeing an extremely powerful performance of Dante's Joynte by the New Music Choral Ensemble which featured, along with the tape, six gesturing/shouting dancer/actors and an amazing film of cancer cells dividing. As one who had suffered through any number of ineptly put together multimedia pieces in the late 1960s, I felt a rush of exhilarated excitement at the precision and energy of Dante So you could do this kind of work, and have it be something other than gratuitous or flimsy; il could be powerful, and not embarrassing.
Dante Alighieri's work was one of Kenneth's delights. He used a number of Dante texts in his pieces. Dante's Joynle, in fact, is a good example of one of Kenneth's favorite techniques of this time: assembling a piece based on a consideration of all the possible meanings of a phrase or object. This kind of thinking has parallels to contemporary science's concern with "emergent properties," those behaviors of a system which result from the structure of a system, but which can't be predicted from looking at the elements of that system. In this case, the catalyst that allows the properties lo emerge is Kenneth's analytical extraction ability.
So Dante here comes to mean both the Italian poet, beautifully deconstructed into an almost abstract theatrical text (his Joynte being, of course, the inferno), and it also, through the magic of the pun, refers lo the Illinois jazz club Danto's. and the infernal underworld of that music A pun provides the connection between Italian Renaissance literature and jazz. Experimental musical thinking provides the glue. Later, of course, Kenneth would lake this technique to megalamaniacal lengths in his masterpiece for seven virtuoso speakers, Maledetto.
On its own, the tape is also a powerful piece. It seems like the culmination of the techniques used in the previous lour pieces. Sped-up and delayed loops of percussion, quotes from popular music, and what I hear in the last section as quotes and processing of traditional African music. Was Kenneth listening to the traditional African music just becoming available on labels such as Folkways at this time? If one of the issues Dante addresses is jazz, it would make sense for a collage that addressed the manic intensity of some jazz lo draw on the African roots of the music, but I was surprised when I thought I recognized some African sources in the last section.
The elegant electronics of Harry and Lemon Drop? are also present here. The repeated "honque honques” of the beginning, made by Kenneth's favorite short delay, the long tones slowly weaving glissandi over a minor second, and the held, modulated tones slowly fading in and out,
Curiously, this piece now sounds to me like a classic. It seems lo embody an era, the collage thinking of the 1960s in a definitive way. Whether the stifled world of classical music will ever recognize a piece like Dante's Joynte as pad of its legitimate heritage is another matter entirely. However, as Kenneth said in The Beauty of Irrelevant Music, "the beauty will, nevertheless, remain.''
RE-Run
In the early 1980s, Kenneth began teaching al the University of Iowa, and revived the studio set up there by his tale student Peter Tod Lewis. In this studio was, among other things, a marginally functioning hybrid (analog/digital) Buchla synthesizer. I had not known Kenneth to be involved with commercial analog electronics before this, but al Iowa, just when the rest of the music world was abandoning [or maybe only temporarily leaving] the analog synthesizers that had been dc rigueur in the late sixties and seventies, he plunged into exploring this instrument, evolving Ins own unique and very physical way of using it. I find a wonderful perversity in Kenneth's altitude lo technology. Just when something was condemned as old-fashioned, or outdated, he would explore it rigorously, extracting every ounce or compositional potential out of it.
Many of Kenneth's works from the fifties through the seventies required elaborate pre-compositional work. The massive amount of research that both he and Virginia Gaburo did for Maledetto is a good example. But with Re-Run, this is not the case. Re-Run is one of the few pieces of Kenneth's where he described how it was made And further, in line with his idea that the composition isn't finished until you have come lo realize what it is you have made, it is a piece where analysis can only be post compositional. That is, no mailer how deeply one's analysis of the piece goes, anything one discovers will only be the result of the exhaustion process he used to make the piece, and not the result of pre-compositional structural thinking. Of course, his decision lo sit down in front of the synthesizer and work in this way (many hours of sensory deprivation followed by Four successive passes at the keyboard without listening to the previous tracks) was a pre-compositional decision, but as pre-compositional thinking, it's a far cry from the elaborate linguistic work of Antiphony IV of the pitch structuring of line Studies.
What strikes me most about this "oil -electronic" piece is how vocal it is. Those short electronic tones seem almost cutesy in their quasi-vocal articulation. Almost, but not quite. And the gestures of the separate (rocks do relate, in a non-intentional, but very sophisticated counterpoint. When you spend your whole life concerned with contrapuntal thinking, undoubtedly it sinks into your physiology. This was, remember, the man who used to talk about breathing as one of (lie ultimate contrapuntal systems.
The Australian art theorist Donald Brook, in hiswonderful 1981 book The Social
Role of Art (Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide) defines art (as opposed to craft,
representation, or entertainment) as nonspecific experimental modeling. Scandalously
simplified, one of the tenets o! his definition is that a total kh6'wredg§able control of one's
materials almost mitigates against producing a work of art.; Given Those conditions. Brook
maintains, it is far more likely that a work of craft will result . In his pushing of himself into new areas of experience with works such as Re-Run, Kenneth .seemed to embody the essence of essence of Brook's nonspecific experimental modeler.
Dante; Canto Six Inferno
Al tornar de
la manta, che si
chluse dinanzi a la
pleta'da' due
cognati, che di
triatilia tutto e novi
tormentati mi veggio
intorno come chr io mi
mova e ch' lo mt volga
come oh' lo mi guati.
lo sono al
terzo cerchii de Is
piova_sterna,
maledetta, fredda b
grave: regola e
qualita' raai non 1'e'
ova.
Grandin-groissa, e acqua tinta, e rxeve per la terra che questo riceve.
Seek odd, not wrist-meek, eat. VENT
"
Day:
aid odd-dew,
pee,(gravely
aid to vain (t)(oh)traent
Mouthpiece II
The First Mouthpiece is a composition for trumpet and slides. It is a virtuoso exploration of instrumental techniques and the use of the trumpet trumpet as an extension of the voice which I first saw in 1971, in a wonderful performance by Jack Logon. It is formalist, funny, and very complex.
This "mouthpiece" is quite different. It's perhaps the most painful work Kenneth ever made. In the 1980s his work began to address social issues more directly than it had in the past. The Scratch Project was a large multimedia project concerned with people's reactions to being considered expendable in the event of nuclear war. Later, the works began to get more personal. Pent/agony is a text work in which antimilitaristic thinking and personal sexual politics mix, in a very powerful way. By the time of this work, the concern is intensely personal, and very painful.
Moulhpiece II is a monologue where Kenneth describes an incident he observed at "The Mill," one of his favorite Iowa City restaurants (frequented by Millies?). A dysfunctional Family dines. They "had no words." They ate. They left. And left Kenneth devastated. Behind the monologue is a texture of soft vocal utterances, processed, mixed, delayed. The texture is reminiscent of the textures of the early tape pieces, but it changes a lot more Frequently, is not so monolithic in its construction, and is, in fact, one of the most nuanced of Kenneth's concrete textures. The texture accompanies the voice almost all the way through the piece. Only once, when Kenneth is describing the daughter of the Family with the words "but she's so . . .beautiful," does the accompaniment slop, suddenly, and then resume other a few seconds. My first impression was this was a corny, obvious gesture. On later listenings, I've come to regard this sudden stopping of the texture as indeed corny and obvious, but absolutely necessary and essential to the piece's integrity.
The quality of voice in Kenneth's monologue is remarkable. It is extremely close-miked, and recorded in o fairly large closed room, I think. I con hear breath, subtle echoes of voice off walls, and so on. The loneliness of the voice is implied by the acoustic of the recording as well as the tone of voice.
Kenneth was fanatical in his search for the right acoustic to record his text pieces in. I remember when; in the late 1980s, he was staying at my flat in Melbourne. I was leaving for a day or two, and let him use my flat. He was doing some voice recording for on Australian Broadcasting Corporation production, and was using my studio. On my return, I noticed plastic lampshade of my new table lamp was melted into a quite grotesque shape. Half embarrassed, half giggling, Kenneth explained to me that he had found the perfect acoustic For recording his voice—under o desk in my studio, with the desk covered with blankets to deaden all other sound. To see in this cave, he had, of course, used my new desk lamp, which, without proper ventilation, had promptly melted, sending him Fleeing a small, acoustically perfect cave full of toxic Fumes He said, "I'd offer to pay for the lamp, but I had the feeling that you'd really dig what happened lo it," The Kenneth Gaburo Memorial Lampshade is still on my desk lamp.
I don't know how he recorded the text of Mouthpiece II, but I'm sure he worked at getting just the right quality of voice for it. It fits the voy-euristic quality of this text—but is voyeuristic the right word? I don't think so. Voyeurism implies an act of will. Kenneth describes a situation here that is so awful that it was almost as if he couldn't not watch. He had said that observation was one way of composing. One of his stratagems was the "stare." That is, one looked fixedly at a given text, object, process, ef cetera, until relations began to be obvious. (He told me that this was one of the techniques he used to assemble the orchestral parts for Antiphony IX, for orchestra, children, and tape.) Here, the idea of the "stare" is carried out of the contemplative world of the studio and into the public sphere of horrid familial relations.
Unlike most of Kenneth's work, which reminds me of nobody else's, this piece makes two names spring to mind: Robert Ashley and Samuel Beckett. But Beckett's grim observations actually seem much more personal, much more from the point of view of the characters than are Kenneth's, and Ashley's loving mid-western reminiscences, no matter how sad, are not tinged with the sense of hopeless ashen desperation that this one is.
This piece may have been Kenneth's last. Knowing how depressed he was in his last years—the situation for art, life, himself, seemed truly hopeless to him, he said to me—I can hear that desperation here, and understand how he became so intensely cued into this awful situation, so that he had no choice but to watch, and to then communicate to us the desperation, and the sadness.
Hiss
Kenneth always had a bit of the junk sculptor about him, from the scraps of Lucrecetzia to his concern with the creative nuances available from substandard equipment. In the University of Iowa studio was a particular mixer that generated quite loud, attractive, and shapable hiss. A normal studio director would probably have consigned such a mixer to the scrap heap, but Kenneth made a point of demonstrating this mixer's creative possibilities. (On hearing the piece at its November 1993 performance at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, composer Meg Travers told me that she, too, had made similar sounds from a mixer she had used.) Hiss was probably made with the noise of this mixer being frequency shifted (through an antique Bode frequency-shifter—another "obsolete" treasure of the Iowa studio) and processed through the Moog. I'm only speculating here, because the piece exists only as a four-channel tape with mixing instructions. Made sometime in the two years before Kenneth's death, its existence was known to a few people at Iowa, but he hadn't talked much about it.
But what timbres! This piece is a purely electronic piece, but it breathes! The timbral richness is remarkable—I'm reminded of a steel mill or other industrial environment. And the breathing of the piece is so labored! This piece may be exploring a process, but knowing the emotional and physiological pain that haunted Kenneth in the last years of his life, I can't help but also hear it as one of the most direct emotional utterances he ever made.
Few
Australian Broadcasting Corporation producer Andrew McLennan tells the story about how Kenneth was walking past a studio in Sydney where a program about Henri Chopin was being edited. He turned to Andrew and said, "That's Henri Chopin! I'd know that throat anywhere!" How Kenneth came to be on intimate terms with Henri's throat is the subject of this piece, an improvisation between the two of them, with Kenneth on synthesizer, and Henri's close-miked (the microphone usually inserted deep into his mouth!) and delayed and processed vocal sounds.
Robert Paredes told me that he felt that at Iowa, Kenneth missed the companionship of colleagues his own age, so Chopin's visit to Iowa in 1985 must have been a special delight. Kenneth's mournful Moog sounds dip and glide, providing a base, while Chopin's vocal explorations, at first tentative, then assured, create noise bands around them. This is the only collaborative work in this series of pieces, and one of the few times I know of where Kenneth jammed with someone, and recorded the results (though he occasionally joined in contact
Irnprov or mixed-media sessions at Iowa). Curiously, for a duet, it's the one piece in this series which is not in discrete stereo. Both synthesizer and processed voice exist together, in the middle of the sound field And ii ends suddenly, too A rare example of a land of intuitive rapport between two artists — just a hint of what might have been, with the kind of collaboration that had too few opportunities la exist.
Kyrie: Orbis Fact/Or; a very odd do
Eight years separate the five Illinois pieces from Kyrie, the one piece of Kenneth's not made in o university studio. Kyrie was his mournful, sarcastic, and very angry farewell to the UCSD Music Department, an institution which he gave a lot to, and which supported him well, but which he came to despise with a passion. Kyrie was a "synthetic composition" made in his home studio in, as he put it, "a small cave near Mandy's Villa." The Villa was the new Mandeville Center for the Performing Arts at UCSD, a structure which Kenneth fell represented the final betrayal of all that he had hoped the Music Department might have stood for.
The stereo in this piece is the most radical of any of the tape pieces. Here, the separation is complete One channel has the sacred, Kenneth himself singing a plainchant Kyrie (Lord, have mercy) processed through a short tope-delay feedback patch used lo thicken up the sound, and make some interesting timbral shifts, while the other channel has the profane, Kenneth reading the nursery rhyme This Old Man, in a tone that verges on the poisonous. The nursery rhyme gets more and more distorted and filtered in each subsequent repetition until at the end it's a grotesque vocal utterance that refers more to the mournings of the mentally damaged than to its point of origin At the same time, the plainchant voice finishes with beautiful Tibetan octaves, a vocal sound that Kenneth was enchanted with and had been championed by Vladimir Voos al UCSD. The original chant, perhaps remembered from his Catholic roots, bears little relation to the performed version but Kenneth once indicated he had used the title ("orbis factor" — "forming a circle") lo suggest two-way communication — in-out, inference -stipulation — and that some of his faculty colleagues were more skilled at pontification than listening.
I don't want to give the impression that the making of Kyrie was entirely negative, however. I remember Kenneth being very excited and happy about the process that generated the vocal distortions of the nursery rhyme. One day he was telling us excitedly about a particular kind of equalizer which was very cheaply available from a mail-order place. This was the equalizer he had used lo make the piece. As well as everything else, Kyiie was about the joyful discovery of the Kind o sound modification made possible with this new equalizer. He was also delighted with the fact that the process he used allowed him lo use his awn voice as a distortion unit, so that his transformational process, which brought the nursery rhyme lo the threshold of intelligibility, would hove to be bodily based, as well as electronically based.
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