Erik Belgum conducted this interview via e-mail with Warren Burt and Philip Blackburn. It was published in Musicworks, 1999

Winded (works for organ and tape by, of and for Kenneth Gaburo) contains Kenneth Gaburo's organic opus, Antiphony X (exquisitely performed by Gary Verkade). The disc also includes two new works for pipe organ ("Recitative/Tracing" and "P.P.S."), tributes really, by two of Gaburo's former students, Philip Blackburn and Warren Burt. The release of Winded occasioned an ideal opportunity to discuss with Burt and Blackburn their work and their experiences with, and as students of, Kenneth Gaburo.

BELGUM: I only saw Gaburo perform once. I remember a tape piece that sounded like an unchanging dial tone that was maybe 15 minutes long.

BLACKBURN: "The Flow of u", for three singers of the New Music Choral Ensemble, an experiment in unison timbres.

BELGUM: What made it a fascinating performance was not really the sound, but the presence of the man playing the tape, sitting there listening with us, often with eyes closed, tilting his head slightly from time to time. He seemed to be in touch with something like what Scelsi mystically refers to as the "depth" of music - a parameter independent of pitch and rhythm. This was my only personal experience with Gaburo. Of course, there was Gaburo's Lingua Press, a publishing endeavor dedicated to the crossroads of language and music. There's also Gaburo the choral conductor, working through a gnarled choral score of, say, Luigi Nono.

BLACKBURN: Or the first US performance of Messiaen's Cinq Rechants.

BURT: Gaburo's own works for choir and performing bodies - his ever widening definitions encompassing ever more activities as possible for the choral performer - form a constant thread in his life's work.

BELGUM: And is recordings of Partch's music are definitive.

BLACKBURN: His recording of Partch's The Bewitched is definitive.

BURT: In 1980, at the invitation of the Harry Partch Foundation, he produced the first "urtext" performance of Partch's "The Bewitched" (1955) for performance at the Berlin Festival. This was the first performance of that work which faithfully followed Partch's ideas of "corporeality" and physicality, integrating the actions of musicians, dancers, and actors into a theatrical whole. This concern for physicality and integration of artistic disciplines was also central to Gaburo's musical thinking. For example, where John Cage and Iannis Xenakis would use external sources of information (the I-Ching, computer programs) for sources of random numbers, Gaburo's work from this period used his own body, often subjected to rather severe sensory deprivation exercises, as a source of random information.

BELGUM: So, Lingua Press, the choral work, the work with Partch, these were the aspects of Gaburo that initially captured my imagination and admiration. As difficult as he is to encapsulate, how would you describe Gaburo's work for those unfamiliar with it?

BLACKBURN: Harnessed chaos with a direct emotional appeal, disciplined but unconventional, uncompromising, stimulating acrobatic awareness, the traces of extraordinary research and psychological self-interrogation, reflective of life's complexities, conceptually gruellingly rigorous, exploring music as language. At various times he hung out with the likes of Samuel Becket, Henri Chopin, Harry Partch, Herbert Brun, Pauline Oliveros, but many of his friends were non-musicians. He was a controversial figure who didn't suffer fools gladly. A sign of his greatness as a teacher is that his students sound nothing at all like him or each other. In the sense that he was a magnet for generations of disenfranchised artists, he was a sort of Nadia Boulanger for underground experimentalists. He was also one of the few teachers that believed that composition could really be taught. Others may present historical models to emulate, Kenneth always brought it back to the phenomenon of the present, here and now. The performance you saw brings that experience home.

BURT: Gaburo was so prolific in such a wide variety of fields that a full assessment of his work is still difficult at this point several years after his death. His early, complexly structured instrumental works, where ideas from serialism and linguistics live side by side are highly valued by the academic musical world. Among these are "Mouthpiece" a "sextet for solo trumpet," for trumpet and three slide projectors (1970) and "Inside," a "quartet for one double bass player" (1969). In both these works, the performer is expected to speak and sing as well as perform a wide variety of extended instrumental techniques.

BURT: Critical to any consideration of Gaburo's work are his "Antiphonies" for instruments and electronic tapes. Twelve of these were begun between 1958 and 1992, of which eight were completed. (Antiphony V for piano and tape, and Antiphony VII for 4 video systems and 4 channel tape remained uncompleted at the time of his death. Antiphonies XI and XII seem to have only reached the sketch stage.) In addition to the works already mentioned "Antiphony III (Pearl White Moments)" (1963) for chamber chorus and tape, on a text by Virginia Hommel, should also be mentioned as one of the most succinct crystallizations of his early thinking in compositional linguistics. On January 26, 1993, Kenneth Gaburo died of cancer at the age of 66. He left behind a considerable body of work that crossed boundaries, widened definitions, and stood in powerful opposition to a commercial culture he considered not only immoral, but inept and obscene.

BELGUM: There's that ridiculously provincial New York City distinction of uptown and downtown composers, but it seems to form an interesting historical starting point from which to look at Gaburo. Where do you place Gaburo in the scope of late 20th century composers?

BLACKBURN: In California. He was so far out of East Coast politics (which also partly led to his lack of recognition). A work such as Antiphony VIII (Revolution) for percussionist Steve Schick, was a knockout at both Darmstadt and Bang on a Can. Neither Up- nor Down-town knew what to make of him. He professed not to care.

BURT: In addition to his own work, Gaburo was an inspiring teacher to several generations of composers. His influence can be seen in a wide range of contemporary artists, ranging from the minimalist clarinet works of composer Daniel Goode to the multimedia presentations of the political-cultural performance group, The Tape-Beatles; from the structural rigor of composers such as Robert Paredes and Dary John Mizelle to the environmental events of composer-ecologist David Dunn. In both his presentation of work from the past (Partch, Schoenberg, et al) and his creation of work for the present and future, Gaburo created a legacy of rigor and experimentalism that will be influential for decades to come.

BELGUM: What's a "scatter" and what were some of the other techniques of Gaburo's musical language?

BLACKBURN: 'Musical language' is a tautology, 'technique' the enemy. But basic cognition, inferring an order, composing a reality, was his schtick (whose isn't?). A 'scatter' is what you don't know yet, an unknown set of information before cognitive processes have assimilated it into patterns, made sense of it, come to know it. As such, we can't help composing, but we can be more aware of it. This started me on a trail of the question "When are we not composing?" and the investigation of composition as meditation.

BURT: The journey of Kenneth Gaburo's life shows a rather remarkable intellectual and spiritual evolution from one quite specific mid-century concept of the avant-garde to a quite opposing late-century one. As David Dunn expresses it, "from the time of his resignation from UCSD in 1975 to his death in 1993, there was a growing repudiation of the analytical procedures that preoccupied his work from the late 1950s through the 1970s. New concerns came to dominate his thinking: the necessity for social action, ecological philosophy, a renewed regard for the personal and local, and an insistence upon open, living structures as a basis for compositional methods. I began to sense a shift in his vocabulary away from references to formal attributes of language (terms like "compositional linguistics") toward references that attempted to embody larger patterns of human and nonhuman relationship.

BELGUM: What were Gaburo's hopes for Lingua Press?

BLACKBURN: To give a voice to exceptional works and their makers, to subvert the hierarchical world of the publishing industry (i.e. that individual works must fit a prescribed format), and to empower artists to carry their vision beyond the final double bar line into matters of how a score looks and feels and where it sits in the world. Kenneth's love of making things was always far ahead of his practical marketing and business sense though. Frog Peak now distributes the catalog. (Contact: Frog Peak, P.O. Box 1052, Lebanon, NH 03766 USA)

BELGUM: The approach I've been taking lately in working with musically with speech revolves around the idea of resonance. Resonance, with its beautifully suited literary, musical, acoustic and linguistic (phonetic) connotations, seems to me a very rich resource and strangely absent from much western music, at least absent as a parameter that composers consider to be on par with pitch and rhythm. For a quick example comparing Western distaste for resonance with the Eastern love of resonance, take the difference between a tabla drummer and a rock drummer. Tabla drummers weight the center of their drum heads to maximize resonance, then they have elaborately developed performance techniques to manipulate that heightened resonant capability. Rock drummers, on the other hand, tape the edges of their toms and stuff pillows into their bass drums to minimize resonance. The more I work with recorded speech, the more I realize that resonance is perhaps THE acoustic phenomenon to focus on. I feel that it can be brought to a point where it is a sonic parameter on par with pitch and rhythm. This is particularly true in working with speech, because speech works almost entirely due to our natural ability as virtuoso performers at the play of resonance. Manipulating resonance is what turns a "s" into a "sh", and "e" into a "i". It's what makes diphthongs possible. It's what puts the wow in "wow." I've heard that an original function of the Om was to slowly put your speech organs through their entire range of resonance as a meditational technique. As the song goes, "She's a brick.... haaaoooouuuuse!" I have also recently developed a McCluhanian interest in using recording technology as an extension of the articulatory organs of speech. Distortion extends fricatives and voiced sounds. Phase vocoding extends breath support. Filters extend the resonance of nasal and oral cavities. It's always amusing watching someone use a wah-wah pedal for the first time. They often literally can't operate it without moving their mouth. In this case, a filter is just a metaphorical extension of their vocal cavity, it appears to be an actual extension.

So, these are the interests that I had coming into this interview, and the interests I developed during several recent projects of my own It struck me that both of your pieces on Winded perhaps looked to the phenomenon of resonance as a starting point for setting a spoken text. I heard a Miles Davis track on the radio right after listening to the Gaburo disc and it struck me that as an improviser Miles wasn't so much playing a melody here as he was reinforcing certain resonant frequencies in manner akin to a lot of Alvin Lucier's work and very much like both of your pieces on the CD. This might have been a fluke listening experience, I don't know. To me there is usually a decidedly un-Western sound, or at least a non-classical (i.e. folksie) sound, to most musical uses of resonance (sitar, didjeridoo, throat singing of many kinds including Inuit and Tuvan, nyckelharpa, hardanger fiddle, Jew's harp, etc.), EXCEPT in the case of the pipe organ. Is anything resonating here with you two so far?

BLACKBURN: Yes, that is a nice observation, though I hadn't used resonance to describe my work until you pointed it out. I think it actually links the rest of my output (sound meditation instructions and building sound sculptures) with P.P.S., which I had thought was totally different from anything else I had done. Obviously I wanted P.P.S. to be a tribute to Kenneth, and the voice, because it reveals the persona, was always central to him. All the works on Winded are more like channeling his spirit than regular western compositions, I think. So P.P.S. began with the discovery of Kenneth's letter to Petrassi (Gaburo's composition teacher) which immediately attracted me because it preserved Kenneth speaking his native Italian and gave a brief personal bio summary. It was so private it brought to mind his interest in public/private issues and of course there was no question of censoring its indiscretions. On a logical level my use of it extended the teacher-student relationship another generation further. I mixed it in with tapes I made in the last few days of his life when he was racked with pain and planning to create a 'pain piece.' It became a collaboration which he asked me to complete. With anyone else I could be accused of exploiting the situation to make a gruesome psychodrama, but in this case the method fitted the subject. It became our pain pietas, a psychic resonance. I tried to remain true to many of Kenneth's favorite compositional issues: public-private (the use of a public confessional mode), in-out (drawing sounds from the organ by wires rather than pushing the keys, also the speakers are placed one in front, one inside the organ, front to back) using the text as a 'set' out of which its inherent ordering can be inferred (making the phonetic relationships three-dimensional, adding resonance to the primary pitches of his speaking voice) consideration of the whole pitch range as a bandwidth, within which a variety of combinations unfold attitudes towards writing for specific performers (Kenneth wrote Winded to exhaust Gary's and the organ's history. I knew Gary is a virtuoso so I wrote something for him which he could not do, yet a personal psychodrama which bares his soul, albeit privately in a journal, in each performance) irreverence with respect (I stuck a microphone up a dying man's nose). Another literal resonance is my subliminal central heating effect (a low pedal tone is introduced at the beginning which you only notice when it stops near the end). This and the occasional use of the voice to excite the natural resonances of the instrument are like acoustical phenomena put to emotional effect. It's all very empirical.

BURT: In the metaphorical sense, Erik, you're absolutely right, although in the literal, physical sense, in this piece I was more tracing the pitch content of Kenneth's voice, rather than its resonances. That is I took a text of his (Pentagony: On Guns and Cock Fighting) which explored those violations of public/private he was interested in (and a text which had cause a great deal of controversy here in Australia in 1987, when he performed in and recorded it for the radio), and then fed it through a pitch-to-MIDI converter to get a tracing of the pitches of his speaking voice. The pitch-to-MIDI converter I used, my trusty Roland CP-40, is moderately inaccurate, so this gave my transcription another level of nuance, working with the idiosyncracies of particular machine processes, which is another concern which Kenneth and I shared, although I first encountered this attitude with Joel Chadabe as an undergraduate. But when I got to UCSD for grad school, and worked with Kenneth, his enthusiasm encouraged me to keep going with this. That said, I did my best to rein in the CP40 so that its transcriptions are more accurate than inaccurate in tracing the pitches and inflections of Kenneth's voice. This use of the pitches of the speaking voice as musical material is something I'd been interested in for quite a while, but I probably wouldn't have done it in this piece if I hadn't performed Partch's "Bitter Music," which is ALL ABOUT the pitch of the speaking voice as music, and if Kenneth hadn't been so enthusiastic in his encouragement of that as well. The timbres that were used came from the structure of Kenneth's voice. I took 5 words (I think it was five, my memory may be incorrect here) and took the most prominent vowel from them, and used a computer Fast Fourier Transform program to look at their spectra. So this is actually dealing with the resonance of Kenneth's vocal tract, and finding out what frequencies are present in his mouth when he articulates a certain vowel. I then picked the most prominent frequencies in these spectrograms, and made additive synthesis tones which used these frequencies at the loudnesses they were in Kenneth's voice. So the timbres, though electronic, were quasi-vocal as well. As with Philip, this use of the voice as the primary structural source of many elements was also something that I derived from Kenneth. His "stare" method - stare at something until structural aspects begin to appear, and his "tracings left by a physical process" ideas were the impetus for these derivings of pitch and timbre. In the realization, I was a bit taken aback by the way my use of pitch-bend, over what was probably a wider range than the bends which occurred in Kenneth's voice, produced an almost humorous inflection to a very serious text. Having generated it though, I stuck with it - in order to learn to hear what this technological nuance might become. Then again, maybe it only accentuated the sarcasm that was in Kenneth's voice that I couldn't hear in the original recording. So yes, there's lots of resonance there - with his ideas, with the tracing of the resonances of his vocal tract, etc. The organ, by the way, plays the same pitches as the voice/electronic part - doubling it, except that the organ is quantized to a 32nd note accuracy. This makes the rhythms very hard to play (Gary asked for a virtuoso piece.....), but it does provide another level of structural interest - a smearing in time of the vocal rhythms. In one sense, the organ and the tape merge into one composite timbre, but in another sense, the organ can be heard as a resonance of the tape part..... Of course, Kenneth RESONATES in me still, and very deeply. Just last night, doing a theatrical improvisation, I found myself wrinkling my nose in disgust. I realized as I was doing it that I was falling briefly into my impression of Ron Robboy, who also wrinkles his nose that way, and I recall that Ron and I both probably got it from Kenneth! (Or maybe Kenneth got it from Ron...) So in these very real, and important nuanced senses, none of us ever completely dies, we just continue to resonate with each other. Maybe more horrifying than the thought of death is the thought of a life lived without interpersonal resonance.

BELGUM: As you two have discussed your Gaburo experiences over the years, what differences/changes/etc. have emerged between the San Diego Gaburo (whom Burt studied with) and the Iowa City Gaburo (Blackburn)?

BURT: It's not that simple. The Gaburo I first knew at USCD ('71) was a manic structuralist. The Gaburo I knew in '75 was much more into process and observing found structures unfolding. The transition from the guy who wrote Maledetto ('67-'68) to the guy who worked on the flow of [u] (three singers on one pitch for 20 mins - just listen to the those beatings!) was remarkable enough in itself. But then the years in the desert, the encounter with Partch's "The Bewitched" in 79-80, and the move to Iowa made further changes. In "LA" he talks about his realization that in the desert, all the complex cultural stuff he knew appeared empty when faced with the desert. That shedding of the whole classical music world can be traced in his writings - recognition of the political inadequacies of that world in "Beauty of Irrelevant Music" ('71) - to recognition of problems of the structures of science ("Brain-half a whole" ('77) to shedding even of phenomenology, which he loved (LA ('87)) to a very intense look at the personal (Pent/Agony ('86) and Ah Dio ('91)). As far as I could tell, he was dissatisfied at UCSD, bitter in the desert, but he HATED Iowa City and the U of I environment. Philip will be able to fill us in on that better than I can. But everytime I visited, he was delighted with his seminar, and the Pioneer food co-op, but despised the rest of the place and had a very hard time with most of his U of I colleagues. Having jettisoned all the values they still valued, this isn't surprising.

BLACKBURN: The main difference between the CA and IA Kenneth was his lack of a standing ensemble to work with. In Illinois and California he had directed the New Music Choral Ensemble and made works for them. After the Ramona buffer period when he was poor, isolated, and focusing on Lingua Press, he started to compose again (Antiphonies 8-10, Enough), make the video work Testimony, practice jazz piano, a few tape works, and make texts for his solo reading (LA, ISIT, AH DIO, Pent/Agony). The rehearsals for ENOUGH! with my choir for a recording were as close as he came to directing groups in performances of his music. Other things did not change: pugnaciousness against academic politics and institutional corruption, and his preference for teaching in multi-disciplinary seminars, as well as his devotion to his own work and that of his students. Ramona and Iowa City were isolating for him and he did what he could to survive in those places; from the one he learned about chaotic desert bugs and the other first hand research of the dumb and mediocre.

BELGUM: I find that there are linguists and philosophers of language who are fascinating to read (Austin, Wittgenstein, Derrida for example), and then there are linguists whose work provides a more practical, immediately applicable philosophy or set of tools for composition (for me these are Chomsky, Jakobson, Gennette and Lakoff). Did Gaburo have a fondness for any linguists in particular? Do you?

BLACKBURN: When I first studied with Kenneth in 1979 at the age of 17 he gave the following reading to do: Chomsky: Structural Linguistics, Benjamin Lee Whorf: Language, Thought and Reality, Claude Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind, Grotowsky: Towards a Poor Theatre. These must have been important to him because he did not recommend the work of others very often, preferring to focus on him and me, right there and then. Later he got into the animists and vitalists (Dee, Vico, Cusanus) and made his own Whole Language Language available to students. And he loved Chris Mann's work.

BURT: He didn't talk that much about this with me. I know he loved Phenomenology, but my brain cell isn't working well enough this morning to remember which phenomenologist. Husserl? Maybe. He also recommended Whorf highly to me. Years later, when I finally read Whorf, I agreed that he was useful. Gaburo's idea of Generative Grammar he got from Chomsky. But he applied it much more creatively than Chomsky. Kenneth definitely used a lot of very old phonetic analysis stuff - and based analysis and composition on the phonetic and phonemic content of a text. David Dunn has taken that method a lot farther than I have. I'll go out on a limb, and say that the distinction you make, between linguists who are fun to read, and ones that provide useful tools, is one that Kenneth would have at least partially have agreed with. But he also would have probably tried to figure out how to use the ideas of the "useless" ones as well. I think Kenneth had a love/hate relationship with Wittgenstein's work. There's sure a lot of references to LW in the ISIT/LA/AhDio trilogy, at any rate.

BELGUM: The question of the place of virtuosity in music seems to be a subtext in "P.P.S." and "Recitative/Tracing." As Warren mentioned earlier, his piece is a virtuoso rhythmic excursion while, unless I'm misunderstanding the performance, P.P.S. seems like it could be performed quite handily by an attentive non-musician. Antiphony X seems to imply that if the organ is to be destroyed once and for all, it is going to take a virtuoso to do it. I have very mixed feelings about virtuosity, and sometimes even about the notion of "chops" at all. (I remember The Fall's Mark Smith commenting that he had to quit playing guitar because he was getting too good!) On the one hand, I've seen the world of virtuosity swallow people whole, along with their love of music. On the other hand, virtuosity can lead to another realm of musical experience, like in Warren's piece. Could each of you say something about your take on virtuosity? What is its place in your music? What is its place in other music that is important to you?

BURT: I was a mediocre child accordion player. True virtuosity- of the kind that takes hours of practice was beyond me. Still, even today, I can do a flashy, empty polka with lots of runs which makes people THINK I'm a virtuoso accordionist. Not true. But I can play flashy runs and arpeggios. I got to San Diego in '71, and by '72 I was playing with Ron Robboy and David Dunn in Fatty Acid, the "incompetence" performance ensemble. Our performances were funny because we kept the rhythmic pulse going in a, well, virtuosic manner. We became the virtuosi of incompetence. Later, I discovered my speaking voice - with "Nighthawk", I found that I could read really fast and still keep the rhythm and coherence going, so I guess I became a virtuoso speaker- the only physical skill I think I REALLY have virtuosity in. These days, I develop my own electronic instruments to play, formerly in hardware, now, with all the great synth emulations, in software. I learn to play them well, but I never play any one long enough so that it doesn't keep surprising me, nor so long that I get slick on it, in the sense that I'm actually a slick and empty and not really very good accordion player. So how do I FEEL about virtuosity? On one level, I'm very distrustful of it. I know a REAL virtuoso pianist, but he has a complete fear of concepts and ideas in music. So there's a set of virtuoso fingers, but definitely not a virtuoso mind. This is the sort of virtuosity I dislike. On the other hand, if someone is going to do something for twenty years, they're going to get good at it, in some way. If I can perceive the way they're good at it, I'll enjoy that, even if it doesn't correspond to conventional notions of virtuosity. I guess that a virtuoso perception is one that can appreciate the beauties of all levels of performance, from microtonal amateur orchestras to those true vituosi Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz and Lennie Tristano on those amazing 1949 "Wow!" sessions. The problem is when either (traditional) virtuosi use their mechanical skills to put down other people, or when (traditional) non-virtuosi use their fear of virtuosi to disempower themselves. Maybe we all need to develop an attitude which values all levels of achievement. The problem there, of course, is changing the attitudes of the educational system. A footnote about Recitative/Tracing - when Gary asked for it, I thought he asked for a virtuoso piece, so I obliged. (I've written lots of music for amateur performance, too, by the way). Then when he was working on it, I apologized for its toughness and said, "but you did ask for a virtuoso piece." He said, "No, I didn't!" I had misheard him. So my hearing of his request was NOT virtuosic.

BLACKBURN: There was a great watershed in my compositions during the time I worked with Kenneth. I wrote increasingly complex music that fewer and fewer people I knew could (or might want to) play. I wrote an impossible piece for a virtuoso baroque ensemble (A Cambridge Musick: Solve et coagula) which made their virtuosity into a theatre of alienation; when watching them and their incredible sense of group unity all I could think was how excluded that made me feel. I made the work as though the audience were spying on a private rehearsal (the players are meant to start playing it as the audience walks in for the concert and refuse to acknowledge their presence). You can only thumb your nose for so long though. I then had a synchronistic experience out in Taos (Indian Friendship Dance) when a piece seemed to create itself. It turned my notions of order upside down much as the Ramona desert experience did for Kenneth. I became suspicious of my intentions every time I tried to compose and began to investigate composition as meditation. My works since then have all been for non-trained musicians (it usually takes too much out of me to have to deinhibit musicians). I have made many verbal instruction scores, simple in means, complex in result (sort of like Pauline Oliveros's Sound Meditations).. In this way I can create situations where anyone can become a virtuoso simply by having an authentic response to the rules of the game, and interacting with the other performers. I am no longer stipulating the desired notes but creating a venue for people to come together in the name of music and learn by doing. The results to an outside observer (if any) are as complex and interrelated as any professional ensemble could create if given plenty of rehearsals. There is no improvisation so no danger of falling back on licks and chops. The next stage of this for me is to not even provide verbal instructions but to compose the physical space and possible acoustic relationships and let people discover their own way. To this end I am building a Sonic Playground of permanent acoustical outdoor sound sculptures and reflecting echo spaces. In music I love to hear, I can take virtuosos or incompetents; both come across as humans engaged in a task to me both have impediments to overcome.. I always empathize much more with players who are on the edge, like when I heard Marie-Claire Alain forget her music or heard any microtonal school orchestra with clarinets about to squawk any moment.

BELGUM: Following up on your development as a composer, I've always been puzzled by the phenomenon of heavy duty serial composers ending up as composers trying to thwart or buck control. In addition to Gaburo, I'm thinking here of Boretz and that group and what I see to be the radical transformation of the journal Perspectives of New Music over the years. I guess this even includes the verbal scores of Stockhausen. Do you think this is a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus phenomenon, or can their current work be viewed as a logical extension of serialism? Some other explanation?

BURT: It's a completely logical development. Let's go out on a limb here. If Arnie S. (the original Arnie S from Vienna, not the current one) were alive today, at the age of 125, he'd be a free improviser. Probably be doing gigs with Merzbow. And maybe even be using turntables, although I see him more as a QuasiMidi Rave-O-Lution owner myself. OK? Seriously, consider that when he was composing with the 12 tone system, he wrote extremely quickly, and didn't revise all that much - my understanding is that the 12 tone system insured pitch coherence, but gesture, rhythm, timbre, etc, were all as free (and as constrained by a history of style) as they were for Bill Evans. (Evans, by the way, was also of the Gaburo generation - Kenneth had a great admiration for Evans. And let's not forget Chris Mann's "Blue Moon" project, which ferreted out the jazz pianist history of such people as Gaburo, Martirano, Babbitt, Stockhausen, Ashley, Chadabe, Boretz, etc. etc. etc.). There's a more simplistic takes on this. I remember my friend Felix Werder, (a wonderful and respected senior Australian composer based in Melbourne. He played jazz bass in the early '40s while writing Wolpe-like symphonies while in the refugees' internment camps. He worked as a neo-classicist in the very early '50s, and evolved a personal 12 tone technique in the late '50s. By the late 60s he was playing live electronics and freely improvising, or improvising using a written score as a basis for contours, but not precise pitches and rhythms. Now he's writing fully notated scores which are constructed so that NO logic can be deduced from them - like Brun, he crafts a series of non-sequiturs) saying that when he had a new music ensemble in the early '70s, at one point they found that they could improvise and produce the same sounds that were in their scores, but the improvised performance had a much better energy. So for him, to move over to improvisation was simply a better way of doing what he had been doing. And then there's the philosophical trend from structuralism to wholism. Certainly, I'd say that that was a contributing factor in Kenneth's case, and probably in Ben Boretz' case as well. And don't forget, this is all occuring in an environment where .....heeeeeerrrrrrreeee's Johnny!.......(Cage, of course) was operating as well. And Cage was a Schoenberg student. So the trends of increased structural complexity and increased anarchic energy are maybe not oppositional, but partners in a larger movement. That applies in my case, anyway. These days, I'm happy writing a 12-tone piano piece based on Ernst Krenek's ideas, if that's what starts itching in my brain cell (as it did in April) and I'm just as happy rolling around on the floor, rising to my feet, grabbing a soft-toy squirrel in which a Buchla Lightning sensor was concealed and moving that around to trigger off some drum'n'bass samples, making a tune that was so thick and chaotic all the drum'n'bass fans I've played it to so far have run screaming from it (as I did in early June). Does this bring us back to virtuosity? (I might just mention another virtuoso anarchist - Lloyd Dunn -from Iowa City- "The Grand Delusion" and indeed all of the Public Works/Tape Beatles projects he's involved in are virtuoso appropriations that anyone could do!)

BLACKBURN: I think the rise of chaos theory permitted dedicated serialists to see that the logical end result of their efforts was a kind of randomness and that randomness was also a kind of order. Fractals have a dignifying effect. Also the use of rows can be a strategy for examining relationships closely and bringing them to the forefront, staring at the possibilities and having the intervals reveal their nature, which you then capitalize on by extending into a larger structure. Thus use of a row is not so far from Gaburo's use of a scatter and inferring order from a random array, coming to know its inherent properties. The difference is largely one of scale: in a scatter you would be dealing with the macro- as well as the micro-levels, rather than pouring the content into a preexisting structure. Especially in Kenneth's case, he never gave up control. Even though he used graphic notation that was simply because it was the most accurate and authentic representation of what the player should do. There is no room for improvisation or chance. While the 'row' may have been generated by random means, the 'coming to know it,' the composing of it, is the same cognitive process.

BELGUM: Philip, the recordings of your work that I've heard have a very strong sense of place. Additionally, one can always sense the presence of people. This is very apparent on the recording of P.P.S. In a way, it seems like you are able to take what is generally viewed as the downside of live recording and turn it into a strength. So, I'm not even sure what it would mean to have a "studio" recording of your work. Does this approach come out of Partch's approach to musical corporeality? I ask because I think it can be detected in the way you've assembled the Partch "enclosure" projects*, especially "enclosure 2." Could you expand a little on this aspect of your work and also maybe even comment on how or if it affected your field recordings in Vietnam* and your editing/assembling of the enclosure Partch project (*all recordings are on the innova label).

BLACKBURN: The performance of P.P.S. was in a packed hall of composers who were peeved at having to wait for the concert to start late. To their credit this was one of the quietest audiences I have ever not heard (until one 'booed' at the end). For a long time I tried to make works that could not be recorded (my obscurity perhaps attests to the success of this). Partly because I think I realized that music does not exist outside a performance/experience of it and no lab version could ever be a timeless representation of 'the score,' only another instance of its oral history. In fact I made a piece, Unearthing, which is a 'chain letter': I recorded an improv and instructed another to listen to the tape and mimic it on whatever instrument. That performance is recorded and passed on to the next. Any combination of players and instruments can be used along with any generation of tapes. There can therefore be no definitive performance, just moments along the way. Somehow the energy of the original tape persists throughout the 20+ versions I have heard. This is only 'corporeal' in the sense that it refers to a specific time and place, like haiku rather than a generalized emotional poem. The universal might come from the concrete. There was no conscious connection to Partchian philosophy but the analogy is certainly there. The Vietnamese field recordings had little option but to exhibit the context; it was impossible to get away from the sound of motorbikes and firecrackers but I also wanted their flavor to permeate the performances. I assembled a Hanoi soundscape in the belief that the music of a people is tied to the acoustic environment they inhabit, so soup vendors, power cables, wood beetles and bells all somehow relate to the musical culture too. Of course the most direct connection is between the tones of the Vietnamese language and the quality of the instruments which developed to complement the voice. The Partch project operated under the same philosophy. You can't understand Harry's Speech-Music and consequent microtones unless you have the sing-song sound of his speaking voice in your head (like recitative could only have been an Italian invention). So I interspersed fragments of his speech at various points which also served to introduce the following piece. He was also a man of many masks so I included surreptitious tapes of him as well as a variety of stories told about him during his wake. Enclosure Two and the series as a whole (of videos, CDs and a book) is intended as a multi-media biography, with artforms interpenetrating much as Harry tried to do with his corporeal ethic. The book too is not straight-jacketed text but rather a scrapbook laid out for readers to make their own connections and come to their own conclusions about the man. I am using the music as a window to the man rather than pretending it came from some sterile composer. In this case it is impossible, even undesirable to separate the maker from the made, Partch's life from his works. To some extent I believe that is true of all of us and that the attempt to deny one's presence in a work of art is also to tell us about yourself.

BELGUM: Here's kind of a dumb wrap-up question, but I ask it of everybody I know. So here goes. Who are your favorite composers?

BLACKBURN: Thomas Tallis, Harry Partch, Warren Burt and Erik Belgum of course, Anon, Eton Choirbook composers, Ali Akhbar Khan, Monteverdi, and many more.

BELGUM: I think I know what you mean in citing me and Warren. I find lately that creating is much more something that my friends and I all do as opposed to being engaged in some kind of massive historical endeavor. In a sense, I guess I have been cured entirely of Bloom's "anxiety of influence."

BURT: Favorite composers? Why, all of them, of course! Especially my friends. Seriously - if someone's my friend, I'll hear their music differently. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago where I said I'm not dealing with Baudrillard's work anymore until I can have a cup of tea with him I was serious. Personal contact as a gateway to aesthetic experience is an idea I deeply believe in. I've been reading a lot about, and re-listening to a lot of music by Ives recently, though, and love him more than ever, if you have to have ONE name.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

PRINCIPAL WORKS (compiled by Warren Burt): "Cantilena One" (soprano solo) (1951) "Four Inventions for Clarinet, Piano and Text" (1954) "BLUR (an opera with actors with tape)" (1956) "Line Studies" (fl.,cl.,vla.,trb.) (1957) "Mass for Tenors and Basses" (1958) "Antiphony I (Voices)" 3 string groups and tape (1958) "Antiphony II (Variations on a Poem of Cavafy)" (satb chorus, soprano solo, tape) (1962) "Antiphony III (Pearl White Moments)" (chamber chorus - satb 4+4+4+4 - tape) text by Virginia Hommel (1963) "Lemon Drops" (tape solo) (1964) "For Harry (dedicated to Harry Partch)" (tape solo) (1964) "Fat Millies Lament (dedicated to MF)" (1964) "The Wasting of Lucrecetzia" (tape solo) (1965) "Antiphony IV: (Poised)" (voice, piccolo, bass trombone, double bass, tape) text by Virginia Hommel (1967) "Lingua I: Dante's Joynte" (6 shouting voices, overhead amber spot, 16mm film, tape) (1965-68) "Lingua I: INSIDE" (quartet for one double bass player) (1969) "Lingua II: Maledetto" (composition for 7 virtuoso speakers) (1967-69) "Lingua I: Mouth-Piece" (solo trumbet, projections) (1970) "Twenty Sensing (Instruction) Compositions" (various vocal and instrumental performers) (1968-73) "Lingua III: In The Can (a dialectic mix in 3 rounds)" (40 actors, slides, film, tape) (1970) "Antiphony VI (Cogito)" (string quartet, slides, 2 and 4 channel tapes) text by Virginia Hommel (1971) "Collaboration I:" Herbert Brun, "Mutatis Mutandis" (computer graphic scores); Kenneth Gaburo, "The Beauty of Irrelevant Music" (linguistic composition) (1972) "The Flow Of (U)" (sab trio) (1974) "Show-Tellies" (video compositions) (1974) "Kyrie: Orbis Fact/Or: a very odd do: (synthetic composition for chorus, generated by one voice in a small cave around Mandy's Villa)" (tape solo) (1975) "Subito - Theatre for Four Instruments" (voice, trumpet, viola, double bass) (1977-78) "Rerun" (4 channel tape) (1983) "Antiphony VIII: Revolution" (solo percussion, tape) (1983-84) "Antiphony IX (---a DOT is no mere thing---)" (orchestra, children, tape) (1984-85) "Few" (collaboration with Henri Chopin)(solo tape) (1985) "ISIT" (solo reader) (1986) "LA" (solo reader) (1987) "ENOUGH! ---(not enough)---" (40 voices, solo percussion) text by Benjamin Franklin (1988) "Pentagon/y (---Concerning Guns & Cock-Fighting)" (solo reader) (1989) "Testimony" (version for radio) (collaboration with Andrew McLennan) (1989) "Antiphony X: (Winded)" (organ, tape) (1991) "Hiss" (tape solo) (1992) "Mouthpiece II" (speaking voice and concrete sounds on tape) (1992)

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