The second day of Tectonics Festival New York turns attention to Harley Gaber, a complex American composer, filmmaker, artist, and tennis player. A panel on the artist’s life and works includes guests Paul Paccione, Ned Sublette and Bill Hellerman, and is moderated by Eric Richards, a composer and friend of Gaber.
Following the panel, Saturday May 24th at 8pm, Gaber’s monumental work The Winds Rise in the North is performed by a quintet including extraordinary string players Conrad Harris, Pauline Kim, Esther Noh, Alex Waterman and Erin Wight.
Harley Gaber (1943-2011) does “harrowing yet peaceful” like no one else. His richly sonorous spectral drones sweep the soul along on its darkest night towards a dawn forever just beyond reach. Originally from Chicago, Gaber studied with Kenneth Gaburo and Darius Milhaud among others. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he 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 to devote himself to teaching and playing tennis. 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 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 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 2008 original soundtrack for “Mein Kamps: Akt V” (filmed in Berlin and named after the Berlin bakery chain Kamps), 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. His “I Saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji” was completed in 2009 and released just weeks before his death by suicide in 2011.
