Kenneth Gaburo conducts New Music Choral Ensemble I
It was 1967, the summer of love, and the young radicals were huddled together experimenting, sweating in a tiny airless room. Gibberish, scat, sighs, whispers, as well as more refined musical tones, were coming from their vocal cords. For this was not Haight-Ashbury but Urbana, Illinois, and the New Music Choral Ensemble (NMCE) was merely exploring the boundaries of music. Instigated by Kenneth Gaburo, pioneer of electronic tape music and compositional linguistics at the University of Illinois, the sixteen student singers formed the first ensemble in the U.S. dedicated to contemporary vocal compositions. Advances in analog synthesizers, music theater, multimedia, and extended instrumental techniques were happening around them but choral music had been left high and dry. They were determined to fix this situation and more than equal to the task. With forty works in their repertoire and as many public concerts on their touring schedule, they established the standard for other generations to follow. “Music with the looseness of cigarette smoke and the intensity of mature thought,” as Gaburo once described the group’s repertoire. First off, learn to sing in 31-tones-to-the octave Just Intonation. Ben Johnston had written Ci-Git-Satie for the Swingle singers but groovy bachelor pads would not hear it until NMCE managed the task. “The game is not merely to name the tune, nor simply to swing…nor to dabble in the glimmer-shimmer of diamonds, but to DIG.,” Gaburo adds. Pauline Oliveros’s Sound Patterns had been around since 1961 and explored the overlap between electronic sounds and phonetic timbres. Robert Shallenberg’s Lilacs deconstructs Whitman’s poetry to its phonetic elements too. 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Leslie Bassett sets a fragment of Dag Hammarskold’s Markings, imitatively and sparingly.
Kenneth Gaburo  (Artist, Composer, Conductor),     New Music Choral Ensemble I (NMCE1)  (Artist),     Ben Johnston  (Composer),     Pauline Oliveros  (Composer),     Charles Hamm  (Composer),     Robert Shallenberg  (Composer),     Leslie Bassett  (Composer),     Luigi Nono  (Composer),     Anton Webern  (Composer),     Olivier Messiaen  (Composer)    &                   8                  more   Format: Audio CD
{"Manufacturer": "Neuma Records", "Date First Available": "November 12, 2020", "Label": "Neuma Records"}