The voice of Italian-American avant-garde pioneer Kenneth Gaburo resounds throughout this disc, both figuratively and literally. He was the teacher of composers Warren Burt and Philip Blackburn as well as organist Gary Verkade, and much in the same way he incorporated his speaking voice in his own works, his students have used Gaburo's taped words in their posthumous tributes to him.
Burt's 'Recitative/Tracing' deconstructs its vocal text and uses pitch-to-midi conversion to literally turn the spoken phrases into musical phrases played on a heavily prepared and altered pipe organ. Blackburn's 'P.P.S.' juxtaposes a recording of Gaburo reading a letter written in Italian to his ailing teacher Goffredo Petrassi with a subtly shifting organ drone. Gaburo's own 'Antiphony X,' one of a series of works for various instruments and tape, exploits as fully as would seem possible the manifold wild and wacky whoops and glissandos that can be extracted from the king of instruments.
