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Grove
Dictionary of Music Entry on Jon Gibson*
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Gibson, Jon (Charles)(b.
Los Angeles CA, 11 March 1940).
Saxophonist, flutist,
keyboardist, percussionist, composer, graphic artist. Attended Sacramento
State University and studied with Henry Onderdonk and Wayne Peterson
at San Francisco State University (BA 1964).
In San Francisco
and after 1966, in New York he performed in early works of Steve
Reich (1963-72, including the 1967 Reed Phase, which Reich
wrote for him, and the premiere of Drumming in 1972); Terry
Riley (premiere of In C, 1964); and La Monte Young (as a
member of the drone ensemble The Theatre of Eternal Music in 1970).
He is a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, in which he
has performed since 1968, the year Glass dedicated to Gibson the
soprano saxophone solo Gradus (originally entitled / \
for Jon Gibson, indicating the shape of the music stands at
performance). He has frequently performed with Glass in duet and
has performed and/or collaborated with such composers as Christian
Wolff, Frederick Rzewski, Garret List, David Behrman, Thomas Buckner,
"Blue" Gene Tyranny, Harold Budd, Alvin Curran, Arthur
Russell, Peter Zummo and Jaron Lanier.
The dancer/choreographers
for whom he has scored and performed his works include Marilyn Wood
(Seagram Building Event, 1972), Nancy Topf (The Great
Outdoors, 1976), Margaret Jenkins (Equal Time, 1976),
Merce Cunningham (Fractions, 1977, and various "Events"),
Lucinda Childs (Relative Calm, 1981), Elaine Summers (Solitary
Geometry, 1983), Simone Forti (Framing Music, 1992),
and Elisabetta Vittoni (La Spezia, 1993).
An accomplished
graphic artist, Gibson also provided the visual elements (slide
projections, video) for several of these performances. His visual
work is most often a structural representation of some aspect of
a music composition (Melody III Book II, 1975, published
by Printed Matter). He collaborated with french artists Tania Mouraud
and Kuntzel on the gallery installation Trans (1977), with
video artist Peter D'Agostino on Teletapes (1981), Double
You (and XYZ)) (1985) and Transmissions (1987-88) and
with JoAnne Akalaitis on the music/theater piece Voyage of the
Beagle (1987), and in 1985 himself produced the computer video
animation Interval 30.9A.
Gibson began his
own early experimental work as an improviser and composer, performing
in the New Music Ensemble, which also included composers Larry Austin,
Richard Swift and Stanley Lunetta. In 1966 he composed Who Are
You in which he recorded his own voice chanting repetitive variations
of "who are you" (who are you are: are you who you: you
who are who) on several tapes that were then placed in various parts
of a space and played back simultaneously. During the salad days
of performance art in New York he clapped, stamped and shouted on
stage in a rhythmic etude entitled Rhythm Study for Voice, Hands,
Feet (1973). Gibson's compositions reveal an underlying Minimalist/Post
Modern vocabulary which he helped pioneer, along with influences
from jazz, which he has studied since his teens, notably with saxophonist
John Handy in the early 60s; and the South Indian vocal music he
studied simultaneously at the Ali Akbar Khan School. Other non-Western
musical influences include Indian musicians Pandit Pran Nath, Bismallah
Khan and Mahalingam. His style ranges from the multi-track density
of Visitations I and II, an "environmental soundscape"
incorporating layers of ocean, bird, percussion and wooden flute
sounds, which anticipates but is rarely equaled by practitioners
of ambient and New Age music, to the austere sustained-tone harmonics
of Cycles, and from the Mediaeval-tinged additive process
of Song I and II to the pristine lyricism of jazz-flavored
ballads like Mont Blanc (from Beagle). He is also
known as an accomplished improviser. Visitations I and II and
later Cycles and Untitled were released by Glass'
Chatham Square Records in 1972 and 1977 and reissued, along with
recordings of other Gibson works from the 70's period, in 1995 and
97 by New Tone. His music also appears on Point, Einstein, Lovely
Music, EarRational, New Arts Program and Atavistic.
(* This biography
varies slightly from the version published in the Grove Dictionary.)
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