Artistic influences

German Expressionism and Dada are the artistic movements that most influenced him. The particular artists that critics cite as evident in Gaber's work are Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The photomontage works of John Heartfield and Hannah Höch influenced him greatly, as did their use of photographs to subvert and criticize their subject matter.^[5][6]

Musical influences

Horace Reisburg, Gaber's music teacher at New Trier High School from 1958 to 1961 in Winnetka, Illinois, encouraged him to continue his studies at the Aspen Institute with Darius Milhaud in the summer of 1961. Gaber enrolled that fall in the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where he studied first with Lajaren Hiller. But the faculty member who influenced Gaber the most was Kenneth Gaburo. The two formed a life-long friendship in which they investigated and challenged each other's basic aesthetic assumptions.^[7] In 1963, he moved to Rome to pursue further studies in composition with Aldo Clementi, Franco Evangelisti, Boris Poorena and Giulio Rotoli. On concluding his studies in 1964, he returned to the U.S., settling in New York City. From 1964 to 1966, Gaber studied with William J. Sydeman,^[8] who was on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music. Gaber was influenced by the creative ferment among fellow composers in the minimalist music world of New York City, especially Morton Feldman.^[9]

Artistic works

Gaber's visual art work took many forms, including photography, pen and ink, collage, photomontage and drawings. His pen-and-ink drawings of graphic music were first exhibited in a group show in Bern, Switzerland, in 1974. By April 1976, his graphic music work was featured in a solo exhibition at Gallery 219 in Buffalo, New York. In September 1976, the Alternative Center for International Arts,^[10] now known as the Alternative Museum, mounted a solo show of his drawings and graphic music.

After moving to San Diego in 1982, Gaber turned to photography as his favored medium. By 1985, his experiments with photomontage led to acquisition of one of his works and its inclusion in an exhibit by the Museum of Photographic Arts^[11] in San Diego's Balboa Park, California. In the late 1980s, he experimented with mixed media collage and wood constructions. Both the wood and mixed media works led to exhibits in San Diego, California and Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1990 and 1991.

One of 4,200 panels from Die Plage (The Plague) by Harley Gaber. Canvases are photomontage and charcoal, black-and-white, 16 by 20 in (41 by 51 cm).

In 1993, Gaber started work on what would become his magnum opus, Die Plage (The Plague). This work soon became the center of Gaber's efforts, displacing his work in all other media. When he completed it in 2002, it was composed of about 4,200 canvases, each measuring 16 by 20 inches (41 by 51 cm).^[6] Gaber used xerography to modify photographs, and then combined them on canvas using photomontage and charcoal. The work is ordered in chronological sequence, starting with Weimar Republic and ending at the conclusion of World War II. When exhibited in its entirety, with canvases arranged in rows five high, the work runs nearly 1,680 feet (510 m) in length.^[3]

In 1995, Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California, mounted an exhibit of the first 950 canvases—its first public showing. Art critic Jonathan Saville, writing for the San Diego Reader, wrote:

In experiencing Die Plage (The Plague), you first focus on the emotion-charged content of the pictures, the Nazi arrogance, the Jewish suffering. After awhile, you become aware of the remarkable artistry displayed in each of the canvases, the powerful composition, the dramatic treatment of darks and lights, the fabulously expressive use of such aesthetic elements as repetition, contrast, density, patterning and texture, where even the graininess of the enlarged photos is given an artistic purpose. (Gaber's medium may be photo-montage, but his sensibilities and talents are those of a painter-–and an exceptionally gifted one.)^[5]

This exhibition at Southwestern College in San Diego, California, in 1995, was the first public showing of Die Plage (The Plague) This panel measured about 10 feet high and about 20 feet long.

From September 23 to October 21, 2000, The Lab in Los Angeles, California exhibited roughly 700 canvases from all sections of the work done to date. Leah Ollman, an art critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote:

Harley Gaber's vast, absorbing installation at the Laboratory steeps its viewers in the visual vocabulary of German politics and culture from the end of the first World War through the end of the second. Neither oppressively didactic nor consistently propagandistic, the work captures the tumult and terror of those years through a thoughtful, aggressive barrage of images. The heart of the show is made up of four continuous sections, whose subjects progress chronologically from the promising dynamism of the Weimar Republic through the depravities of the Nazi regime. In this terrifically engaging panorama, Gaber uses both the imagery and visual strategies of German art from those decades to invoke the character of the times.^[6]

Musical works

Gaber's first recorded composition, Ludus Primus: Two Flutes and Vibraphone, (1966) was followed by Chimyaku: Solo Alto Flute (1968), Kata: Solo Violin for (1969) and Michi: Solo Violin (1969). Composer Eric Richards described Gaber's minimalist music as an effort to "get inside the music."

He notated minute directions for the attack, dynamic changes, and other physical characteristics of each and every note, in ways that, while they might have superficially resembled some of the serial music of that time, were really his attempt to get beyond appearances, and slow down the sense of time in the music through a deeper investigation of the sound itself.^[7]

His compositions in the 1970s were mainly for strings, and in these works, he strived to suspend time. The Winds Rise in the North: String Quintet (1974), Sovereign of the Centre (1972) and Indra's Net (1974) are considered to be his most significant compositions. These minimalist works reflected Gaber's study of Buddhism."^[7][9]

Harley Gaber resumed composing in 2008, after receiving a commission from William Hellerman of the Downtown Ensemble, resulting in Webern's Gambit, a multi-media work for film and cello. It associated film imagery, including old German footage and recordings, with a cello part derived from pitches in a movement of Anton Webern's Piano Variations.^[1] In 2009, Harley Gaber composed I Saw My Mother Ascending Mt. Fuji using GarageBand to assemble and rework existing acoustic sound sources, in a manner similar to his visual photomontage works. It was produced by Philip Blackburn, and released on Innova Recordings. In 2011, Innova Recordings also published In Memoriam 2010, a work commissioned by the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation in memory of his mother.^[1]

Gaber's contributions as a composer were described by Shane Mack, in the obituary which he wrote for the British music publication, The Wire:

he and his music shared the same complex personality, uncompromised by marketing concerns or wanting to fit into any scene.... it is the high level of perfectly-realised thoughts in sound, that could only have sprung from his fragile life of outsider-dom, that ensures his stature as one of America's most important artists.^[4]

Major performances of his work were produced on May 13, 1977, by the New York Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble, conducted by Pierre Boulez;^[13] the Berlin Festival;^[14] the Tanglewood Music Festival; the Once Festival at the University of Michigan;^[15] the Kitchen in New York City; Evenings for New Music in Buffalo and New York City.^[16]