The Limits of a Mouth: Nate Wooley in NY Reviewed

From NYTimes.com:

Nate Wooley’s new work “For Kenneth Gaburo” is a setting of a sentence by Mr. Gaburo (1926-93), a searching composer, conductor, pianist and language theorist. But its presentation of the words is extreme, to say the least.

Abstractions of text in music aren’t new. Listening to the premiere of “For Kenneth Gaburo” on Monday evening at the Wild Project in the East Village, I thought of Morton Feldman’s glacial “Three Voices” (1982), in which long passages repeat and deconstruct, to the point of wordlessness, the opening of Frank O’Hara’s poem “wind”: “Who’d have thought/that snow falls.”