The Flow of (u) is a piece of music for three voices by Kenneth Gaburo, composed in 1974.
Kenneth Louis Gaburo was an American composer.
The piece consists of "one note sung by three singers for twenty-three minutes" on u whose goal is "to sing in tune to such an extent that … this would consist of phase-coherent waves of sound." This, however, proves impossible, as singers must breathe, beating occurs between nearly in tune pitches, and the frequency spectrum or harmonics: "Gently changing balances between the voices would result in very subtle glissandi of the harmonics of the spectrum being heard." The piece creates a "(sonic) universe in this (linguistic) 'grain of sand'" (Burt 2002).
The close back rounded vowel, or high back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨u⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is u.
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse, of the mensural level. The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a piece of music, or the numbers a musician counts while performing, though in practice this may be technically incorrect. In popular use, beat can refer to a variety of related concepts including: pulse, tempo, meter, specific rhythms, and groove.
A harmonic is any member of the harmonic series. The term is employed in various disciplines, including music, physics, acoustics, electronic power transmission, radio technology, and other fields. It is typically applied to repeating signals, such as sinusoidal waves. A harmonic of such a wave is a wave with a frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the frequency of the original wave, known as the fundamental frequency. The original wave is also called the 1st harmonic, the following harmonics are known as higher harmonics. As all harmonics are periodic at the fundamental frequency, the sum of harmonics is also periodic at that frequency. For example, if the fundamental frequency is 50 Hz, a common AC power supply frequency, the frequencies of the first three higher harmonics are 100 Hz, 150 Hz, 200 Hz and any addition of waves with these frequencies is periodic at 50 Hz.
An nth characteristic mode, for n > 1, will have nodes that are not vibrating. For example, the 3rd characteristic mode will have nodes at L and L, where L is the length of the string. In fact, each nth characteristic mode, for n not a multiple of 3, will not have nodes at these points. These other characteristic modes will be vibrating at the positions L and L. If the player gently touches one of these positions, then these other characteristic modes will be suppressed. The tonal harmonics from these other characteristic modes will then also be suppressed. Consequently, the tonal harmonics from the nth characteristic modes, where n is a multiple of 3, will be made relatively more prominent.
Unlike other minimalist works in which, compared to serial music, "a certain level of articulational subtlety is eschewed in favor of an overall psycho-acoustic effect," in Gaburo's piece "the focus is even more intense, and the attention to dynamic shaping given to the lines … is here transferred to the micro-level" (Burt 2002).
An earlier work from Gaburo's Lingua series, Lingua IV (1970), for various media, bears a similar subtitle: "The Flow of (i)2" (Rosen and Moore 2001).
Sources
Burt, Warren. 2002. Liner notes for Kenneth Gaburo: Five Works For Voices, Instruments, and Electronics". New World Records 80585-2. Produced for CD by David Dunn.
Rosen, Jerome, and Keith Moore. 2001. "Gaburo, Kenneth (Louis)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Warren Burt is an Australia-based composer of American birth. He is known for composing in a wide variety of new music styles, ranging from acoustic music, electroacoustic music, sound art installations, and text-based music. Burt often employs elements of improvisation, microtonality, humour, live interaction, and lo-fi electronic techniques into his music.
Stanley John Sadie was an influential and prolific British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), which was published as the first edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
John Tyrrell was a British musicologist. Born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, he studied at the universities of Cape Town, Oxford and Brno. He was a Lecturer in Music at the University of Nottingham (1976), becoming Reader in Opera Studies (1987) and Professor (1996). From 1996 to 2000 he was Executive Editor of the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001). From 2000 to 2008 he was Research Professor at Cardiff University
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