Person · Male
Harley Gaber
American composer and visual artist
- From
- Chicago, United States
- Active
- 1943–2011
- Releases
- 5
About
Harley Gaber (June 5, 1943 – June 16, 2011) was a visual artist and composer known for his minimalist and spectral approaches to time and sound. With his emphasis on quiet sustained sonorities and textures, Gaber is counted among the early American minimalist composers, and considered to be a forerunner of drone and spectralism. His best known recorded composition, The Winds Rise in the North, has been called by musician Keith Fullerton Whitman "one of the holy grails of minimalism in music in the 20th century."
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In 1978, he stopped composing, moved from New York City to San Diego, California, and began creating photo-collages, mixed media collages, paintings, and pen-and-ink works he called graphic music. However, in 1993 he started work on Die Plage (The Plague), an art-historical narrative of Germany from the Weimar Republic to the end of World War II, completing it in 2002. It grew to become a massive work of approximately 4,200 photomontaged canvases measuring 16 by 20 inches (41 by 51 cm).
In the final three years of his life Gaber composed two works: I Saw My Mother Ascending Mt Fuji and In Memoriam 2010. The album of his last work was released two weeks before Gaber committed suicide in June 2011.
Discography
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Identifiers
- MusicBrainz
- 36f4a30c-a477-4f45-a6a1-0f7c770fbafa
- ISNI
- 0000000083837981
- IPI
- 00061214517
Data from MusicBrainz, saved 6 Nov 2026. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, covers from the Cover Art Archive and Apple Music.