Jon Gibson, minimalist composer, dies at age 80
Jon Gibson, a composer, multi-instrumentalist, visual artist and collaborative musician who had a profound effect on the creation and dissemination of what would come to be known as “minimalist” music, died Oct. 12 at a hospital in Springfield, Mass. He was 80.
The cause was complications from a brain tumor, said his son, Jeremy Gibson, also a musician.
In a career spanning almost six decades, Gibson wrote music for solo instruments, electronics, dance, music theater and opera.
His most ambitious creation was “Violet Fire,” a 90-minute opera about the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla for six principal singers, chorus and chamber orchestra. It received its world premiere in Belgrade in 2006 and was brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the Next Wave Festival that year. An evening-length work, “Relative Calm,” in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs, was presented at BAM in 1981.
Gibson played in the world premiere performances of three hugely influential works that changed the musical zeitgeist in America — Terry Riley’s “In C” (1964), Steve Reich’s “Drumming” (1971) and Philip Glass’s “Music in 12 Parts” (1974). “Whether you’re drawing a straight line or zig-zagging through the history of American Minimalist music, there is one person you’re bound to meet,” composer Britton Powell wrote of Gibson in 2016 for Bomb magazine.
He was a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble from its first concert in 1968 until 2019. He played in every performance of the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera
“Einstein on the Beach” around the world and made two separate recordings of the work.
“Jon Gibson was one of the people responsible for the new musical languages which came out of the 1960s and ’70s,” Glass said this week, recalling his friend as gentle, self-effacing and highly skilled. “Jon brought the technique of circular-breathing to the music, and to the Philip Glass Ensemble. To put it bluntly, the music wouldn’t have happened without Jon. His aesthetic and technical ability was essential for new music. That’s why everyone wanted to play with him. He brought the music to life.”
The son of educators, Jon Charles Gibson was born in Los Angeles on March 11, 1940, and grew up in El Monte, a suburb. His initial musical interests were in what was known as modern “cool school” jazz, and he heard many of the leading artists in the field, including pianist Dave Brubeck, saxophonist Paul Desmond and trumpeter Chet Baker.
Gibson and his family moved to northern California, where he studied at Sacramento State, San Francisco State and the University of California at Davis. There, he grew interested in the avant-garde, experimental music of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Cornelius Cardew and helped form a group called the New Music Ensemble, which made two albums.
He moved to San Francisco, where he met Reich, who asked Gibson to play saxophone in a new piece.
In recent years, Gibson had played and toured with his son Jeremy’s playful ensemble Sir Jarlsberg, which offers an idiosyncratic mixture of Renaissance music and hip-hop that they called “Hark Hop.”