Harley Gaber was an experimental composer from the USA. The Winds Rise in the North was composed in the Winter of 1973/74 and revised a year later. It is a monumental work, in duration and intensity of expression, lasting some 90-100 minutes and is in 4 parts. Scored for a quintet of 3 violins, viola and cello, the instruments are amplified and much of the music is performed sul ponticello (on or near the bridge of the instruments) creating a richly incandescent web of overtones and harmonics. Gaber wrote that the piece ‘exists as a tipping point into the interior World of musical sound where only a vague patina of music and musical structures as we commonly think of it and them, remain. It is not a slowed down, protracted conventional musical structure, nor is it really a form of drone music. It moves more directionally than most music of that genre. It was at its inception modeled after my perception of Nature’s ‘natural’ process of evolvement, movement and cyclical change seen simultaneously from a micro and macro vantage point.’