Gilbert did his doctorate in composition at Harvard University with Bernard Rands and Mario Davidovsky as well as Joshua Fineberg and Hans Tutschku and worked with Chaya Czernowin, Helmut Lachenmann and Magnus Lindberg.

Their multi-media, live-electronic chamber opera dreimaldrei gleich unendlich has been performed in Germany and the United States, including a premiere as part of the Musik der Jahrhunderte festival in Stuttgart.

[5] They have created multiple interactive installation pieces including Listening to Mountains,[1] and An Overlapping of Spaces, which combined a series of hanging surround-sound speaker arrays with unique iPod-based audience-interactivity.

...The book outright doesn't accept the rarely spoken but widely held assumption that a high-ish level of musical training is needed to appreciate these works.

But why it's subversive is that this completely undercuts the just-as-widely held and far-more-frequently spoken accusations that new music is abstrusely elitist, forever trapped in some sort of academic iron lung.