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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue “White Woman” as Jazz
Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947)
by Sherrie Tucker Katrina and the New Jazz Orthodoxy by Salim Washington Celebrating Noah Creshevsky Dusty Springfield and the Motown Invasion by Annie J. Randall Review: Searching for Robert Johnson by Nathan W. Pearson Review: From Paris to Peoria by Nancy Newman |
Celebrating Noah Creshevsky
Noah Creshevsky in the 1970s Noah
Creshevsky studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luciano
Berio at Juilliard. As a faculty
member in Brooklyn College’s Conservatory of Music, he coordinated the
composition program and directed the Center for Computer Music.
Creshevsky’s recent compositional work is part of a genre known as
hyperrealism, explored in his essay below. On 3 November 2005 the Brooklyn College International
Electro-Acoustic Music Festival presented a concert to celebrate
Creshevsky’s sixtieth birthday. The concert took place at Klavierhaus in
Manhattan and featured performances by Vahagn Avetisyan (piano), Dennis
Báthory-Kitsz (voice), Thomas Buckner (baritone), and Beth Griffith
(soprano). Highlights of the program were compositions written in
Creshevsky’s honor by Báthory-Kitsz, George Brunner, Douglas Cohen,
David Gunn, Michael Kinney, Tania León, Robert Voisey, and Amnon Wolman. In honor of Creshevsky’s birthday, an excerpt from
León’s Para-Noah and reminiscences and statements by his friends and colleagues are published on
p.7. The complete tribute statements are
available at <www.bcisam.org>. —Douglas
Cohen Brooklyn College On Hyperrealism My musical vocabulary consists
largely of familiar bits of words, songs, and instrumental music which are
edited but rarely subjected to electronic processing. The result
is music that obscures the boundaries of
real and imaginary ensembles through the fusion of opposites: music and noise,
comprehensible and incomprehensible vocal sources, human and superhuman vocal
and instrumental capacities. My most
recent hyperrealist compositions explore the fragmentation and reconstruction
of pre-existing music in combination with original synthetic and acoustic
materials. Moments suggest musical
environments of indeterminate ethnicity—simultaneously Western and
non-Western, ancient and modern, familiar and unfamiliar. Hyperrealism is an electro-acoustic musical
language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment
(“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or
excessive (“hyper”). Hyperreal music exists in two basic genres. The first uses the sounds of traditional
instruments that are pushed beyond the capacities
of human performers in order to create superperformers— hypothetical
virtuosos who transcend the limitations of individual performance
capabilities. These are the
“supermen” who appeared in a number of my compositions, beginning
with Circuit (1971) for harpsichord, on tape. The compact disc Man & Superman (Centaur
CRC 2126) was largely connected to my interest in the ambiguous borders
between live performers and their impossibly expanded electronic
counterparts. The idea of
superperformers has numerous precursors, including the violin music of
Paganini, the piano music of Liszt, conventional music for player piano, and
the fully realized player-piano music of Conlon Nancarrow. Fundamental to the second genre of hyperrealism is the
expansion of the sound palettes from which music is made. Developments in technology and
transformations in social and economic realities have made it possible for
composers to incorporate the sounds of the entire world into their
music. Hyperrealism of this second
genre aims to integrate vast and diverse sonic elements to produce an
expressive and versatile musical language.
Its vocabulary is an inclusive, limitless sonic compendium, free of
ethnic and national particularity. Essential to the concept of hyperrealism is that its
sounds are generally of natural origin, and that they remain sufficiently
unprocessed so that their origin is perceived by the listener as being
“natural.” Since the
sounds of our environment vary from year to year, generation to generation,
and culture to culture, it is impossible to isolate a definitive encyclopedia
of “natural” sounds, but there are a great many sounds that are
familiar to nearly all of us. These
are the most basic building blocks in the formation of a shared (if
temporary) collective sonic reality.
The development and incorporation of expanded palettes consisting of
natural sounds also has precursors, most notably the work of Pierre
Schaeffer, Pierre Henri, and the tradition of musique concrčte. Hyperrealism celebrates bounty, either by
the extravagant treatment of limited sound palettes or by assembling and
manipulating substantially extended palettes. —Noah Creshevsky New York Editors’ note: Excerpts from
Creshevsky’s music may be heard at <www.newmus.net.org/creshevsky.html>. Tania León, Para-Noah, mm. 32-38 Courtesy of Tania León For more
information about Tania León and her music, please visit <www.tanialeon.com>. Fractured Sounds of a Broken World I
discovered in Creshevsky's music a world I had never before experienced, even
imagined. Here
were sounds that hadn’t occupied the same musical space, now somehow
co-existing, and creating an integrated music that seemed to transcend style,
time, and place. —Robert Carl Hartt School of
Music Creshevsky’s
music magnifies the reality of the sounds, creating an unexpected level of
integration between the familiar in sound, the familiar in meaning, and the
familiar in composition. —Dennis Báthory-Kitsz Northfield, Vermont Sometimes a
composer looks at a certain technology and sees it in a way that is not how
it was designed. This is the case with
Noah and samplers. He assembles
several hundred or more of pre-recorded sounds and imports them into the
samplers…. The focus is on
sound, not pitch. His approach is one
of the most imaginative I’ve experienced in all of MIDI implemented
music and, in fact, all of electro-acoustic music. —George Brunner Brooklyn College You
can teach almost any musically talented person to make music that sounds like
music; what interests me are people who make music that sounds like
themselves. Noah Creshevsky is certainly a composer whose music sounds like
no other. —Thomas Buckner New York For
Noah, the whole world of ideas, sounds, and experiences is a potential source
of inspiration, and he encourages the same openness in his students. —Nancy Hager Brooklyn College The
fractured sounds of a broken world recover their unity in the kaleidoscope of
Noah’s music. —Charles Amirkhanian San
Francisco ISAM home Who we
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