Noah Creshevsky sound recordings collection [sound recording]

1981-1995

(b Rochester, NY, 31 Jan 1945). American composer. After early musical studies at the Eastman School (1950-61), he studied with Boulanger at the Ecole Normale de Musique (1963-4), with Thomson at SUNY, Buffalo (BFA 1966) and with Berio at the Juilliard School (MS 1968). In 1969 Creshevsky joined the faculty of Brooklyn College, CUNY, later becoming director of the Center for Computer Music (1994) and professor. He has held teaching positions at Juilliard and Hunter College and was visiting professor at Princeton (1987-8). He has received grants from NEA, ASCAP and other organizations.

By subjecting familiar fragments of words, songs and instrumental music to a variety of electronic processes, Creshevsky projects his music into the region between acoustic and electronic sounds. The boundaries of real and imaginary ensembles are obscured through the fusion of opposites, both in the extreme and unpredictable juxtapositions of iconographic source material in his pop-art text-sound compositions and in later pieces, in which the integration of electronic and acoustic sources produces superperformerst, hypothetical virtuosos with unattainable performance capabilities. In his compositions of the late 1990s he suggests musical environments which are simultaneously Western and non-Western, ancient and modern, and familiar and unfamiliar, by combining fragmented and reconstructed pre-existing music with new synthetic and acoustic sounds. [Cf New Grove Online].