Noah Creshevsky


Noah Creshevsky is a composer and electronic musician born in Rochester, New York in 1945. He coined the term hyperrealism to describe his work.

Biography

Trained in composition by Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luciano Berio at the Juilliard School, Creshevsky has lived and worked in New York since 1966. He taught at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York for thirty-one years, serving as Director of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music from 1994 to 1999. He also served on the faculties of Juilliard and Hunter College, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University.
Creshevsky has been composing electronic music since 1971. Much of his musical vocabulary consists of familiar bits of words, songs, and instrumental sounds that he edits but seldom subjects to electronic processing. By obscuring the boundaries of real and imaginary ensembles though the fusion of opposites—music and noise, comprehensible and incomprehensible vocal sources, human and superhuman vocal and instrumental capacities—Creshevsky’s music sounds both Western and non-Western, ancient and modern, familiar and unfamiliar.
This alliance of opposites is heard both in his text-sound compositions —Pop Art works in which extreme and unpredictable juxtapositions of iconographic sonic materials establish links between music and society —and in later pieces, in which the integration of electronic and acoustic sources and processes “creates virtual ‘superperformers’ by using the sounds of traditional instruments pushed past the capacities of human performance.”
Creshevsky’s most recent compositions are examples of "Hyperrealism," a term he uses to describe an electroacoustic language constructed from sounds found in our shared environment that he handles in ways that are exaggerated or intense.
Collections of Creshevsky's scores and sound recordings are held at the music libraries of Northwestern University. and the .

Discography

CDs

MAN & SUPERMAN ' Centaur Records CRC 2126
  • Variations
  • Electric String Quartet
  • Memento Mori
  • Electric Partita
  • Talea
WHO ' Centaur Records CRC 2476
AUXESIS Electronic Music by Charles Amirkhanian and Noah Creshevsky ' Centaur Records CRC 2194
HYPERREALISM ' Mutable 17516-2
THE TAPE MUSIC OF NOAH CRESHEVSKY, 1971-1992 ' EM 1042CD
TO KNOW AND NOT TO KNOW ' Tzadik Tzadik-8036
FAVORITE ENCORES, Music of Noah Creshevsky and If, Bwana, '
Pogus 21049-2
  • Mari Kimura Redux
  • Xyloxings
  • Shadow of a Doubt
  • Scraping Scrafide
  • Intrada
  • Cicada #4: Version Barnard
  • Favorite Encores
THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS ' Tzadik Tzadik-8069
ROUNDED WITH A SLEEP ' Pogus 21063-2
THE FOUR SEASONS ' Tzadik Tzadik-8097
HYPERREALIST MUSIC, 2011-2015 ' EM 1140CD
  • 1. Pulp Fiction
  • 2. Tomomi Adachi Redux I
  • 3. Quaestio
  • 4. Orchestral Variations
  • 5. Full Fathom Five
  • 6. La Valse
  • 7. You Are Here
SLEEPING AWAKE ' Open Space CD 37
Circuit In Other Words - Opus One No. 45

Broadcast Great Performances - Opus One No. 47

Chaconne Portrait of Rudy Perez Highway - Opus One No. 50

Sonata - Opus One No. 58

Celebration - Opus One No. 101

Drummer Strategic Defense Initiative - Opus One No. 111
Reanimator - Orange Milk Records No. 99

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