Noah Creshevsky

---

Bio

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 (BC-CCM) 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 (1973-1986)—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.

A collection of Creshevsky's scores and sound recordings is held at the music library at Northwestern University.

---

Noah Creshevsky

I have been composing electronic music for more than thirty years. Common to all of my music is the use of expanded sonic palettes. My goal has been to create a body of work using a novel but natural, versatile, and expressive musical language. My focus on extended musical palettes mirrors the belief that individuals and societies are improved through broad inclusion. Much of my musical vocabulary consists of familiar bits of words, songs, and instrumental music which are deconstructed into minute fragments, subjected to a variety of electronic processes, and finally reassembled in ways that bear little or no discernible relationship to their original sources. The result is a sound at once nearly human and tangentially electronic, but never fully one or the other. Allusions to Middle Eastern, Asian, and Western sacred, secular, popular, and classical instrumental and vocal music seek to produce hypothetical performers of indeterminate identity--simultaneously male and female, Western and non-Western, ancient and modern, familiar and unfamiliar.

---

Hyperrealism

Hyperrealism is a term coined by the composer Noah Creshevsky to describe a musical language for his and his colleagues' compositional aesthetic. Creshevsky defines this language as "Hyperrealism is an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment ("realism"), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive ("hyper").