Noah Creshevsky

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 (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 (music)," 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 New York Public Library.

CDs

MAN & SUPERMAN (1992) Centaur Records CRC 2126

WHO (1993) Centaur Records CRC 2476

AUXESIS Electronic Music by Charles Amirkhanian and Noah Creshevsky (1995) Centaur Records CRC 2194

HYPERREALISM (2003) Mutable Music Mutable 17516-2

THE TAPE MUSIC OF NOAH CRESHEVSKY, 1971-1992 (2004) EM Records (Japan) EM 1042CD

TO KNOW AND NOT TO KNOW (2007) Tzadik Tzadik-8036

FAVORITE ENCORES, Music of Noah Creshevsky and If, Bwana, (2008) Pogus Pogus 21049-2

THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS (2010) Tzadik Tzadik-8069

ROUNDED WITH A SLEEP (2011) Pogus Pogus 21063-2

THE FOUR SEASONS (2013) Tzadik Tzadik-8097

HYPERREALIST MUSIC, 2011-2015 (2015) EM Records (Japan) EM 1140CD

Compilation Albums

LPs

Circuit (1971) In Other Words (1976) - Opus One No. 45
Broadcast (1973) Great Performances (1978) - Opus One No. 47
Chaconne (1974) Portrait of Rudy Perez (1978) Highway (1979) - Opus One No. 50
Sonata (1980) - Opus One No. 58
Celebration (1983) - Opus One No. 101
Drummer (1985) Strategic Defense Initiative (1986) - Opus One No. 111

Articles and reviews