Man and Superman- Noah Creshevsky

Noah Creshevsky began musical study at the Eastman School of Music. He graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was a pupil of VirgilThomson, arid studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Fontainebleau. His master’s degree is from the JulWard School, where he was a pupil of Luciano Berio.
Creshevsky’s work has been supported by grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and ASCAP. It has been published by Alexander Broude, released on recordings, and performed and broadcast in the United States, Europe and Asia.
A professor of music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Creshevsky has served on the faculties of the Juilliard School and Hunter College and as a visiting professor at Princeton University.
Creshevsky has been composing electronic music for more than twenty years. Many of his works explore the boundaries of real and imaginary ensembles though the fusion of opposites: music and noise, comprehensible and incomprehensible vocal sources, human and superhuman instrumental skIlls.
His latest music integrates electronic and acoustic sources to create superperformers — hypothetical virtuosos who transcend the limitations of individual performance capabilities.
The result is electronic music of symphonic proportion in which expansive gesture and a vast sonic palette are combined to form expressive ties between the real and unreal, man and superman.

Variations (1987)

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Variations 1987 “It is in looking for possibilities that you find reality. . . . This year I received a letter which went thus: ‘Mademoiselle, the cow is better, my wife is dead, the trees are shooting up. My respects.’ Well, that’s a very real letter.” — Nadia Boulanger The digital sampler and the computer have made possible an unprecedented degree of technical accuracy and efficiency, and have made available the sounds of all things and the music of all times. flexibility. I chose in Variations to spend time with the ancient and parsimonious notion of economy by restricting my choices to pitched sounds only. Even so, a great many timbres are introduced and united. The principle of perpetual variation operates throughout; sectional repetitions are interrelated solely through a few prominent motivic and rhythmic elements. Yeta kind of puritanical restraint and frugality persist. I am skeptical of the view that economy should be considered the proper mission of all human endeavor, and celebrate abundance — both in the expanded palette of musical sounds and technologies, and in the existence of more and better choices and enhanced

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Electric String Quartet (1988)

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Electronic String Quartet 1988

“We bake a cake and it turns out tha the sugar was not sugar but salt. I n sooner start to work than th telephone rings.”

— John Cage, “Juilliard Lecture”
One plays the way one can One plays the way one can’t One talks, One does other things.

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Memento Mori (1989)

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Memento Mon 1989

“The boundaries which divide Lif from Death are at best shadowy an vague. Who shall say where the on ends, and where the other begins?”

— Edgar Allan Poe, “The Prematur Burial”
The fusion in Memento Mon o radically contrasting material represents the ever-present awarenes of the human condition, a recognition of our collective identity, and the inevitableility of our common destinations - made every day more movingly evident.

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Electric Partita (1990)

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Electric Partita 1990

“A performance so complete, so wholly integrated, so prepared, is rarely to be encountered. Most artists, by the time they have worked out that much detail, are heartily sick of any piece and either walk through it half asleep or ham it up.”

— Virgil Thomson, reviewing Wanda Landowska’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, February 22, 1942.
Electric Partita was composed for an ensemble of improbably accomplished performers, capable neither of fatigue nor histrionics, that exists and can only exist on tape.
Digital dexterity reaches unlikely levels through the union of the human hand and the digital computer. A technical feature of the 14th- I century isorhythmic motet is the application of a reiterated pattern of time values to present a liturgical cantus firmus.
Of particular appeal are motets in which the number of notes in the melody — color — and rhythmic pattern — talea — do not coincide. This produces a complex internal order which is anything but obvious to the ear.
A concealed interior structure existing in the realm of abstraction and I contemplation rather than as something capable of being detected by hearing would have pleased the medieval musician.

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Talea (1991)

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Talea 1991 A technical feature of the 14th- century isorhythmic motet is the application of a reiterated pattern of time values to present a liturgical cantus firmus.
Of particular appeal are motets in which the number of notes in the melody — color — and rhythmic pattern — talea — do not coincide. This produces a complex internal order which is anything but obvious to the ear.
A concealed interior structure existing in the realm of abstraction and contemplation rather than as something capable of being detected by hearing would have pleased the medieval musician.

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