Creshevsky, Noah

Composer, and Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College.

From the description of Noah Creshevsky Collection, 1966-2005. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 144619241

(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].

From the description of Sound recordings collection, 1981-1995. (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 122378474

(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].

From the guide to the Noah Creshevsky sound recordings collection [sound recording], 1981-1995, (The New York Public Library. Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound.)

Noah Creshevsky (b. 1945, Rochester, New York) is an American composer of primarily electronic music. His composition teachers included Nadia Boulanger, Virgil Thomson (at the State University of New York at Buffalo), and Luciano Berio (at the Juilliard School). He has taught at Juilliard, Hunter College, and Princeton University. Currently he is Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, where he has also served as director of the Center for Computer Music.

Creshevsky has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and ASCAP. His music has been published, performed, broadcast, and recorded around the world.

A hallmark of Creshevsky's music is his electronic manipulation of recognizable sounds. He writes, "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."

From the guide to the Noah Creshevsky sound recordings, scores, and other material, 1966-2005, (Music Library)