Musical Hyperrealism: Exploring Noah Creshevsky’s compositions through Jean Baudrillard’s ideas

While a familiar term in art history, philosophy and cultural studies, ‘hyperrealism’ is rarely applied to music. This is despite Noah Creshevsky’s use of the term to describe his unique compositional process and aesthetic approach. A composer of electroacoustic music and founder of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music, Creshevsky has described his musical hyperrealism as a ‘language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”)’. In this article, I summarise the ideas behind Creshevsky’s hyperreal music and compare them to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of the hyperreal. Numerous similarities between Creshevsky and Baudrillard’s ideas will be made evident. The first half of this article focuses on Creshevsky’s sampling of sounds as ‘simulacra’ and how the interweaving textures and melodies that Creshevsky makes out of these samples are similar to ‘simulations’. In the article’s second half, Creshevsky’s creation of disembodied ‘superperformers’ is addressed and related to Baudrillard’s transhumanism. Towards the end of the article, Creshevsky’s aesthetic more broadly and what he calls ‘hyperdrama’ are linked to Baudrillard’s ‘transaesthetics’, before a concluding note addressing Baudrillard and Creshevsky’s different dispositions towards hyperrealism.

Improvising Inside a House of Cards: New performance and music-making through a collective networked instrument

This article presents experiences and reflections related to performing improvised, live processed electroacoustic music within a context of networked music performance. The musical interaction is performed through a new collective networked instrument, and we report how the ensemble ‘Magnify the Sound’, consisting of two of the authors of this article, meets the instrument in different networked performance situations, and how this is related to the affordance of the instrument. In our performances the network is inherent to our artistic practice, and we experience a phenomenological and somatic transformation in our roles as musicians, from individual instrumentality to shared instrumentality. The instrument invites new forms of music-making and contributes in fundamental ways to the ensemble’s musical communication and artistic expression. In the present article we outline our methods of working artistically with the networked instrument, and we point at some artistic results. We then discuss how the collective instrument has facilitated new performance and musical practice within the network.

Semiological Interpretation of the Electroacoustic Music Phenomenon

As evolving technologies become more massive and more easily accessible to virtually every user, as the speed of the global Internet grows faster and more, the composer’s relationship with these capabilities takes on new meanings. It was not so much the issues of accessibility and quantity that became relevant, but rather the issues of quality, artistic value, and the uniqueness of creation. This article attempts to review the principles of composing electroacoustic music based on semiological theory. Music, as a message, passes through the various stages of creation, transforming the consciousness of both its sender and receiver. It is important to capture, highlight and define these processes. The identification of oneself as a creator and a clear, unambiguous perception of one’s work provides a clear ideological and esthetic basis for new means of composition. Electroacoustic music opens the way to hear any possible sounds, infinity of sounds — from realistic to surreal. The listener’s traditional connection to physical sound is often severed: electroacoustic sound forms and qualities usually do not reveal the original sound source and cause. Composers face the dilemma of how to ground a new esthetic field in the wide-open world of sounds, how to develop more clearly defined methods of sound creation, how to understand and explain electroacoustic music.

ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC AND THE SLOVAK MUSICAL AVANT-GARDE IN THE 1960S

In the 1960s, the development of music in Slovakia was marked by prominent generational and stylistic confrontations of the compositional poetries of the previous generations of composers and the just emerging one. In the composers’ community, an initiative was gaining a foothold that reassessed the practices, norms, and achievements of the previous developmental stages of Slovak music and looked for new points of departure. In certain stages of the given period, the first graduates of the Academy of Performing Arts (Ilja Zeljenka, Juraj Pospíšil, Pavol Šimai, Ladislav Kupkovič, Peter Kolman, Roman Berger, Jozef Malovec, Miroslav Bázlik, Ivan Parík, Tadeáš Salva, and others) entered the musical scene. The genesis and the formation of the Slovak musical avant-garde in the 1960s was determined by their quest for the novel possibilities of expression and the compositional techniques of the so-called New Music of Western Europe. They included experimenting with previously unknown electrogenic compositional materials and techniques of electroacoustic music. Slovak electroacoustic music, which achieved success in Slovakia and abroad already in the 1960s, emerged first on a private basis, later in the Sound Studio of the Czechoslovak Television, and, primarily, in the Experimental Studio of the Czechoslovak Radio.

Electroacoustic Experiments of the Art Zoyd and Their Implementation in Soundtracks for Silent Films

The article is devoted to the work of Art Zoyd, a French group whose experimental style is often defined by modern researchers as “la musique nouvelle” (from the French — “new music”) and is viewed through the prism of the genre-style dialogue between rock and contemporary academic music. The idea of “metamusic”, expressed in the co-creation of several composers, as well as in the unity of visual, plastic, and musical components, is also important for understanding the style of the group. This trend is especially closely related to the personality of one of the founders of the group, Gerard Hourbette, who combines the gift of a composer with the talent of a programmer. The obvious reliance on the achievements of electroacoustic music, the desire to combine the scientific understanding of the phenomenon of sound with the implementation of practical musical projects (expressed in the creation of the research and creative center Art Zoyd Studios), make him related to the figure of the pioneer of musique concrète and the founding father of Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Pierre Schaeffer. The idea of the synthesis of the arts is reflected in the innovative multimedia performances of the group, as well as in the soundtracks to silent films. The article analyzes the sound scores for the films Nosferatu by Friedrich Murnau, Häxan by Benjamin Christensen, The Fall of the House of Usher by Jean Epstein.