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.

Sunday Sounds

Rev. Dr. William Augustus Jones, Jr. was pastor of Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church for over 40 years and a significant figure in the African-American community. In the mid-1970’s New Jersey radio station WFME approached him with an offer to have his Sunday sermons broadcast as The Bethany Hour in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut markets. Brooklyn College Archives has the Jones collection, which contains cassette recordings of several hundred of these sermons, as well as video recordings from the program’s short time on broadcast television. With no playback equipment for patrons, and concerned about the physical integrity of the recordings, the archives decided to digitize the materials. With a tight budget and no digitization expertise on staff, the archives applied for and won a Council on Library and Information Resources Recordings-at-Risk grant. Despite some delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was made available to the public at the end of March 2021.

Reviewer Acknowledgements for Journal of Food Research, Vol. 9 No. 6

Journal of Food Research wishes to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Their help and contributions in maintaining the quality of the journal are greatly appreciated. Journal of Food Research is recruiting reviewers for the journal. If you are interested in becoming a reviewer, we welcome you to join us. Please contact us for the application form at: [email protected] Reviewers for Volume 9, Number 6 Amira Mohamed Elkholy, Suez Canal University, Egypt Ana Silva, National Institute of Health Dr Ricardo Jorge, Portugal Antonella Santillo, University of Foggia, Italy Bruno Alejandro Irigaray, Facultad de Química, Uruguay Cheryl Rosita Rock, California State University, United States Jose Maria Zubeldia, Clinical Regulatory Consultant for the HIV & Hepatitis C initiative at Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, Spain Raza Hussain, School of Dietetics and Human Nutrition, McGill University, Canada Rigane Ghayth, Organic Chemistry-Physics Laboratory, University of Sfax, Tunisia Xinyin Jiang, Brooklyn College, United States

Book Review: A.S. Vitale, The End of Policing.

In his book, The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project of Brooklyn College, immerses the reader into the world of critical policing studies with his comprehensive distillation of the current issues related to policing in America. Broadly, this is a book about economic, social, and political injustices and how this trifecta manifests itself in the various aspects of policing. The book begins its initial argument by proposing that the most commonly enacted methods of reform (more training, body-worn cameras, and community policing programs) have not and will not “reduce the burden or increase the justness of policing” (222).