In the June 13 issue of NewMusicBox there’s an excellent article on Noah Creshevsky and his style of Hyperrealism. For those who don’t know Creshevsky, he was trained in composition by Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luciano Berio at Juilliard; he is the former director of the Center for Computer Music and professor emeritus at Brooklyn College.

Creshevsky defines hyperrealism as “an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment, handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive.” Which as Dennis Báthory-Kitsz remarks, sounds a little 60s-ish. But in conversation with Báthory-Kitsz, Creshecsky adds the following: “Soundtracks and commercials are the best examples. That’s where hyperrealism is found routinely. If you take the best moments from good movies and you close your eyes, you’re hearing a collection of music, sound effects, subverbal utterances, verbal utterances—the whole soundtrack. It’s useful to substitute the word ’soundtrack’ in certain sentences in looking at what kind of a world we live in.”

In his NewMusicBox article, Báthory-Kitsz goes on to describe hyperrealism’s “salient features.” He also includes samples of Creshevsky’s “heightened or exaggerated reality.” They are short but fascinating. They have a classical sound, but are using sounds that no classical composer would have used. As Creshevsky says, The soundtracks are organized in much more complex ways than we organize a string quartet, because we can include a string quartet as part of it. There’s the music part of the soundtrack—and then there’s all the rest.” Listen to an excerpt from “Born Again”: http://www.newmusicbox.org/607/audio/born_again.m3u