Creshevsky, Noah
Biography
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."