Hostname: page-component-68945f75b7-6q656 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-02T22:08:41.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2021

Maurice Windleburn
Maurice Windleburn*
Affiliation:
Independent scholar, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
*
Email: mwindleburn@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Article
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 26 , Issue 3: Collective and Networked Sound Practices , December 2021 , pp. 403 - 412
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Appadurai, A. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Theory, Culture & Society 7: 295–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amico, S. 2020. ‘We Are All Musicologists Now’; or, the End of Ethnomusicology. The Journal of Musicology 37(1): 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashby, A. 2010. Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Barthes, R. 1977. The Grain of the Voice. In Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press.Google Scholar
Báthory-Kitsz, D. 2007. A Language We Already Understand: Noah Creshevsky’s Hyperrealism. New Music Box. https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/a-language-we-already-understand-noah-creshevskys-hyperrealism/ (accessed 24 May 2021).Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1990. Seduction. Montréal: New World Perspectives.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1993a. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1993b. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 2002. Screened Out. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 2003. Passwords. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 2005. Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. New York: Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 2008. Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
Bloechl, O. 2005. Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘Desert Rose’. Journal of Popular Music Studies 17 (2): 133–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borgmann, A. 1992. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cage, J. 1973. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Caux, J. 2012. Almost Nothing with Luc Ferrari. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press.Google Scholar
Çamci, A. and Granzow, J. 2019. Hyperreal Instruments: Bridging VR and Digital Fabrication to Facilitate New Forms of Musical Expression. Leonardo Music Journal 29: 14–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chion, M. 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett, J. and Kapsalis, T. 1996. The Female Orgasm in Popular Music. TDR 40 (3): 102–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2001. On Borrowed Time. Contemporary Music Review 20: 91–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2007a. Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama, Superperformers, and Open Palette. In Zorn, J. (ed.) Arcana II: Musicians on Music. New York: Hips Road, 66–74.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. and Fischer, T. 2012. 15 Questions to Noah Creshevsky. Tokafi. www.tokafi.com/15questions/15-questions-noah-creshevsky/ (accessed May 24 2021).Google Scholar
Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. London: John Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Eco, U. 1986. Travels in Hyperreality. New York: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Emmerson, S. 2007. Living Electronic Music. Burlington: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Erlmann, V. 1996. The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990s. Public Culture 8: 467–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gann, K. 2004. Slice ‘N’ Dice. The Village Voice. www.villagevoice.com/2004/06/29/slice-n-dice/ (accessed May 24 2021).Google Scholar
Gould, G. 2006. The Prospects of Recording. In Cox, C. and Warner, D. (eds.) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, 115–26.Google Scholar
Heile, B. 2009. Weltmusik and the Globalization of New Music. In B. Heile (ed.) The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music. Burlington: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Hesmondhalgh, D. and Born, G. 2000. Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. In Hesmondhalgh, D. and Born, G. (eds.) Western Music and Its Others. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–58.Google Scholar
Ivnescu, A. 2015. Torched Song: The Hyperreal and the Music of L.A. Noire. The Soundtrack 8(1–2): 41–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahn, D. 2001. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kellner, D. 2019. Jean Baudrillard. In E. N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/baudrillard/ (accessed 24 May 2021).Google Scholar
Kramer, L. 2012. The Virtuoso Body; Or, the Two Births of Musical Performance. In Hawkins, S. (ed.) Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott. London: Routledge, 231–44.Google Scholar
Maloy, L. 2010. ‘Stayin Alive in Da Club’: The Illegality and Hyperreality of Mashups. Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 1(2): 1–20.Google Scholar
Manuel, P. 1995. Music as Symbol, Music as Simulacrum: Postmodern, Pre-Modern, and Modern Aesthetics in Subcultural Popular Musics. Popular Music 14 (2): 227–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mueller, C. 2013. Jeff Beck: The Quintessential Postmodern Virtuoso Meets Baudrillard’s Racing Driver and his Double. College Music Symposium 53. https://symposium.music.org/index.php/53/item/9575-jeff-beck-the-quintessential-postmodern-virtuoso-meets-baudrillard-s-racing-driver-and-his-double (accessed 24 May 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oswald, J. 2006. Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt. In Cox, C. and Warner, D. (eds.) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, 131–7.Google Scholar
Oteri, F. J. 2013. Sounds Heard: Noah Creshevsky – The Four Seasons. New Music Box. https://nmbx.new musicusa.org/sounds-heard-noah-creshevsky-the-four-seasons/ (accessed 24 May 2021).Google Scholar
Sanden., P. 2009. Hearing Glen Gould’s Body: Corporeal Liveness in Recorded Music. Current Musicology 88: 7–34.Google Scholar
Sturm, B. L. 2006. Adaptive Concatenative Sound Synthesis and Its Application to Micromontage Composition. Computer Music Journal 30(4): 46–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, J. R. 2009. Exactitude: Hyperrealist Art Today. London: Thames & Hudson.Google Scholar
Young., M. 2015. Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology. Burlington: Ashgate.Google Scholar

Discography

Creshevsky, N. 1992. Man and Superman. Baton Rouge: Centaur records, CRC 2126-CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 1993. Who. Baton Rouge: Centaur records, CRC 2476-CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N./Amirkhanian, C. 1995. Auxesis. Baton Rouge: Centaur records, CRC 2194- CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2003. Hyperrealism. New York: Mutable Music, 17516–2-CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2004. The Tape Music of Noah Creshevsky, 1971–1992. Osaka: EM records, EM 1042-CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2007b. To Know And Not To Know. New York: Tzadik, Tzadik-8036-CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2010. The Twilight of the Gods. New York: Tzadik, Tzadik-8069-CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2013. The Four Seasons. New York: Tzadik, Tzadik-8097-CD.Google Scholar
Creshevsky, N. 2015. Hyperrealist Music, 2011–2015. Osaka: EM records, EM 1140-CD.Google Scholar