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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: [email protected]
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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.

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

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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
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Creshevsky, N. 2004. The Tape Music of Noah Creshevsky, 1971–1992. Osaka: EM records, EM 1042-CD.Google Scholar
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Creshevsky, N. 2010. The Twilight of the Gods. New York: Tzadik, Tzadik-8069-CD.Google Scholar
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Creshevsky, N. 2015. Hyperrealist Music, 2011–2015. Osaka: EM records, EM 1140-CD.Google Scholar