"What, when you get right down to it, can be written of music such as Charles Wuorinen's remarkable 1969 essay 'Time's Encomium?' Our usual points of reference are almost all absent, and even after 30-plus years there is still a dearth of good language with which to describe, or even intelligently discuss, purely electronic art music. There is also the fact that a work like 'Time's Encomium' cannot be performed in the usual sense of the word, or even re-recorded -- 'Time's Encomium' is a single recorded realization that does not and cannot exist in any other form, quite unlike a traditional piece of Western music, which exists first as a score and then as a potentially infinite collection of temporally-bound realizations of that score (performances, in our everyday jargon). Therefore, although it is a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of music (1970), and in fact is the first electronic work to receive that award, it is not especially well known or often heard. Aficionados of contemporary music all claim familiarity with 'Time's Encomium;' few, however, have heard it more than a handful of times.
"Wuorinen created 'Time's Encomium' using the RCA Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, a machine that several other prominent American composers employed during those early days of electronic music (including Milton Babbitt). The work is divided into two large hunks of music, one just under 15 minutes long and the other just under 17 minutes. Part I is spacious, filled mostly with slow or slowish gestures. Part II, on the other hand, is much denser and, as is more immediately noticeable, considerably quicker. There are two layers of sound throughout both parts. The fundamental layer is made from original synthesized sound. Wuorinen then processes (i.e., modifies) this fundamental layer, most often by the use of reverberation and stereo relocation, to create a second layer that grows from and develops it. The music is serial through and through: pitches are organized around a twelve-tone row, and rhythms are set up as ratios that derive from that same row.
"Developments in computer technology have rendered many of the technical means used to create 'Time's Encomium' obsolete, and the listener should be forgiven if he/she finds that thoughts of 1950s and '60s sci-fi films come to mind when hearing it ("beeps" and "boops" can sometimes start to all sound the same after a time). But Wuorinen was and is first and foremost a composer, and it is not on its circuitry but rather on its rhetoric, and most of all, large-scale structure that 'Time's Encomium' should be judged." (Analysis of 'Time's Enconium' by Blair Johnston. From AllMusic. See here.)
"One of Wuorinen's most accessible and colorful scores, 'New York Notes'
is written for an ensemble of seven players (flute, clarinet, cello,
violin, piano and two percussionists) which are joined by
computer-generated sounds at various times throughout the work. Its
three movements are arranged in a conventional fast-slow-fast pattern,
but that is practically all that is conventional about the work. 'New
York Notes' grabs the listener's attention from the very beginning, in
which each successive sound seems to arise from the one before it. This
develops into a spectacular display of rapid fire melodic lines,
sometimes sombre, sometimes playful, undergirded by the sparkling
dulcimer-like timbre of the computer sounds. Eventually the music slows
down, takes on the mysterious quality of Bartok's 'night music'
pieces, with some very beautiful writing for the string instruments. The
slow movement becomes ever more agitated; after a crescendo the third
movement begins, similar in character to the first movement but even
more dance-like, building up to a gigantic passage for all the
instruments and the electronic sounds, after which a brief, dramatic
coda ends the work." (Analysis of 'New York Notes' by James Lee. From AllMusic. See here.)
1. Time's Encomium Part I
2. Time's Encomium Part II
3. Lepton
4. New York Notes Part I
5. New York Notes Part II
6. New York Notes Part III
7. Epithalamium
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