Faculty Obituaries

Noah Creshevsky 

Noah Creshevsky, composer

The Conservatory is mourning the loss of one of its esteemed former faculty members and formative figures in shaping the school's mission: composer Noah Creshevsky. Noah was a formidable musician who is renowned for his challenging theory and ear-training pedagogy as well as for having been one of the founding members of Brooklyn College's groundbreaking Center for Computer Music. He told faculty composer Douglas Cohen "on repeated occasions how he felt that Brooklyn College was one of the best places to teach music composition, and once he began here, he never desired to teach anywhere else."  Having retired in 2020, he spent the past 20 years composing and releasing an impressive body of work in his "Hyperrealism" genre, as can be seen on his Wikipedia page. What follows are highlights from New York Times writer Steve Smith's Dec. 12, 2020 exhaustive encomium to the iconoclastic musician, Noah Creshevsky, Composer of ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75, which can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/arts/music/noah-creshevsky-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1, in its totality, given its fulsome overview of the deceased's oeuvre. The article's subtitle poignantly notes that Noah "built his musical works from myriad sampled sounds, including noises from the street as well as voices and instruments" and that "He was also a respected teacher," which he assuredly was. Smith writes,

"Noah Creshevsky, a composer of sophisticated, variegated electroacoustic works that mingled scraps of vocal and instrumental music, speech, outside noise, television snippets and other bits of sound, died on Dec. 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 75.

"His husband, David Sachs, said the cause was cancer.

"Mr. Creshevsky studied composition with some of the most prominent figures in modern music, including the French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and the Italian composer Luciano Berio.

"Rather than pursuing a career that might have resulted in concert-hall celebrity, Mr. Creshevsky found his calling in the studio-bound world of electronic music. Using the prevailing technologies of the day — at first cutting and splicing magnetic tape, later using samplers and digital audio workstations — he made music that was dizzyingly complex in its conception and construction.

"But because he built his works from everyday sounds as well as voices and instruments, his compositions felt accessible, engaging and witty. The term he used to describe his music, and the philosophy that animated it, was 'hyperrealism.'

"The “realism” comes from what we hear in our shared environment, and the “hyper” from the “exaggerated or excessive” ways those sounds are handled, Mr. Creshevsky wrote in 'Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama, Superperformers and Open Palette,' an influential 2005 essay."

Smith goes on to acknowledge Creshevsky's vaunted career as a pedagogue and to describe his background:

"Mr. Creshevsky was also a much-admired teacher. He joined the faculty of Brooklyn College in 1969 and served as director of the college’s trailblazing Center for Computer Music from 1994 to 1999. He also taught at the Juilliard School and Hunter College in New York and spent the 1984 academic year at Princeton University.

"Noah Creshevsky was born Gary Cohen on Jan. 31, 1945, in Rochester, N.Y., to Joseph and Sylvia Cohen. His father worked in his family’s dry-cleaning business, and his mother was a homemaker. He changed his surname to Creshevsky, according to Mr. Sachs, 'to honor his grandparents, whose name it was.' At the same time he also changed his first name, because, he said, 'I never felt like a Gary.'

"The Cohen household was not especially musical, but young Gary was drawn to a piano that had been bought for his older brother. His parents, Mr. Sachs said, 'were surprised to see toddler Noah — his legs too short to reach the pedals — picking out pop melodies he had heard and retained.'

"He began his formal musical training at 6, in the preparatory division of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. 'Since my nature is that of a composer rather than a performer, I never liked spending much time practicing someone else’s composition,' Mr. Creshevsky said in an interview published by Tokafi, a music website. 'Instead of working on the music that had been assigned by my teachers at Eastman, I spent many hours improvising at the piano.' He made money, he said, working as a cocktail pianist at bars and restaurants.

"After finishing at Eastman in 1961, he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo, now known as the University at Buffalo, in 1966. There he studied with the noted composer Lukas Foss. He also spent a year with Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, in 1963 and 1964, a rite of passage for many prominent American composers.

"After graduating he moved to New York City, where he founded a new-music group, the New York Improvisation Ensemble. He studied with Berio at Juilliard and earned his master’s degree in 1968.
Not long afterward, Mr. Creshevsky gave up composing music meant to be performed live. In espousing hyperrealism, he identified two chief threads in his own work."

Smith concludes his article with a description of some of Creshevsky's aesthetic philosophy, which imbues much of what the Conservatory strives to do to this day:

"He also sought to radically expand the sonic palette available to a composer, a venture aided by affordable personal computers and the advent of sampling. Composers could now 'incorporate the sounds of the entire world into their music,' he wrote. The result, he proposed, would be 'an inclusive, limitless sonic compendium, free of ethnic and national particularity.'

"Mr. Creshevsky’s view of music education balanced a healthy respect for classical music’s lineage and literature with an open-minded approach to global culture and emerging technologies. 'It seems probable that the next Mozart will not play the piano, but will be a terrific player of computer games,' he predicted in the Tokafi interview. 'A senior generation needs to educate itself by understanding that digital technologies are creative instruments of quality.'"

Noah retired from Brooklyn College in 2000, and spent the last 20 years composing, with numerous recordings on labels specializing in both classical and experimental musics, mirroring his ever-eclectic palette. His powerful spirit will truly be missed.