Vladimir Ussachevsky: Electronic And Acoustic Works 1957-1972

Album review

Vladimir Ussachevsky is chiefly remembered as a pioneer in composing music for tape and as a co-founder with Otto Luening of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, but he is somewhat less recognized for his vocal and instrumental music. Fortunately, Ussachevsky's work is fairly well represented by this 1999 CRI release, because the program presents some of his experiments in musique concrète from the late '50s through the 1960s, as well as two choral works from the 1970s. Fans of early tape music will find Metamorphosis (1957), Linear Contrasts (1958), Wireless Fantasy (1960), and Of Wood and Brass (1965) to be classics of the genre and rather easy to approach for their clear gestural style, atmospheric sonorities, and transparent textures. Computer Piece No. 1 (1968) and Two Sketches for a Computer Piece (1971) demonstrate Ussachevsky's advances in the medium and are more challenging for their denser materials and rapid changes of mood. A transition between electronics and acoustic music is provided by Three Scenes from The Creation (1960, revised 1973), where the Macalester College Chamber Chorus, led by Ian Morton; mezzo-soprano Alice Shields; and the University of Utah A Capella Choir, conducted by Newell Weight, are accompanied by a tape of electronically generated sounds with some modifications of the group's own voices, realized at the Columbia-Princeton lab. At times, this work seems like a modal cantata, mostly sung in unison, and its electronic parts appear only loosely integrated with the voices, serving instead as a darkly evocative backdrop. In comparison, the Missa Brevis for soprano, choir, and brass (1972) is a fairly conventional sacred work, and the contrast with Ussachevsky's groundbreaking electronic music couldn't be stronger, since the quasi-tonal musical language of this piece seems derived in many passages from Stravinsky and Hindemith. The performance by soprano JoAnn Ottley, the chorus of the University of Utah, and brass players from the Utah Symphony, directed by Newell Weight, is well delivered and effective, though the piece itself is something of a disappointment after the previous works, which are more truly representative of Ussachevsky's boldly innovative legacy.

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