Uccelli [née Pazzini], Carolina Uccellini, Marco
Ussachevsky, Vladimir (Alexis)
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Ussachevsky, Vladimir (Alexis)(b Hailar, 3 Nov/21 Oct 1911; d New York, 4 Jan 1990). American composer of Manchurian birth. He emigrated to the USA in 1930 and received the BA from Pomona College in 1935; he later studied under Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music (MA 1936, PhD 1939). After wartime service in the Office of Strategic Services and State Department, he undertook postdoctoral work at Columbia University with Luening and joined the faculty, eventually becoming professor of music. In 1951 he began the earliest American experiments in the electronic medium (excluding attempts at synthetic music before the advent of magnetic tape recording), shortly thereafter collaborating with Luening in a series of electronic works, not joint compositions but rather amalgamations of independently created sections, both live and electronic, by each composer. Only later did he become aware of the slightly earlier activities of the Parisian musique concrète group. In 1959 Ussachevsky, with Luening, Babbitt and Sessions, founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (New York) and became chairman of its committee of direction. For regular periods from 1970 he served as composer-in-residence at the University of Utah (he taught there from 1980 to 1985), and in 1973 was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He retired from Columbia University in 1980 as professor emeritus. He wrote and lectured widely, in the Americas and Europe, on electronic music. Ussachevsky’s works divide into two principal genres: the electronic and the choral. Brought up in the Russian Orthodox Church (as a youth he served as reader and altar boy), he acknowledged a profound influence from Russian liturgical music. His choral works stem directly from the 19th-century tradition of Russian choral liturgy (the tradition of Grechaninov, Tchaikovsky and Musorgsky) and in many ways offer a sharp contrast to his electronic music. The ‘stylistic’ distinction between the two genres persisted even after 20 years’ work in the electronic medium, as can be seen from the Missa brevis for chorus and brass (1972). In his electronic works Ussachevsky consistently maintained a flexible attitude towards sound sources: recordings of live sounds (‘musical’ and otherwise), analogue studio and computer-generated material all feature in his works. (This catholicity distinguished American electronic music from the originally more restrictive French and German types, and gave rise to the designation ‘tape music’.) But Ussachevsky is noted particularly for the transformation of pre-existing material rather than for electronic synthesis, and his greatest skill lay perhaps in the mutating of sound from instrumental sources, as in Piece for Tape Recorder (1956) and Of Wood and Brass (1964–5). Not surprisingly, therefore, he also tended to take over material from one work to the next – a practice that is particularly significant in ‘tape music’, for here the processes of composition and electronic realization are simultaneous: the work is created directly on tape, frequently by manual operations on the constituent recorded sound materials. This mode of electronic composition, which became known as ‘classical studio’ technique, recognizes Ussachevsky as one of its most distinguished exponents. In the late 1970s he began writing music for instruments accompanied by tapes of those same instruments (or same class of instruments) transformed through sophisticated ‘classical studio’, techniques. During his final decades he wrote several compositions for EVI (Electronic Valve Instrument), which allowed live performance in real-time within an electronic medium. He also returned to conventional media, particularly works for chorus, brass and piano. WORKSPrincipal publishers: American Composers Edition, Peters traditional media
electro-acousticEVI - electronic valve instrument
WRITINGS‘Sound Materials in the Experimental Media of Musique Concrète, Tape Music and Electronic Music’, JASA, xxix (1957), 768 only ‘The Processes of Experimental Music’, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, vi (1958), 202–8) ‘Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center’, RBM, xiii (1959), 129–31 ‘Applications of Modern Technology in Musicology, Music Theory, and Composition in the United States’, Yugoslav-American Seminar on Music: Sveti Stefan 1968, 123–42 with O. Luening: Electronic Music 1952: the First Compositions (New York, 1977) BIBLIOGRAPHYEwenD C. Whittenberg: ‘Ussachevsky’s Film Music’, American Composers Alliance Bulletin, xi/1 (1963), 5 only J. Paulson: The History, Current Status and Possible Future of Electronic Music as Exemplified in the Works of Vladimir Ussachevsky (Thesis, U. of Utah, 1976) S.H. Duehlmeier: Vladimir Ussachevsky: Life and Works with Emphasis on the Piano Compositions (diss., Boston U., 1985) M.L. Mecham: The Choral Music of Vladimir Ussachevsky (diss., U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1985) Vladimir Ussachevsky: in Celebration of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday (Salt Lake City, UT, 1987) R. Harksock and C. Rahkonen: Vladimir Ussachevsky: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT, 2000) CHARLES WUORINEN/CARL RAHKONEN Yüklə 3,09 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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