CITY WAVES - A portrait in sound of New York

Audio Collage of electronic and concrete sounds.

A first version of the work was completed in 1985 at Lehman College of the City University of New York, in the electronic music studio designed by the composer.

Assisted by students, he used mostly analog equipment.

For the final version completed in 2013, the first version was digitized, revised, and

re-mixed at the Computer Music Center of Columbia University.

The aim was to incorporate sounds and audio events the composer has experienced

from his arrival in New York City in 1969 up to the time of the work’s completion.

Close to the end, he is heard at the piano in a short jazzy episode.

The prolonged electronic opening and concluding sonorities, as well as the rhythmically varied ones that are heard throughout the piece, are meant to frame and hold together the disparate concrete city sounds, some of which are themselves electronically produced.

Esthetically, the overlapping and interaction of various musical idioms that tend

to harmonize toward the end (including an orchestral tuning) suggest how far what

is regularly considered as music can be experienced as sound-environment, and

vice versa.

G. C.

The work is available

– In a Stereo version: as a two-track audio file or a CD playable on a regular sound

   system

– As a four-track audio file, playable from a computer using an audio-sequencer

   software, connected through an audio interface to four loudspeakers