Search - Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros :: New Music For Electronic And Recorded Media: Women In Electronic Music-1977

The music on this album exhibits an exciting, wide-open, freewheeling approach to the medium of electronic music which has come to be typical of this genre in the late 1970s. No longer are composers obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely "electronic" (synthesized) sound formulas which marked much of this music composed between the mid Fifties and the late Sixties. Instead, today we have composers willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways to achieve ends which are new-sounding, and often more engaging, than that of the "academic" avant-garde. This is the outgrowth of a fundamental change in concerns which has been evolving not only among members are some of themost fecund and inspired. These new wources of inspiratin cerainly werer not as widely shared fifteen years agao. Several composers represented here are deeply concerned with Eastern musics and their subsequent metamorphoses into such popular forms as rock and roll. Still others bring to bear a sense of wit and satire, rarely a prominent feature of avant-garde music in the early 1960s. This first anthology of women's electronic music demonstrates great refinement and skill at work in a variety of different styles, several of which are unfamiliar or new even to those who follow contemporary music. The fact that these pieces are more listenable than that of the Sixties avant-garde does not point to a musical regression as some critics have overeagerly assumed when discussing modern works using, say, consonant harmonic structures. -Charles Amirkhanian, August 1977 (This recording was orginally issued as CRI CD 728)