Electro Acoustic Music VI.(Review)

Jerry Tabor, Jean-Claude Risset, Otto Laske, Agostino Di Scipio, Michael Hamman, Mark Sullivan, Insook Choi, Thomas DeLio: Electro Acoustic Music VI

Compact disc, 1999, Neuma 450-99; available from Neuma Records, 71 Maple Street, Acton, Massachusetts 01720, USA

Neuma's recent release, Electro Acoustic Music VI, adds to an already impressive series of recordings devoted to electronic music. Comprised of works for tape alone and tape with solo instrument, this disc offers an exciting and refreshing collection of works that approach both sound and structural design in a variety of new and interesting ways. Several works incorporate imaginative applications of concepts borrowed from chaos theory.

The first piece, Jerry Tabor's engaging Causey (1996), is an exciting and highly charged work for tape that incorporates a rather original approach to compositional design through inventive applications of chaos theory concepts. The composer writes:

 
   Structural concepts ... are represented as sonic articulations of 
   behavioral principles revealed in the Feigenbaum Final State Diagram. 
   During the compositional process an abstraction of the diagram was created 
   that eventually served as an indeterminate score. This new structure 
   allowed the process of composing to become divorced from the final state 
   diagram and allowed for more abstract behavioral principles to be 
   intertwined with the concrete local articulation of the system through 
   `composed improvisation.' 

The sonic result of this unique approach constitutes an amalgam of engaging and at times unpredictable behavioral patterns of the work's highly rich and diverse soundscape.

Jean-Claude Risset, a pioneering composer and researcher, contributes Saxtractor (1995), a captivating work for soprano/tenor saxophones and computer-generated tape. Extracted and varied from part of an earlier piece for clarinet and tape (Attracteurs etranges), the tape part of Saxtractor is predominantly composed of computer-processed clarinet sounds that beautifully interact with the soprano and tenor saxophones. In creating this work, Mr. Risset also adapted principles from chaos theory. The composer writes: