Vladimir Ussachevsky

A respected catalyst behind the rise of American electronic music, composer Vladimir Ussachevsky was created November 3, 1911 in Hailar, Manchuria; he emigrated towards the U.S. in 1930, and after graduating from Pomona University went on to review on the Eastman College of Music. There he constructed his first main works, included in this 1935’s Theme and Variants and 1938’s Jubilee Cantata, in addition to various other items for piano, vocal, choral and orchestral overall performance. Upon generating his Ph.D. in 1939, Ussachevsky became a member of the faculty at Columbia University or college in 1947; for this period he began producing his first forays into digital music, culminating a couple of years later along with his acquisition of an Ampex tape recorder. In 1952, he and colleague Otto Luening offered the very first tape music overall performance ever provided in the U.S., where one of the items premiered was Ussachevsky’s musique concrète landmark Sonic Curves; key functions including 1954’s Poem of Cycles and Bells and 1956’s Piece for Tape Recorder adopted, and in 1958 Ussachevsky and Luening received a Rockefeller Basis grant to open up the Columbia-Princeton Digital Music Center, the very first such electro-acoustic service in America. Filled with four analog tape studios for digital composition along with the room-sized RCA Tag II Synthesizer, the CPEMC was the starting pad for countless experimental functions, not minimal of which had been those compiled by Ussachevsky himself. He passed away January 4, 1990.