Charles Amirkhanian (born Jan. 19, 1945) is a California-based composer best known for his electroacoustic and text-sound music. Performance artist Laurie Anderson praises his work: "The art of audio collage has been reinvented here...A brilliant sense of imaginary space." State nickname: The Golden State Other U.S. States Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) Official languages English Area 410,000 km² (3rd) - Land 404,298 km² - Water 20,047 km² (4. ... A composer is a person who writes music. ... Electroacoustic music is a type of music which originated in the late 1940s, and early 1950s. ... Sound poetry is a form of literary or musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded at the expense of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; verse without words. By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance. ... Laurie Anderson on the cover of her album Strange Angels. ... Collage is the assemblage of different forms creating a new whole. ...
Composer, poet, and percussionist CharlesAmirkhanian is one of the leading United States exponents of text-sound composition, the intermedium between music and literature.
Using the recording studio as his composing desk, Amirkhanian incorporates tape loops, tape delay, multi-track layering, digital modulation, and synthetic and acoustic percussion tracks in combination with ambient sound recordings to produce enigmatic wordscapes characterized by intense rhythmic activity and abstract objectification of words into sound.
Since 1969, Amirkhanian has developed his current style of restless minimalism in which repeated figures are sustained for short periods of time before giving way to other variations on similar themes.
CHARLESAMIRKHANIAN: If you go back to 1920, there was a kind of feeling among American musicians that composers should study in Germany or France to be able to learn how to do it right.
Then you had composers like Dain Ruchaird, who is a Frenchman, and Edgard Varèse, also from France, both active in New York with their societies of new music that they founded to oppose the kind of standard orchestral fare that was given by the New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony and so forth.
Seeger was a very open minded kind of guy, and he realized that he had a tiger by the tail with Cowell, and he sort of gave him his head to experiment with as a composer.
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