ANS conclusion (I promise...)

ROVNER: Has there been any renewed interest in the ANS synthesizer
among musicians, composers and other people active in the musical
field?

KREICHI: Many composers, from time to time, ask me "Can I come and
write something for the ANS?" and I always invite and encourage them
to do so. Although not too many of these people actu-ally do come,
but
such people can always be found. I myself have recently written a
piece for the ANS with the title Tryptich-Ocean, which was performed
at the Moscow Autumn Festival and at the Electro-nic Music Festival
in
Bourges in 1996. It presents three sound-pictures of the oceans. The
first of these is called Waves, Winds and Birds, the second -
Tam-tams
of the Green Island, and the third - The Game of Dolphins. The entire
composition utilizes the sonorities of the ANS as well as variety of
natu-ral, concrete sounds - waves, sounds of dolphins and African
drums. The ANS is also regularly used in an electronic and computer
music course, taught by composer Victor Ulyanich at the Gnessin
Russian Music Academy. His students come to my laboratory at Moscow
University and work on the ANS in practice. Every year two or three
students, composers of the fourth course of the Academy, write
elec-tronic pieces at the end of the second semester as final
projects
for the course. One student, a girl from Vietnam, wrote a piece with
the title In a Buddhist Temple. Another graduate of the Musical
Academy, Ludmila Mechova, wrote a piece for the ANS and saxophone.
Except for a few of such pieces of a larger scope, most people write
small pieces, such as etudes or elec-tronic preludes, their main
intent being to show their technical mastery of the ANS. I myself
have
re-cently used the ANS in a recent composition of mine, which has
recently been performed at the Mos-cow Autumn music festival, which
is
titled The Birth of the Vertical. I decided to give it this name,
be-cause I was really impressed by a painting of a famous Moscow
painter of Spanish origin, Francisco In-fante, carrying this title,
which I saw three years ago at an exhibition in a gallery where there
was an ex-hibition of paintings from the 1960's. I was very much
inspired by his painting and the whole concept and idea itself of The
Birth of the Vertical, so I decided to realize this idea in sounds. I
used the ANS for that - it sounded in a generous doze along with
other
electronic and computer-generated sounds. There were also some
concrete sounds, so what turned out was a distinctive conglomeration
of all of these musical means. Lately I have switched almost entirely
to computer musical technology. Two of my latest compositions: Music
for Wood and Metal and Confession, which consisted entirely of
con-crete sounds, recorded with a microphone, nevertheless all
underwent electronic elaboration on the computer, such as
transformation of sound and piling of musical layers one on top of
the
other - this was done with the help of special computer music
programs, such as DART (Digital Audio Restoration Technology), Sound
Forge and SAW (Software Audio Workshop). I am continuing to work
intensively in this direction.

Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, translated by the
interviewer.