CD: Joel Chadabe - Intelligent Arts

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Intelligent Arts is a compilation of recordings from 1973 through 1997.

Joel Chadabe is familiar to many synthesizer enthusiasts as a pioneer in his field, conceptualizing and commissioning the legendary CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio) System, which was built in 1970 by his life-long friend and colleague Bob Moog, and his company, R.A. Moog Co. He is also the author of "Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music".  

In 1977, thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation, Joel was able to buy the first Synclavier, a digital synthesizer/computer system built by Sydney Alonso and Cameron Jones at New England Digital Corporation and, with the help of Roger Meyers as his working partner at the time, began to write programs for it. He composed Solo, Scenes from Stevens, and Follow Me Softly with the Synclavier. He asked Robert Moog to build two antennae, as modified Theremins, to control the Synclavier as a conductor. His antennas were more than five feet tall and half-inch in diameter.

In 1986, Joel began to work with a MIDI system consisting of a Macintosh computer, Yamaha synthesizers, and software developed at Intelligent Music, a company that he had formed with some friends, among them David Zicarelli who developed M, a group of algorithms portrayed graphically on a computer screen. Many of the songs in After Some Songs, as well as Spring Drum, were composed with M.

"From that time to the present, when people ask me what I do as a composer, I explain that I do not compose pieces, I compose activities. A 'piece', whatever its content, is a construction with a beginning and end that exists independent of its listeners and within its own boundaries of time. An 'activity' unfolds because of the way people perform; and consequently, an activity happens in the time of living; and art comes closer to life." - Joel Chadabe

The Bob Moog Foundation is proud to feature Joel's unusual musical works here in our online store.