Noah Creshevsky, who died on 3 December at the age of 75 after he was diagnosed with cancer, called his work hyperrealist music. On the face of it, it’s a pretty hip term, with hints of science fiction imagery and a cyberpunk stance. But with Creshevsky’s music, it is both exquisitely descriptive and accurate.As the composer himself explained in his essay “Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama, Superperformers And Open Palette”, hyperrealism in music meant “an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (‘realism’), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (‘hyper’). Contemporary reality is so densely layered and information-rich and so far removed from a hypothetical state of ‘naturalness’ that hyperrealism is an accurate term for identifying the fabric of daily life. We live in a hyperrealist world.”

As Creshevsky’s statement indicates, the term electroacoustic takes on a different meaning in his work than is commonly heard or understood. His music separates acoustic material from its source and repositions and recontextualises it in a digital (electronic) medium. Unlike musique concrète or most sample-based collages, where non-musical sounds are given musicality via compositional thinking and listening, Creshevsky reassembled musical samples – in ideal circumstances, that meant being able to record a vocalist singing every identifiable pitch in their range or an instrumentalist producing every note possible – into new pieces of music that were based in human performance but had never been played in real time.

Nor, in the end, could they be. Hyperrealism produced the Superperformer, a digital musician who could play at a speed, or with an agility in articulation, or using a timbre beyond what any human musician could achieve. The ensembles in his pieces had a level of precision that no chamber group or orchestra could produce, and individual instruments had a sound envelope that could never be heard in a live, acoustic performance.

If all this suggests Creshevsky stands apart from the history of electronic and computer musicians and composers, that’s because he was. Born in 1945, he lived within a generational niche that came after pioneers like Pierre Schaeffer, Vladimir Ussachevsky and John Cage, and before the easy availability of digital music making tools. And while his main medium was electric (he worked with analogue tape before digital sampling) he was, fundamentally, and always, a composer, a classicist who studied with both Nadia Boulanger and Luciano Berio. He made compositions with the formal and structural means of the Western art music tradition – the harpsichord part that is the basis for 1971’s Circuit was a fully notated composition in and of itself – and from a training that included, as he said, “piano, theory, ear-training, all the basics.”

An important moment came when, aged 21, he heard Terry Riley’s In C and “realised it was OK to have a beat and keep things in time.” Electronic means also helped him reconcile two conflicting inclinations: one was his admiration for what he called extreme virtuosity, which he heard in the music of Liszt and Scarlatti, and his distaste for preparing live performances with other musicians. “To be a regular composer,” he told me once, “you have to like the rehearsal process.” Creshevsky didn’t, but with hyperrealism, he could construct his own hyper-virtuosic performers. Creshevsky also looked at the ghetto of new music, of poorly attended (and often poorly prepared) concerts, of composers writing for hypothetical listeners, and side-stepped it. He made the natural connection between how most people listen to music, playing it on speakers or headphones, and how music should be made for recordings, not concerts. Where other musicians might prioritise the live performance, Creshevsky simply shrugged, smiled and went his own way.

His method was, in its own way, hyper-compositional. He loved working with pitched material, so he made sure that all his samples were properly tuned so that when he wrote his pieces on a digital sequencer, everything sounded the way it would if played, for example, on a Steinway piano. For his piece Jubilate (2001), he used 82 samples from Thomas Buckner’s recordings and constructed a vocal work that Buckner never sang. This, and his attention to the quality of each sample – Creshevsky would identify things as transitional or cadential material – makes for an uncanny valley of listening.

Pieces like Jacob’s Ladder (1999), Ossi Di Morte (1997) and Jubilate (all can be found on the compilation Hyperrealism: Electroacoustic Music By Noah Creshevsky on Mutable; excellent selections of his work can also be found on EM Records) are vivid and life-like in every detail. The superperformer aspect is subtle but pervasive, just slightly outside real life, but absolutely beyond it. It is both unsettling and exhilarating to listen to Creshevsky’s pieces, which can have you laughing both with unease and with genuine amusement.

And that is another essential feature of Creshevsky’s work. He was serious, and assiduous about his composing time and his attention to detail, but never stuffy. He was personally warm and found joy in living, and his pieces are shot through with his sense of humour, which ranged from self-deprecation and wit to the audio slapstick of pieces like Hoodlum Priest (2002), which mixed Buckner’s crooning with stretched funk guitar samples, or Drummer (1985), a dazzling construction of drum rolls, paradiddles, traffic and street sounds, and record-scratching techniques.

In the end, as strange is it may seem after encountering his music, Creshevsky was a traditionalist. But he was true, in every way, to the Western art music/compositional tradition, which, taken in its historical totality, is more in tune with contemporary times than are the cul-de-sacs of both academic modernism and contemporary classical music culture. Up through the 19th century, so-called classical composers were always making contemporary music and working with and responding to the daily life of their times, especially advances in instrument building and musical technology. The notion of what classical music was, and how it should be, didn’t yet exist. Noah Creshevsky stood amid that tradition, looked at the world around him, and remade it all, new, and with a smile.

Subscribers to The Wire can read Julian Cowley's essay on Nadia Boulanger and her students in The Wire 422.