The original starship Enterprise (Wikipedia)
The Playing It UNsafe recording by the American Composers Orchestra (rdio) contains Dan Trueman's Silicon/Carbon. From a Steve Smith concert review in 2008:
In Dan Trueman’s appealing “Silicon/Carbon: An Anti-Concerto Grosso” members of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra used computers to manipulate sounds made by the acoustic ensemble while adding rhythmic patter and rubbed-goblet peals. The results sounded something like a shimmering moment from a John Adams orchestral score stretched out indefinitely.
Lucid Culture's comments are equally interesting:
Dan Trueman’s Silicon/Carbon: An Anti-Concerto-Grosso begins with a seemingly unrelated allusions to Appalachian fiddling and then offers spaciously horizontal, Uranian ambience punctuated by occasional percussion and bell-like tones, a handful of crescendos to restart the suspense and a clever rhythmic tradeofff between the percussion section and the entire orchestra toward the end.
And from the composer:
In the original Star Trek (I believe), a distinction was kept between carbon-based and silicon-based beings. Carbon and Silicon, but one row different in the table of elements, are functionally quite similar, but different enough that life is built on carbon, computers on silicon. In this piece, we are exploring one particular way that familiar carbon-based music making can meet new, silicon-based music.




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