David Buddin’s “Canticles” CD is an electronic music realization of the instrumental parts for a six movement chamber work featuring soprano voice. The music is vigorous, dissonant, rhythmically complex and exhilarating. Influenced heavily by the thrust of the Western classical music tradition, Buddin is a modern musical maverick in the lineage of radical, iconoclastic American composers like Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Elliott Carter, Ralph Shapey and Milton Babbitt. The timbral character of this release is reminiscent of latter-day electronic realizations by Karlheinz Stockhausen, featuring phrases of seemingly erratic proportion, starkly dovetailing, unfolding and hurtling chaotically from within a void of digital silence. Buddin’s fastidious compositional voice is entirely uncompromising and bristles with untertones of violence, cruelty and danger. This release should appeal equally to fans of New Music, noise, electronic music and avant-rock alike: It is intense, relentless and highly intelligent. This sophisticated offering demands close scrutiny.
“The work is generated from a single six-note ordered set and its canonical transformations . . . the values of the intervals of this set determine everything from the note-to-note writing of individual lines to the large-scale formal divisions of the six sections, as well as the durations of the sections themselves.”
- From the album notes by David Buddin.
David Earl Buddin (b. 1968) is an American composer from South Carolina. His primary composition teachers include Salvatore Macchia and Charles Wuorinen. Works of his have been performed by such groups as the New York New Music Ensemble, Helix, and Ancora. His output is notable for its volume and diversity. He has written large works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, soloists, and electronic media. Presently he composes, performs, teaches, and writes about music in Brooklyn.
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