= page 214, 215 (Felciano) =

Felciano, Richard, b. Santa Rosa, Calif., December 7, 1930.

...Felciano had interested himself with highly refined sonorities and with timbre as a constructive element. This interest led him, in 1963, to work in electronic music at the San Francisco Tape Center. His first major compositions utilizing electronic means came four years later: Crasis, for seven instruments and electronic tape, and Glossolalia, for organ, baritone voice, percussion and tape.

Crasis (San Francisco, June 2, 1967) was a response to what Felciano described as "one of the most powerful acoustical experience of my life." He was referring to a performance of a Noh drama by a visiting Japanese company. "The subtle gradation of the wailing voices . . . and the abrupt and cataclysmic explorations on the part of the drummers, interrupting and yet preserving a strange sense of stasis -- all these made an intense impression on me. The appropriateness of these materials to an electronic context seemed clear, and I set about writing a work which would be not programmatic but rather an attempt to build a structure in sound whose acoustical materials are derived from Noh."

...in his search for a common electronic basis for acoustical and visual elements, Felciano began experimenting with television by becoming resident composer of the nascent National Center for Experiments in Television in San Francisco. Linearity, for harp and electronics (1968; San Francisco, November 22, 1968), became the first musical work to use the television system as a compositional element, and Trio, for speaker, screen, and viewer (1968; San Francisco, November 1, 1968), was the first audience-participation television composition.

Typed by Cheryl Vega 7-31-95