Larry Austin (1930–2018), thirteen years Hunt’s senior, was a key interlocutor for the composer. The two met during Austin’s term as editorial director of the magazine Source: Music of the Avant Garde and both had studied music at the University of North Texas. Following stints at the University of California, Davis, and the University of South Florida, Austin returned to UNT as professor in 1976 and took over its electronic music studio, the Center for Electronic Music and Intermedia. When Hunt drifted away from official academia in the late ’70s, Austin served as an important institutional connection for him, helping him to book time with the university’s synthesizers and inviting him to perform on campus.

The “hybridity” of Hybrid Musics refers to Austin’s syncretic approach to composition: electronic and acoustic sounds meld freely, while rigorous, structural techniques interplay with Austin’s intuitive and emotional approach to sound. “Quadrants: Event/Complex No. 1” for symphonic wind ensemble and tape is the first in a series of compositions structured around a rhythmic pulse that systematically increases and then decreases, which Austin called a “tempo arc.” “Catalogo Voce” (the elegance of the Italian belies its literal translation, “item catalog”) juxtaposes the deep baritone of bel canto opera singer John Large with the otherworldly creak of a vocoder. Like many composers of his generation, Austin sustained a career-long interest in the work of Charles Ives, and in 1974 he set out to complete the late composer’s unfinished Universe Symphony (ca. 1911–28), a segment of which appears here. Austin also came across Ives’s sketches depicting the contours of rock formations while studying the composer’s papers, and was inspired to attempt this technique himself. This resulted in the score for “Maroon Bells,” a work named after two peaks in Colorado’s Elk Mountains composed for voice and tape that featured Jerry Hunt on prepared piano.