condition (record/cover): EX / EX- (light wear)

A CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) split LP pairing two young American electronic composers who had each studied in Europe and brought back different vocabularies. John Melby (b. 1941, Whitehall, Wisconsin) had studied with George Crumb, Henry Weinberg, Peter Westergaard, J.K. Randall and Milton Babbitt at Princeton, taking the PhD in 1972; he taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 1973. His Side A piece comes out of the Princeton computer-music studio tradition, all hard-edged synthesis and serial-derived structures. NEA Fellowship 1977, Bourges First Prize 1979 for Chor der Steine.

Ronald Perera (1941-2023, b. Boston) had studied with Leon Kirchner at Harvard and electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht; he joined Smith College's faculty in 1972 and stayed thirty years. His Side B pieces draw on Koenig's serial-stochastic vocabulary rather than the Princeton synthesis approach. The juxtaposition of the two on one LP makes audible the divide between the American Princeton-Columbia school and the European Koenig school at the moment when computer composition was opening up in both. CRI as label was the principal home for academic American electronic music throughout the 1970s.