If you've ever wondered what impact electronic music technology has had on 20th century compositions, Voyager offers an excellent way to find out. All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis is a CD-ROM featuring the music of Morton Subatnick, one of this country's foremost composers. The works – which premiered in 1992 – is inspired by the collage of novels of surrealist artist Max Ernst and explores in musical terms the love and tensions between men and women.
The music is written for MIDI keyboard, MIDI mallets, flute, cello, and computer (it also includes some vocal sounds). As the music plays you view images and text from Ernst's novel A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil... You can also include the composer's comments as the images appear. Or optionally, you can view Subotnick's modern-looking score in its entirety.
If you want to learn move about how the composition was created, the program offers several options. The seciton called About The Music provides brief explanations describing how Subotnick structured the 17-part work and how he treated text, harmony, melody, and rhythm. You can also learn about interactive logic and the role that the computer played in the piece. And finally, you can learn how Subotnick used digital signal processing, synthehtic sounds (FM and sampled), and other sounds.
Elsewhere on the disc you can listen to audio clips of the composer sharing his thoughts on the creative process and his use of technology in compoing music. You can even read comments from the programmer and the recording engineer.
The Voyager disc also includes a second work called 5 Scenes from an Imaginary Ballet. This piece, derived from Hummingbirds, was composed by Subotnick especially for the CD-ROM medium. It uses images and text from the Ernst novel to create multimedia "chamber music" for CD-ROM.
Rubin, David M. (1995). The Desktop Musician. (pgs. 393-394). Osborne McGraw-Hill.