Transmission Two: The Great Excursion (TT:TGE)—The Aesthetic, Art and Science of a Composition for Radio

The three authors each explore an aspect of Larry Austin’s 1990 extended composition for radio broadcast. Composer-writer Charles Boone examines the work for its musical and dramatic interest and for its significance as a hybrid of Hörspiel, with elements of theater, portraiture and sound collage. Its scope, means, intent, realization and compositional approach are elaborated by Austin, the composer. Throughout his section, he intersperses aphorisms drawn from his conversations with the seven protagonists of his ‘sound movie’. Austin’s collaborator, computer-music scientist Xavier Serra, explicates the technical/theoretical genesis of TT:TGE’s computer-generated speech sounds.