This CD-ROM is an important milestone. It was created by a significant composer and includes a multimedia work that was composed specifically for CD-ROM medium. This work is not actually title piece, but a shorter work derived from it entitled 5 Scenes from an Imaginary Ballet. According to accompanying booklet, this is the first piece of music composed especially for CD-ROM. If this is so, and there is no reason to doubt it, this fact alone is significant. That this work and its companion are also well-structured, engaging, and convincing works as purely auditory experiences makes Subotnick's achievement even more impressive. All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis (1991-92) is third and final part of Music for Three Imaginary Ballets. The first two works in sequence were The Key of Songs (1985) and And Butterflies Begin to Sing (1988). These ballets are all based on collage of pioneer German dada painter, Max Ernst (1891-1976), who was also part of French surrealist movement in twenties, and who lived in New York and Arizona from 1941 until 1953. During his time in United States he had a significant influence on artists of abstract expressionist movement. All My Hummingbirds is based on Ernst's novel Reve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel (1930), in translation by Dorothea Tanning, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking Veil. To create his collage Ernst cut illustrations - wood engravings - from popular nineteenth-century novels and other books about nature, science, and exoticism, transforming this material through bizarre juxtapositions and addition of highly ambiguous, seemingly nonsensical, texts. The main themes of these novels are religious bigotry and sexual repression, seen as cause of both psychological and physical illness. These themes are reflected in fourteen illustrations, with their accompanying texts, that were selected by Subotnick as basis for two works on this CD. As Subotnick explains in an audio clip in Composer's View section of CD, although a sense of of these works might be very clear, it is as hard to explain that meaning as it is to explain meaning we find in music. It is this intuitive experience of meaning that attracted him to novels. All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis is a work for MIDI keyboard (played by Gloria Cheng), MIDI mallets (Amy Knoles), flute (Dorothy Stone), cello (Erika Duke), and computer. The musicians are all members of California E.A.R. Unit. The sounds manipulated by computer include those produced by piano, flute, and cello; samples of voices of Joan La Barbara, Gene Youngblood, and Morton Subotnick; sounds of insects recorded from underwater; cries of ravens; and sounds generated by FM sound synthesis. The various elements of work were built up over a period of time. First two acoustic instruments were recorded in conventional way, then two MIDI tracks were added, with MIDI information from keyboard and mallets controlling synthesized and sampled sounds. Only at this stage did composer decide to include actual sound of a piano, something that was possible with use of a Yamaha MIDI grand piano controlled by MIDI information recorded by keyboard player. The next stage involved fine tuning of recorded performances in ways that are possible only with digital technology, refining of electronically generated sounds, and addition of more layers. The final version of work involved use of Interactor computer program developed by Mark Coniglio and Morton Subotnick. This program is capable of responding to MIDI events in highly complex ways while following up to eight different tempos simultaneously. The program can locate current position in score, assess relative attributes of various musical events, and respond according to a set of conditions decided by composer, controlling samplers, sequencers, digital delays, and other digital processing devices. …