Paul Lansky | Princeton University (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Lansky

Quatuor pour Ia fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) (1940) I. Liturgie de crista! II. Voca... more Quatuor pour Ia fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) (1940) I. Liturgie de crista! II. Vocalise, pour l'ange qui annonce Ia fin du temps III. Ablme des oiseaux rv. lntermede V. Louange a l'etemite de Jesus V1. Danse de Ia fureur pour les sept trompettes VII. Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'ange qui annonce Ia fin du temps VIII. Louange a I' immortalite de Jesus

Computer Music Journal, 1983

Perspectives of New Music, 1996

A Network Model of Music JP: In a 1990 article in Perspectives of New Music, you consider music a... more A Network Model of Music JP: In a 1990 article in Perspectives of New Music, you consider music as a process of network building. Besides the three traditional nodes on this network-composer, performer and audience-you add two new ones: the "sound-giver" and the "instrument-builder". If I understand you, the topology of the resulting network is open, and any number of different pathways are possible. It is no longer necessarily a hierarchy organized in top-down fashion around a composer. PL: I'm no longer so comfortable with this network model. There was an implicit assumption in my topology that technology was acting as an equalizer between people with different levels of skill. I think that's a slippery assumption. While I still think that the topology I described is interesting and suggestive, I've become a bit more skeptical about the hype that so often accompanies arguments about the freedom that technology brings to people who haven't undergone extensive musical training. There is a similar hype about "interactivity"-that computers give you the ability to engage music and other things with a new freedom and flexibility. While it's true that a hypertext interface to a Beethoven symphony, for example, is an interesting thing to contemplate, so often the author of the links is imposing his or her vision on you, so in a way it's even less interactive. I regard listening to a piece of music or reading a book as an intensely interactive activity, a communication between minds. I'm a little more hesitant these days about elevating the "sound giver" too much in that there are a lot of blurry boundaries between that node and the listener. I don't want to regard the "sound giver" as a node with equal weight to the performer or composer. "Instrument builder", however, is another matter. The design of an instrument will very often involve compositional decisions. To reduce it to a very simple-minded sense, it's as if I'm designing a piano which only plays C major chords, or which has a pedal that will always give you some particular resonance. So, the design process is actually like building an instrument that only plays a specific piece of music, and is perhaps synonymous with that piece. Music on Tape and CD JP: Recently I was listening to your piece Still Time, in which I feel I can hear the internal network-building process going on. The piece is very strong on the sound-giver aspects, but in certain places you're being quite definitely a composer. How would a piece such as this one be different if it were a piece of performed music, rather than one that creates a special kind of environment and experience only possible to experience through a recorded medium? PL: Let me back up a little and say that it's really a problem, writing music that essentially lives on tape or CD, because you're bypassing the whole performance process. My feeling about performance is that it creates a sense of danger and excitement in a piece of music. There is always a contest of some sort, and the piece and/or the performer is either going to win or lose. Early on in my work with computers, I noticed that pieces would often die on tape. Each time you'd listen to it something would be lost, so that ultimately it became meaningless blather. I didn't think about this at the time, but over the years, I suspect what I've tried to do is to come up with compositional strategies which ameliorate, and, I hope, eliminate this problem. One strategy is to build in a kind of distance so your relation with the music is oblique: it doesn't tell you right out what it is you're supposed to do with yourself as you listen to it. In the case of Still Time, I built an expansive and 'not-right-at-the-tip-ofyour-nose' sort of continuity, which is modeled more on cinematic logic than on traditional notions of musical continuity. In other pieces, such as the Chatter pieces, the texture is so complicated that every time you listen to it, you can choose to pay attention to a different thread. In pieces like Smalltalk there is a similar difficulty in parsing the texture. You not only have to decide what to listen to, but you also have to strain to hear it. So, the mixing of natural and synthesized sounds in Still Time has more to do with the creation of an objective distance than anything else. JP: Last year my four-year-old son went into a fun house at a carnival, and instead of going through it from start

Oxford Music Online, 2001

Leonardo Music Journal, 1991

After a career of 40 years spent largely in computer music technology, the author has moved to mo... more After a career of 40 years spent largely in computer music technology, the author has moved to more traditional musical practice and offers a valedictory reflection on the changing and evolving views of the promise and reality of digital music technology. What seemed initially, in the 1960’s, to be nothing short of a miracle and revolution has, with the complete convergence of digital and audio technologies, become a pervasive and general fact of life. Autobiographical and personal anecdotes annotate this transformation. The issues of musical versus technological progress are considered. Note: the full paper is at the end of the proceedings, page 561. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2009), Montreal, Canada August 16-21, 2009

array. the journal of the ICMA

Perspectives of New Music, 2012