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Home , George Perle, Paul Lansky

MUSIC + LIFE

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AFTER THE GRADUATINc Tigers sing "Old The orchestral, chamber and solo piano Nassau" this spring and all the caps and pieces on Lansly's latest album, Notes to Self gowns are put away, wiil (Bridge Records), form a sort ofmusical diary. say goodbye to a retiring faculty member who The pastoral Arches for strings revises and didnt just teach the sweep of twentieth and expands a previous piece for string quartet. twenty-first-century music he lived it. Partita for guitar and percussion extends 'l - faotPos-R In his own work, , who Lanslq's long collaboration with guitarist, turns seventy in June, journeyed from the producer and label head David Starobin. The algebraic of through And the title work has elements that nod the painstaking programming of early at from Ravel and Stravinsky to Experimentalist computers to emerge, decades later, as a Hindemith and Messiaen as well as a pair of of bright, friendly and decidedly Lanslgr's teachers, Babbitt and . Th rough encou nters with tonal music for traditional instruments. "When I entered Princetonj' Lansky says, atonality and , Along the way he became known for such "I was very involved in pitch structures as and , rock and eiectronic pieces as Table's Clear (which a successor to tonalityl' It was t966, and he rap, Paul Lanskyfinds his voice. includes mealtime hijinks by his children) was a graduate of Queens College and New and Notjustmoreidlechatter (which trans- York's High School of Music and Art, as well By Mark Mobley forms Lanskyt wife reading lane Eyre into a as the French horn player in the Dorian rnassive chorale prelude). . "It was very exciting. Milton MUSIC + LlFE. COMPOSER

'-'..:-.111 Good company. Milton Babbitt 'Theblurringof thc 1i,:., -, .' -.' ' . betweenclassicaland (I9I6-2OLL) (top) in the computer room at Col u mbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center; (b. 1971) sampled Paul Lansky's Mild und leisefor 's "ldioteque""

Babbitt was in his prime. Ther:',ra-i : ir':-.-: :::Lcated Lanskyt own campus evatgeliza- revolution going on and people Ll--:'':s::: =.: :i.rn ibr another English band more than serialism and tn elve-tone music ''.ia'-.J r,. --i:. --l^-rrtr- r-ears before. way of the future. -l lored rock'n ro11 in the fifties," Lansky "I was not that interested in i:- -.:: I .er-s. "-\nd then I became interested in more studied the craft and tried Io ;.rr-r.' j: l .erious'music, let's say, and immediately computer piece. It \{as a 1'en'Lb;r:::::g :he sound of fifties rock became repulsive experience, because I rrorked ,ln -I3 ::r;: :,--r me. I couldn t take it. It just wasn't music. for a year and a half and thel irrir- .13 :ii -\nd then the sixties came around and The I listened to it and I said, 'This :ta-1" ::.r;. Beatles basically did a take on fifties rock- a So I stopped doing it unti-l abrrut l.;:',-..:i .ot of the eariy Beatles deals with Jerry Lee later when I started up again n1i ;il -1I:,.; Lerr is, Elvis, Chuck Berry- and the music und leise." ali ofa sudden started to sound good again, The eighteen-minute compute: ::: --;. especialiy through The Beatles' ears." named for the opening line oi rh,e -L:;i".-.;-'.: But as fresh and influential as The Beatles from Tristan und Isolde, u'as made oi 1r:al i, ere, and despite existing examples of was then, according to Lanslir-, the on-r- classical-popular fusion from Ives to Gersh- Princeton campus computer. It rsa-. an 1B\l rrin to Copland, there was still resistance in mainframe that despite costing hu:creds the academy to assimilating rock. - "The of thousands of Nixon-era dollars - ra:r on Beatles in a funny way changed punch cards and had just one meqab.,-te of everrthingi' Lansky says. "The graduate memory. (For comparison, an iPhone -1 has students were keen to convince the faculty eight thousand times more.) that there was some virtue to this music. My The piece won Lans\'a League oi lather was still working for Capitol Records Composers-Internationai Socien tor Con- at that point, so I could get free LPs and I temporary Music award and the opporninin- qave Beatles LPs to bunch ofpeople. The for the piece to be issued b1'Capitol Records. r'-hole shift, the blurring of the iines and whose studio his tather happened demarcation between classical and popular to run. Lanskyt work concludes the album cultures changed a lot as a result of The Electronic Music Winners (on Capitol's Beaties. They became an emblem of a new Odyssey label). The record is long out of approach to thinking oftonality and the print, but not so obscure that Radiohead kinds of music that one would want to write. guitarist lonny Greenrvood couldnt snag a I still think Paul McCartney is one of the used copy and then incorporate ten seconds great songwriters." of Mild und leise into "Idiotequei' rrhich is One trait Lansky shares with McCartney on the bandt zooo album Kld l. is a family musical partnership. Linda Mc- In a brief essay on Lansls-t rsebslte (paul. Cartney collabqrated with her husband on mycpanel.princeton. edu), the composer hrote, the album Ram, and, as a member of Wings, 'What's especially cute, and also occurred co-wrote the Oscar-nominated hit single to |onny Greenwood, is that I lvas about his "Live and Let Diel' The voice of Lanskyt wife current age when I wrote the piece - sort of and muse, Hannah McKay, has appeared a musical time warpi' Even before the band both unadorned and electronically in his approached Lans$ about sampling his music, works, in which it was - to borrow a Waffle he knew about them, having been introduced House phrase, - "scattered, smothered, to them by his students. It's a process that chunked and diced."

34 SPRING EOI4 Square one. Pau Lansky rn the old Winham Laboratory at the Colunrbia- Princeton Univers ty ln 1981. Digital tapes were carried here from the lBl\4 nrainframe across the street. The mischievous grin on Lansky's face is probably clue to the fact that he "had to be crazy to do the things we used to do to make corrpuler Jnu5ic. 'B :& ffi a,r*l

"The first thing I did with her was the Slx Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion|' Lansky says. "I had been sort ofallergic to rythmic approach to speech in music and I decided at that point to do a piece in which I r,vas setting a text, but I was really interested in the contours of the spoken rendition of the text, so I just set her up with a tape machine and went and had a cup of coffee rvhile she recorded it. "She is trained as an actress, went to The High School of Performing Arts, and before we had children she did movies and commerciais in . The thing I like about her reading is that it doesnt sound like somebody is reading. There's a very natural ring to it. I think it's very hard F to read. There are a few composers who :E {q can do it, like Robert Ashley and . You can t just talk naturally, but vou can't overdo it." McKay, Lansky says, "had a very graceful and delicate way of reading. That was the first piece I had er.er written that I felt I was going to keep. Then I did a piece with her, we called it "I had just become aware of rap and I came to the realization that as a senior I had As it Grew Dark, and that was the setting of text thought that was a fascinating use ofspeech. probably changed my major." His conversion irom Jane Eyre, where lane tells Mr. Rochester It was highly artificial speech, but it was was surprising enough to merit a feature in about meeting his wife in the atticl' sort of an interesting rhythmic approach to , and new Lansky works Then Lansky and McKay embarked on a speech, so I decided to do something like continued to emerge for performers as series of 'thatter" pieces, beginning with ldle that on the computer and I took the data varied as the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Chatter, largely because of a chance encounter set from As it Grew Dark and chopped it up the Yale Concert Band and forward-looking at a stoplight. into little bits and sort ofput them together chamber ensembles like Eighth Blackbird "I was driving into New York with into Idle Chatterl'This piece was eventually and So Percussion. [composer] Frank Lewin to talk to his class at choreographed by Bill T. Jones and is on "There is a whole new generation of Columbia and we got out of the Lincoln Tun- Lansky's second album for Bridge, Homebrew, young composers who are doing wonderful, nel," Lansky says. 'At that point, this was in along with jus t _more_idle _chatter and wonderful thingsl' Lansky says. "This sounds eighty-three, eighty-four, the Manhattan end N o tj u st m o r eidl e chatt er. strange to say, but they are composers who of the Lincoln Tunnel was something you had As Lansky entered the new century, his probably really like the sound of their own to navigate because the poor people would priorities began to shift, as he explained music. When we were writing complicated, come up and try to wipe your windshield. I in the keynote address ofthe zoog Inter- serial-based pieces, there was often sort ofa saw a group ofteenagers standing around a national Computer Music Conference in sense of, it's not the surface that you wanted cop, sort ofbouncing up and down. And the Montreal - an entertaining speech that can but sooner or later, maybe you can learn to cop had a smile on his face, so I rolled down be read at his website. 'After spending nearly love itl'As he moves forward, Lansky has the window and listened to what was going forty years doing little but computer musicj' found a way to love not just his wife's voice, on and it was amazing. Lansly said, "I found myself doing none, and but his own. -