Lansky Interview

7/27/2019 Lansky Interview

1/22

The Inner Voices of Simple Things: A Conversation with Paul LanskyAuthor(s): Paul Lansky and Jeffrey PerrySource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 40-60Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/833470

Accessed: 14/03/2009 12:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=pnm.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Perspectives of New Music is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Perspectives

of New Music.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/833470?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=pnmhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=pnmhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/833470?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/22

THE INNERVOICESOF SIMPLE THINGS:A CONVERSATIONWITH PAUL LANSKY

JEFFREYPERRY

A NETWORK MODEL OF MUSICN A 1990 ARTICLE in Perspectives of New Music, you considermusicasa processof networkbuilding.' Besides he threetraditional nodes on thisnetwork-composer, performer,and audience-you add two new ones: the"sound-giver"and the "instrument-builder."2If I understand you, thetopologyof the resulting network s open,and any number of differentpath-ways are possible.It is no longer necessarilya hierarchyorganized in top-downfashion around a composer.

PaulLansky,effreyPerry.This article s basedon a conversation onductedon 7July1995 at PaulLansky's ome in Princeton unction,New Jersey.


3/22

The InnerVoices of SimpleThings

I'm no longer so comfortable with this network model. There was animplicit assumption in my topology that technology was acting as anequalizerbetween people with different levels of skill. I think that's a slip-pery assumption. While I still think that the topology I described is inter-esting and suggestive, I've become a bit more skeptical about the hypethat so often accompanies arguments about the freedom that technologybrings to people who haven't undergone extensive musical training.There is a similar hype about "interactivity"-that computers give youthe ability to engage music and other things with a new freedom andflexibility.While it's true that a hypertext interface to a Beethoven sym-phony, for example, is an interesting thing to contemplate, so often theauthor of the links is imposing his or her vision on you, so in a way it'seven less interactive.I regardlistening to a piece of music or reading a book as an intenselyinteractive activity, a communication between minds. I'm a little morehesitant these days about elevating the "sound giver" too much in thatthere are a lot of blurry boundaries between that node and the listener. Idon't want to regard the "sound giver" as a node with equal weight tothe performer or composer. "Instrument builder," however, is anothermatter. The design of an instrument will very often involve compositionaldecisions. To reduce it to a very simple-minded sense, it's as if I'mdesigning a piano which only plays C majorchords, or which has a pedalthat will always give you some particularresonance. So, the design pro-cess is actually like building an instrument that only plays a specific pieceof music, and is perhapssynonymous with that piece.

Music ON TAPEAND CDRecentlyI was listening to yourpieceStill Time, in whichIfeel I can hearthe internal network-buildingprocess oing on.3 Thepiece is verystrong onthesound-giveraspects,but in certain placesyou're being quite definitelyacomposer.How would a piecesuchas this one bedifferent if it werea pieceofperformedmusic, ratherthan one that createsa specialkind of environmentand experienceonlypossible o experience hrougha recordedmedium?Let me back up a little and say that it's reallya problem, writing musicthat essentially lives on tape or CD, because you're bypassing the wholeperformance process. My feeling about performance is that it creates asense of danger and excitement in a piece of music. There is alwaysa con-test of some sort, and the piece and/or the performer is either going towin or lose. Earlyon in my work with computers, I noticed that pieces

41


4/22

Perspectivesof New Music

would often die on tape. Each time you'd listen to it something would belost, so that ultimately it became meaningless blather. I didn't thinkabout this at the time, but over the yearsI suspect what I've tried to do isto come up with compositional strategies which ameliorate and, I hope,eliminate this problem. One strategy is to build in a kind of distance soyour relation with the music is oblique: it doesn't tell you right out whatit is you're supposed to do with yourself as you listen to it. In the case ofStill Time, I built an expansive and "not-right-at-the-tip-of-your-nose"sort of continuity, which is modeled more on cinematic logic than on tra-ditional notions of musical continuity. In other pieces, such as the Chat-ter 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 likeSmalltalk there is a similardifficulty in parsing the texture. You not onlyhave 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 todo with the creation of an objective distance than anything else.Lastyear my our-year-oldson went into a fun house at a carnival, and,instead ofgoing throughit from start tofinish, hefound waysto loopbackand do somethings out of order,do somethings morethan once,bypassotherthingsaltogether.He spenthalf an hour in there.He didn'tsee it as a left-to-right experienceat all-I think he took the name "FunHouse"literally anddecidedto live in therefor a while.That's an appropriatemodel for some of the things I've been trying todo over the years. Idle Chatter, for example, was a very enlighteningexperience for me. I was very startled at first by the responses I got to it.Nobody seemed to hear the same things. Everyone seemed to choose adifferent route through the fun house. That sort of clued me in to theidea that in order to make stuff survive on tape, there has to be a differ-ent kind of relation between the material and the way in which peopleengage it. In the Chatterpieces this has a lot to do with the complexity ofthe surface, of course. Still Time, on the other hand, is trying to cash inon our experience of film. This is in explicit distinction from what youmight call a discursive model of music in which the composer leads youalong purposefully and skillfully,often by the nose. While film can do thisas well, it is also a medium which invites a kind of detached observationand often allowsyou to ruminate on the moment. In terms of my revisednetwork, I think that what I'm trying to do is to work up new ways ofconnecting to the listener, rather than opening possibilities with newnodes. But, I suppose that this is what every composer does.Whatabout the compactdisc as a medium? In your mostrecentreleases,the CD as a wholeseemsmorea single unit, the individual piecesmorepartsof thewhole.Is Lanskyreinventing the conceptalbum?

42


5/22

The InnerVoicesof SimpleThings

I really think the CD is a great medium because it's like a book-it'snot just a repository. There was an implicit assumption in the days of theLP that the LP was kind of an archivalmedium. For a variety of reasons,such as its durability and fidelity, as well as the ease with which you canmaneuver around in it, I think that the CD medium itself is opening upnew musical possibilities. I do like to think of individual CDs in termswhich will differentiate one from another. It's not always possible, butwhen you do have a group of pieces which go together well, it seemsappropriateto group them together in a "concept album." It makes itlike a book, or a movie. I like to think of a CD more like a book or avideo than like a "concert in a box."

MUSIQUE VWRITtTherewere some composersn the seventies and early eightiesdoing what Ithinkof as theelectronic-music quivalentofcinema verite,for instanceLucFerrari in Presque rien no. 1, wherehe recordsa day at the beachandmixes it down to album length, and Fritz Weiland's Orient Express(1982), ninety minutes of unprocessedrain sounds. Suchpieces really arealmost documentary ournalism, almostpure sound-giver.I think that these pieces are extremely interesting and suggestive. Theydo tend to suggest, however, a Cage-like dialectic in which you presumethat what we traditionally call music is a rung on a ladder leading to aworld view in which everything is music. My point of view inverts this, inthat I feel that what is particularly nteresting about music is the way inwhich it can build worlds on its own. My perspective is that, rather thantrying to liberate our musical perceptions from traditional notions ofmusic, I'm interested in harnessing the world-building power of familiarmusical conceptions to enhance our perceptions of the sounds of theworld. Often, I take the sounds of the world and impose "music" onthem, or use them as excitation functions for music. In Smalltalk, forexample, I simply use speech to trigger musical filters, and so the speechitself becomes a much more traditionalkind of music. I would hope thatwhat happens is that it feeds back so that you can hear speech as musical.I guess I'm thinking of music as the top rung of the ladder.There is also an implicit association that these pieces make betweensound and sight: If you can create a work of art by photographing ascene, why can't you do the same by recording it? My answer to that isthat I think there's an important distinction between photographicimages of things in the world and recordings of real sounds. First,photo-graphs and film lose a lot in that they are in two dimensions and in alimited frame. Second, while as Martin Scorcese observes film presents

43


6/22


the perspective of an unblinking eye, focused on one point, in the realworld we are constantly turning our heads, blinking our eyes, focusingon different things, and so on, and recorded sound has the potential tocompletely recreate real-world experiencewith sound, to the limits of thereproduction equipment, which is improving all the time.Certainlythere areways in which recorded sound can seem like photo-graphsand film. Luc Ferrariand others cash in on the fact that recordingcreates an artificialframe. But more importantly, from my point of view,when sound is stripped of its physical sources and environment, we losewhat I like to think of as a sense of danger. In the real world we need toknow where a sound is coming from and how to locate it-it may be justcuriosity, but it may be a life and death issue. Like film, recorded soundeliminates the need to do this. So a recording may be fun for the first lis-tening or two, but after a while it becomes boring. This is where musiccomes in. I feel that music's world-building power allows one to restorethe sense of danger in the world of sound. It's as if we are creating atheater for the sounds and using the power of music to make them per-manently threatening.When we enlist "music" in this enterprise, we're creating a situationwhere the listener suspends disbelief-you're investing in the theatricalexperience. That's what's so wonderful about opera-and cinema, in asense, does the same thing-you recreate the danger of the real experi-ence. That's what I tried to do in my piece Night Traffic,made from thesounds of the carswhizzing back and forth.4At firstI found the recordedsounds exciting by themselves but eventually they became kind of uglyand meaningless, so what I felt I had to do was to impose a musical con-text which puts one in a more theatrical relation to the trafficsounds. Asa listener, then, when you hear that truck rumbling by, accompanied by amonster E-flat chord that's getting louder and louder, distorting as itgoes, you engage a different kind of relation with sound, and it remainsterrifying,or perhapsbecomes terrifying in a theatrical sense. (One of myfriends described the piece as "Tod und Verklirungon Wheels.") But atleast this allows me to experience some sort of danger on repeated hear-ing. I suspect that what I'm suggesting is closer to traditionalnotions ofprogram music than to what Luc Ferrariand others are doing.

ELECTRONICMusic: GETTINGHOOKEDDid any of the relatively ew durable milestonesof the early electronic (orpre-digital) era, for instance Varese'sPoeme electronique, Stockhausen'sGesang der Jiinglinge, or Berio'sThema (Omaggio a Joyce) steeryou inthedirectionof electronicmusic?

44


7/22


I was not one of those people who heard early electronic pieces andbecame convinced that this was the way to go. I have a lot of respect andadmiration for those who forged the way, but they weren't what con-vinced me to give it a try. In fact when I first came to Princeton the grad-uate representative, Ken Levy, had to twist my arm to enroll in GodfreyWinham's course. The things I subsequently found most exciting aboutit, and still do, have to do with the musical economics of being your ownperformer (as a French Horn playermy options were very limited ... ).I found then, and still find now, wild electronic effects to be ratheruninteresting. What is more interesting to me are the pieces which makenew suggestions about how music might go. (I still love Milton Babbitt'ssaying: "No sound grows old faster than a new sound.") In this respect,one piece that reallyknocked me out much more than any of those piecesyou mention was Jim Randall's film score for the movie Eakins. It basi-cally consists of a lot of rather simple, sustained synthetic tones. But,when I first heard it, I was bowled over by the way in which its musicalelegance was so powerfully expressed by the capabilities of the machine.For me, this was much more suggestive than the well-known block-busters. By their standards it was probably primitive and simple minded,but by my standardsit opened a new world. It had a lot of influence onmy firstcomputer piece, Mild und Leise.5

ENDS AND MEANSIn the 1983 interview you did with Curtis Roads, you said, "It would benice in thefuture if the description of the piece's hardware and softwareresources ecameas relevant as an assertion that a pianist played on a Bald-win or a Steinway."6Do you stillfeel thisway?If a piece elicits more curiosity about its production methods thanabout its content, it is essentially a failure. I don't want people to listen tomy music as an example of the power of technology. I would prefer thatthey didn't even notice. There is a lot of commercial music which usesvery powerful signal processing, but people are generally not enthralledby that. If the technology shouts louder than the music, it's over. I thinkwe won't really get anywhereuntil the technology becomes utterly unin-teresting. When you listen to beautiful violin playing you do sometimesmarvel that the human race invented this incredible instrument, but usu-ally you notice the music. Vacuous virtuoso pieces are on the other sideof the same coin. The music doesn't really matter, it's the technique.Unfortunately, a lot of computer music today is motivated by the pres-sure to show off the technology, to demonstrate technique.

45


8/22


THE COMPUTER AND NOTATIONOne of the things that stoppedme coldat first about workingwithyourpro-grams on the IBM mainframe many yearsago was the absenceof anythingresemblingeither musical notation or musical input devices. Ultimately,though,it wasveryexciting to be reedfrom thegrid imposedon one'smusi-cal thoughtbytraditional musicnotation, and bytheblackand whitekeysofthepiano keyboard.Thecliche about sculpting directly with soundsrepeat-edly came to my mind backthen, on thosedayswhen everythingwasgoingwell.I have become increasingly aware of the conceptual prison created bynotation, particularly n computer music. There are lots of different kindsof music which have little or no tradition of notation, and there is a vastvariety of ways in which music relates to its notated form. On the com-puter, which is the ultimate instrument, after all, it seems a bit absurd tothink in terms of traditionalWestern notation. This raises an interestingquestion, however, which concerns compositional methods in general. Ithink that there are two kinds of composers, to be a bit simplistic: thosewhose music originates in the notation, and those for whom notation is,at best, an attempt to capture something. When I look at scores by mycolleague Steve Mackey, for example, I am struck by the fact that nobodycould possibly invent music like this on the page. He is being very inge-nious about finding ways to notate his conceptions, and essentially he'sbattling with notation. My experience with computer music is that nota-tion is more like a diary, or mnemonic, or place holder. In addition, yougenerate megabytes of data files which can tell you everything about themusic, down to the sample. Almost inevitably,when I begin a computerpiece by writing some notes down on music staves, it ends in failure. It'slots of fun to look at the role of notation in popular culture. Commercialtranscriptionsof music by PearlJam, for example, consist of extraordinar-ily fastidious notations which give it the appearanceof something quitecomplex, alongside guitar tablature.All this beingso, I can seewhyyou have said publiclythat you don't likeMIDI verymuch.7While MIDI is tremendously useful for many things, and has revolu-tionized the music industry, its conceptual limitations are severe. It is aprotocol based on a view of music in which the notated score is at the topof the hierarchy,rather than somewhere off to the side, where it belongs.I find it extremely limiting to work with, particularlybecause of the waysin which it detaches pitch from timbre, from rhythm, from expression. Somuch of what I find interesting about doing computer music has to do

46


9/22


with musically realizing the potential of some acoustic event. In the lim-ited work I've done using synthesizers as sound generators (for instance,a piece called TalkShow) found it very frustrating to invert the processand poke around some odd synthesizer for an appropriatetimbre after Ihad written the piece (which was actually a piece of interactivesoftware).I really hope that something better and more intelligent, and faster thanMIDI comes along. I expect it will.

THE IVORYTOWERThe condition of the academic composer s the subject of much discussion.Thereare, for example, John Harbison's "Six TanglewoodTalks,"FrankZappa's infamous tirade to the composers fASUC, and some lessthan com-plimentary wordsrom MortonFeldman about thePrinceton musicdepart-ment of old.8 Do you think about the oft-lamented quandary of theuniversity composervery much? It seems to me that you're pretty muchexactlywhereyou want and needto be.I think the university is great. I see its problems very clearly,and I seeits limitations. I see what you need to protect yourself from. I see thepressuresit puts on people. Despite all these factors it enables things tohappen, good things, which could never happen otherwise. If I had notbeen at a university all these years I would never have been able to doanything remotely like what I've accomplished. Computer music isentirely a product of universities. FrankZappacertainlywould never havebeen able to do a lot of his work if Jon Appleton and others around Dart-mouth hadn't had the freedom to work on the Synclavier, and JohnChowning, at Stanford, hadn't discovered the musical potential of fre-quency modulation. Bell Labs gave it the initial push, and Yamahamadesome big bucks but, without all the work that went on at universities, thefield simply wouldn't exist.On the other hand, I feel that people who are involved in the arts inthe university have a real responsibility to be aware of how the world atlarge perceives their efforts. It's very easy to lose touch, particularlyinmatters involving technology. Every once in a while I like to hop down tothe local music store to see what's up. Music stores and guitar stores areincredible places, worlds of their own.I suppose that universities arejust like anything else in the sense that ifyou know how to work around their problems, you can really appreciatetheir virtues. Working at a healthy university with good students is anincredible luxury and privilege. Don't think that I don't appreciate it. Icertainly don't take it for granted.

47


10/22


Do you think thingsare changing?I knowthat a lot of universitycompos-ersfeel endangeredright now.I think that there are a couple of things that have been happening.Federal cutbacks in research support for the sciences is ultimately goingto bounce back to the humanities, because the sciences do support thehumanities. The new retirement law is a real disaster.I recently read anarticle by Hillary Clinton in which she quoted John Adams (the presi-dent), who said something to the effect that "I have to study war so thatmy children can study math and science and philosophy, so that theirchildren can study art, literature, and music." The basic assumption at auniversityis that everything is valuable and everything is interesting: biol-ogy, math, music (although people in the humanities realize that they donot quite have the clout of those in the sciences).That requiresa verylong view.It's a position you have to constantly reiterate. University musicianshave to be very carefulnot to succumb to physics envy. Our position hasto be that nothing is as interesting as music, and that we need not justifyit in any way other than asserting that knowing music is part of beinghuman.

EAVESDROPPING, SPEECH, AND SONGThere is something hopeful about your preoccupationwith the sounds ofhuman speechand human activity. Thisdespitewhat you'vesaid elsewhereabout computermusicbeing "adomain pronetogreat seriousness,ometimesborderingon despair."9I was being partly sarcastic.So what was your question?I'm trying toget at the role of speech n your music. You'vementionedthat you're out of sympathywith text setting or songwriting, as it's conven-tionally done-that's not what you like to do with speech,setting speechtomusic.I would preferto sayit's not what I'm particularlygood at. I wrote theSix Fantasies on a Poem of ThomasCampion because I really wanted tosee what it would be like if I tried to write a song, and that was my way ofwriting a song. I just can't see myself writing songs.10One of thethings that everyonenoticesabout the CampionFantasiesis theway that you coax the musicality out of thespokenword-there's an appeal-inggentlenessand respector therecitation,for thesonnet.I would hope at the end of the piece that speech will sound like song.It has kind of a didactic function, to make you listen to the music inspeech, or to explicate the implicit music in speech.

48


11/22


Thelistener sits back at theend of the Campion pieceand says,wow,all ofthoseamazing sounds were hidden in the text all along! It's a bit of legerde-main onyourpart, becauseyou are imposingthings on the text, although itdoesn'tsound that way.I'm really interested in the inner voices of simple things. In a way, myultimate interest is to make simple things seem more interesting andcomplicated rather than to make complicated things seem simpler. InSmalltalk, for instance, I want to make music from the rhythm, contours,and feel of the conversation-to make you notice that there's kind of aninner text in the conversation. What people are saying is sometimes notas important as how they're saying it.1

THE IDLE CHATTERPIECESI want to talk about the Idle Chatter series.12 rememberyou saying whenyou did thefirst piece that oneof thethingsthat inspiredyou to doIdle Chat-ter was theway the NewJerseyPercussionQuartet moved,changing malletsconstantly,moving from vibraphoneto drums toglockenspiel, constantlyinmotion, in a sort of logistical counterpointto what theyplayed. Whatdoyouthink now?I remember the concert, now that you mention it. I was quite attractedto the busy workshop-like atmosphere. It really generated a feeling ofmultitasking, and seemed to be quite suggestive for a computer piece.Another inspiration for the piece was rap music, which had just emergedfrom hip-hop, and sounded really interesting and outrageous. Idle Chat-ter was also a breakthrough for me in that it was the first piece of minethat was specificallytonal.Just as Idle Chatter was inspired by rap, just_more_idle_chatterattempts to conjure up a lively group of background singers, all holdingmicrophones and swaying from side to side, accompanying the mainsingers. In Notjustmoreidlechatter, 'm not sure what was going on, but Isure did indulge myself in writing fourth species counterpoint.And you mentioned someplacethat you could almost understand what'sgoing on at certain points, that there'salmost a linguistic denouement....Somebody described it as a piece which seems to consist of a bunch ofmonkeys chattering away, and at a certain point they almost begin tomake sense, but return abruptly to unintelligibility, as realityis regained.In thesepieces,instead of theusual Lanskyianeavesdroppingon a more orless completerecitation or a continuous discourse,you're taking a slice ofsomeone else'sspeech,and building something rom theground up with it.And in thesepieces aren't you doing a lot withfiltering, creating banksofformantfilters .. ?

49


12/22


On those pieces? Those are very simple, actually. They're done withLinearPredictive Coding, which does amount to rapidlychanging banksof formant filters. I just isolate words, sort of flatten the pitch contours abit, and then transpose them. The sustained stuff is done with granularsynthesis. And then the bulk of the detail work is done with a kind ofalgorithmic composition. I don't actuallydecide what note goes where, Iuse a random probability method that scatters them with a fairdegree ofconsistency.That works pretty well-I do it a lot.

PERLEJAM:IMPLICATIONAND REFERENCEIn your recent Perlearticle you talk about implication and reference,whichsuggesta verypowerful way of examining what we mean when we say cer-tain thingsabout music. Let me quoteyou here:

Implication refers to the ability which a note, chord, passage, orsome pitch/rhythm configuration has to imply some other notes,chords, etc., either consequently, simultaneously, or previously.Familiarexamples of this are suspensions, resolutions, progressions,sequences, voice-leading rules, cadential patterns, motivic connec-tions, etc. Whether or not the consequences of implications are real-ized is not important-the absence of realization is often just assignificant.... By reference I mean the listener's ability to relate anote, chord, passage, etc. to a more abstractconcept, such as a col-lection of pitches, or pitch-classes. The concepts of "key," "scale,"and "collection" are familiarforms of reference.13Your implication/reference dichotomyis a way of making interpretiveand editorial decisions,as well as a means of analysis:you use it to exploretheE versusEflat issuein the third measureof Chopin'sPreludeop.28, no.20, to talk aboutPerle'smusic, Stravinsky'sSerenade n A, and the blues.Itseemsto me that it's veryhard to carry the conceptof implication out of therealm ofpitch-centeredmusic.I think I'm able to extrapolateout of the pitch domain into recordings

of real-world sounds. My sense of the implicative qualities of recordingsof real-world sound, is that they entail a powerful sense of implicationthat is closely related to a sense of danger, as I mentioned. Our percep-tion of sound in the real world is often used to tell us what is about tohappen. We read the future by the sounds of the present. What I thinkI've been attempting to do is to use the power of music to enhance theimplicative qualities of real-world sound. For example, I take the sound

50


13/22


of carspassing, or the sound of wind in the garden-sounds which haveno implicative qualities in terms of pitch-and somehow impose musi-callybased implicative qualities. In my speech pieces I think that the samething happens but in a slightly different sense. An interesting example isNow and Then. It consists of phrasesfrom children's stories that have todo with time. The text implies a lot but is never explicit about content.The listener has to reconstruct the story inwardly. My sense of the impli-cative qualities of real-world sounds (particularlysince I'm dealing withthem as sound on tape) has to do a lot with what you actually end updoing in order to make the sounds on tape have as much power as theyhave in real life, or perhaps even more power. To be really convolutedabout it, you might say that music gives you the power to suspend disbe-lief in a case in which belief has become inherently weak (i.e., you nolonger reallycan absorb those recorded sounds as real sounds).Let'sget back to GeorgePerle. He was a teacherofyoursat Queens. Whatwasyour contribution to his bookon serial music?What actually happened was that he published Serial CompositionandAtonality while I was a student at Queens.14There was a confusing chap-ter about his so-called twelve-tone modal system. George didn't feel thatit was proper for him to talk about his own music. But, he was an inspir-ing teacher and I took it on faith that there was something substantialgoing on there, even though he was hesitant to go into it. After I gradu-ated from Queens and came to Princeton, I decided I would try to dosomething with his twelve-tone modal system, and in 1969 I wrote apiece using it and then wrote to George to tell him about some newtwists I had used-I combined two primes-and assumed that he wouldbe horrified. Instead he wrote back saying, "My God, in thirty yearsI'venever thought of doing that." So we started a huge correspondence, andworked together very closely for about three years, constantly expandingthe system. I basicallysee it as a multidimensional system of cyclic arrays.George sees it in a much more complicated and rich way. I wrote my dis-sertation on it, and I developed a mathematical model of the thing usinglinear algebra, which sort of had the effect of making me lose interest init, to the extent that all the mystery was gone. George, on the otherhand, is working with it more intensely than ever. He's just published thesecond edition of Twelve-ToneTonality.l5Youmentionedsomewhere hat one of the thingsyou thoughtyou wantedto do with the computerearly on was exploreserial relationshipswith it. Alot ofpeopleseemedto havethat idea in thesixties.That was a big thing back in those days. Milton Babbitt had a set oftapes which he played to demonstrate that you could hear things whichwere, however, very difficult to perform. The idea was that a really pow-erful use of the computer was to do a lot of things that would be easy to

51


14/22


do on the machine and would be reallyhard to do in real life, but whichwould, however, make perfectly clear aural sense. That was the first rea-son I went to the computer in 1966 when I first came to Princeton. Myfirst computer piece used combinatorial tetrachords. I had the spectrumof each tetrachord tuned in majorthirds, which are excluded in a combi-natorial tetrachord,with the result that the timbre would always uniquelydefine the tetrachord. I worked on it for about a year and a half andfinally trashed it. I very quickly moved to use the computer as an auralcamera on the sounds of the world. Coming from an orientation inwhich pitch and pitch class played a central role, this led me to what Iconsider an interesting issue, namely the different meanings of pitch incomputer music and instrumental music.I feel that in instrumental pieces, as in the piece I just played for you[HOP for violin and marimba],16pitch really functions as a predicate-you're constantly tinkering with pitches and doing things with them inan interesting way that defines the logic of the piece. This doesn't workthe same way in computer music. On the other hand, while some peoplecertainly turn to the computer to create a sonic landscapein which pitchis vaguely defined, I seem to still want to make pitch an active player.ButI seem to use it in a way which allows other aspects of the piece tobecome focal, while still functioning in a way which engenders implica-tive qualities.Pitch is sort of a carrierwave?Perhaps, and then the information is decoded by demodulating thatpackage rather than letting the pitch itself lead you along. So, forexample, when I started to do Idle Chatter, I was still doing the Perle-type stuff, and the way I got to B-flat major in that piece was by just sim-plifying my cyclic arraysuntil all of a sudden I was just sustaining an F fora long time, and then I added a D, and then a B-flat, and that seemed tobe all I needed. So I really backed into tonal music. I didn't decide that Iwas going to write using tonal syntax. I still don't think of it that way asmuch as letting the pitch contours and context occupy a certain relativelyuncomplicated niche. It often seems to me as if telling complicated pitchstories is something that performers do so well, while machines haveother capabilities, to create worlds and landscapeswhich have very differ-ent agendas.I heard a North African drum ensembleonce where the drumming wasin the oregroundand aflute was accompanyingthedrummers.Perhaps that's the way I'm thinking. I may be deceiving myself,because it occurs to me that one thing I may be doing is investing veryheavily in a lot of musical experience that people have, so using triads andtonal content is not necessarilysimplifying things in that sense.It suggests o methat at onepoint you had a real loveof system.

52


15/22


That was the way things were back in the sixties, and even the seventiesto a certain extent, especially around Princeton. It was very exciting. Inrecent years, however, I've come to think of the whole "systemthing" asa particularkind of mythology. Everything is a system, and nothing is asystem.Tourarticle on Perlesuggeststo me that no matter how ar afield you'vemovedfrom serialism and high-tech musical modernism, all along you'vebeen thinking about the sorts of issues that JosephStraus deals with in hisbookRemaking the Past-namely, finding commonalities in the ways wecan talk about verydifferent dialects within the twentieth-centurymusicalrepertoire,and what theyhave in commonwith earlier music.17Finding acommonvocabularyto deal with thesedifferentkindsof musicseems o havebeenoccupyingyou under thesurface or quite a while.Yes, a big issue for me, which I tried to get at in the Perle article, wasthat I think we've developed bad thinking habits concerning the distinc-tions between what we think of as "tonality" and whatever followed it. Ingeneral, I consider the traditional practice of regarding some music astonal or not tonal to be very simplistic and probably due to our relianceon the machinery of music theory. I was really interested in this notionthat a lot of what music does is to tell you where you are and whereyou're going. Different kinds of music have different ways of expressingimplication and reference, but nevertheless you see them in all kinds ofmusic.In the blues, for example, there is a fascinating friction between ourability to comfortably locate ourselves at any moment in a familiarpat-tern, and our anticipation of the next step as a result of our clear view ofwhere we are in the big picture. In a sense, you are flipping back andforth between a referential and an implicative perspective. I suspect theblues is more like Vivaldi than Brahms in this respect. A leading tone, forexample, derives its qualities from our referential perception of it as theseventh degree of the scale, while at the same time implying a resolution.The two concepts then coexist and add dimensionality to the experience.Twelve-tone music seems to me to invest much more heavilyin referencethan implication, and for this reason I am disappointed at the lack of fric-tion, or interaction, between the two.

LOUDSPEAKERS: WINDOWS OR INSTRUMENTS?You mentioned that you usedgranular synthesisn the Idle Chatterpieces.Thegranular synthesis ssaypar excellence is Barry Truax'sRiverrun.Thatpiece is one that peopleunfamiliar with contemporarymusic have troubleacknowledgingas music, because, ike a river, it doesn'tbreathe.

53


16/22


In a way, the issue seems to me to be more one of acknowledgingloudspeakermusic as music. Some people, like Miller Puckette in a CMJarticle a few years ago, are quite explicit in denying it this status.18Theinteresting question in this regard is whether you consider loudspeakersto be windows or instruments. Most people are accustomed to thinkingof them as windows in that they usually listen to recordings of a liveevent, and the loudspeakers attempt to approximate something of theacoustics of the original sound location. I suspect Truax, Xenakis, andothers would ratherregard them as instruments. In my case, however, Iprefer to regard them as windows into a (you'll pardon the expression)virtual reality that the computer creates. In pieces like just_moreidle_chatter, I want to create the illusion that there is a virtual band ofgirl singers in the background, and in Still Timethe illusion that there issomebody back there actually doing something, and also that the spaceof the speakers is being subtly manipulated by a larger cinematic pres-ence. In these cases, however, the virtual reality is probably somewhatunfamiliarand the listener has to do some work to parsethe space.I regard this as one of the realpotentials of computer music, the abilityto create worlds which need to be fleshed out by the listener. When youhave a recording of somebody speaking or of somebody playing aninstrument, you have a pretty good mental model of what it is, but whenit's not quite clear what's going on, the listener has to do a lot of work.That's why, for example, a lot of the early reaction to electronic musicwas that it was "outer space music." People were trying to find somephysical correlate of the sound. They were trying to find some way inwhich they could imagine the sound's origin, and the most likely scenariowas outer space, because it seemed to have no earthly source. But theywere doing interesting things with their heads as they derived this sce-nario. I think that the real power of the medium is to create a world inwhich the listener has to work to imagine what's going on. The listenerbecomes his or her own story-teller, in a way. What I find the computerso good at is manipulating all kinds of familiarsounds to stimulate ourconsciousness in an endless varietyof ways.

THE AUDIENCE AND COMPUTER MUSICComputermusic seemsto bea medium that targetsitself veryspecifically othe individual, to an audience of one listener at a time. Theredoesn'tseemto be much of a rolefor the mass audience now, all sitting togetherin oneplace and listening toyour music en masse.It's bestexperiencedn your ownarmchair, throughyour ownspeakersorheadphones.

54


17/22

The InnerVoices of SimpleThings 55

It's great fun to listen to music with other people; on the other hand,one thing I've become sensitive to is the way in which a given piece pro-grams its listening environment. To take a really simple example, think ofthe ending of Brahms's Second Symphony, where there are series of bigchords while the horns hold a sustained D-major triad. At that momentyou actuallyhear the audience exploding with applause,or perhapsantic-ipating a huge ovation. Brahms really mastered the large concert hall.There are some electro-acoustic composers-several Canadians andSwedes come to mind-who seem to be working in the same environ-ment. They write pieces for dozens of large speakersin a large space andattempt to create a sensational effect for a large audience-and they do.Some of my pieces fall absolutely flat in a large public space-MemoryPages in particular-in that they are very private and intimate pieces,while others, such as Still Time seem to work better.One thing that I discussed in the Soundout interview was that shibbo-leth about how hard it is to put on concerts of tape music because peoplehave nothing to look at.19The more significant problem is that there isno intermediary between the listener and the composer. In this situationyou essentiallyhave the composer screaming in your ear-and there's noescape. You're just much too close to the composer: you smell his breath,et cetera.This is an interesting problem, because one of the things I like to thinkabout in tape music is ways to give the listener a chance to maneuver,or,as I mentioned earlier, a kind of objective distance. Perhaps it's a lessonfrom minimalism that it's interesting to relinquish control for a while andlet the listener wander about, perhaps changing levels of focus and con-centration. When you have a piece for live performers, you don't quitehave that problem because they essentially provide an alternativepoint offocus. I suspect that this hasn't really dawned on a lot of people who doelectronic music. They still use the conceptual model of the performer,and they don't realize that they're essentially shouting in somebody's ear.

FOUND OBJECTSAND FILTERSIn many of your tape pieces,you tend to respectthe internal chronologyofyour chosen oundsource,and usefiltration techniques oprocess hesourceasa whole.20Filtration seemsto be important toyou, to have an almost meta-phoricalvalue.I spend all day, every day, working with filters, and that's essentiallywhat it's all about, so I think of filtersmetaphoricallyin that any time youexperience something, you're experiencing it through a filter, whetherit's the filter of your own experience, or whatever....


18/22


Although earlyelectronicmusicdevelopedaround additive synthesis.Well, I think it was just that we hadn't caught up with the engineersyet, and in the early days it was much more expensive to use a sixty-fourth-order filter than a simple lookup table.That brings me to another point. A fairly early work of yours, Cross-works,21is indicative to me of whereyou wereheadedbecauseyou'realreadytaking a musicalfound objectand coaxing some latencies out of it, thewaythat you wereto do a little whilelater in the Campion Fantasies and someofyour othertape pieces. WithCrossworks, of course,you make useof a musi-cal object aden with such baggage and freight, it almost seems to me thatyou'retrying to exorcise ome demons.I think a particulardemon I'm talking to there is the incredible abilitya good piece of music has to invest one moment with the resonance ofthe entire piece. The opening chord of Schonberg's op. 16, no. 2, forexample, just rings with the sound of the entire movement, as does theopening chord of Beethoven's op. 110, et cetera. I took a specific chal-lenge in Crossworks,o liberate that chord from Schonberg. It's such agreat chord and I resented the extent to which he came to own it. ...But of course the reason it's such a great chord, is because of whatSchonberg did with it. (I'm stuck in a circle here.)It's interesting to hearyou say this, becauseI alwaysassumed rom hear-ing all the workyou'vedone with human speech hat you really wanted insomeway tofree yourselfof equal-tempered uning.I think that as much as I try to escape it, I've got an equal-temperedgrid in my subconscious. I've denied it for years, and I still do, but Ithink that it's fundamentallywhere I end up, no matter how hard I try toescape-and I do try to escape. I do believe that there's a lot a mythologyabout it, that there's not really any such thing as a true equal-temperedsystem, because the only machine that can ever really do it is the com-puter, and then when you do it on the computer, it's alwaysreally awful.I find myself constantly detuning things on the computer. A curious by-product of working with a digital system is the integer loop length prob-lem. Comb filters, for example, are inherently out of tune because theirmemory is in an integer-length loop and their resonant frequencies arethus equal to the sampling rate divided by the size of the loop. Thehigher you go the worse it gets. You can fine tune them with all-pass fil-ters, but it never seems to work quite right.

56


19/22


SAYING THINGS WITH A COMPUTER"Expression"s a term eschewedbymany composersn this century.Does itpunch any buttonsfor you? Is your music expressive,or anti-expressive,ordoes musical expressionnot involveyou as a composer?I see the sense in which it's a pejorative term-to the extent that it'ssynonymous with "effusive." But the way in which a piece of music triesto make a point, if you use the term "expressive"in that sense, it's cer-tainly something I'm interested in. I can think of some peoples' pieceswhich one would not regard as expressive because of the extent to whichthey're asserting their own idiosyncrasies without too much concernabout what one makes of them. Perhaps this has something to do withthe ways in which a piece negotiates its terms with the listeners. Somepieces are like those buses in New YorkCity that bow down to politely letpassengers off and on, while others are moving trainswhich barelystop,and force you to leap on and off at your own risk. I definitely think of mypieces in the former category, although I love a lot of pieces in the latter.In fact, I'dgo sofar as to say that mostpeoplewouldfind remarkabletheextent to whichyour music is expressive,n that it is electronicmusic.Without meaning to seem arrogant I'd like to say that a lot of peopledoing electronic music are attracted to it by the advertisement that saysthat it's going to make it easier for you to do dazzling things. In fact, Iregard the medium as one which makes it hard to do anything, and Iconsider it more like a musical instrument which you have to learn howto play, slowly and with great patience. There is a wonderful moment inlearning to play an instrument, when afteryearsof practice you suddenlyget some positive feedback. At that point, the process acceleratesas youand the instrument start to really hit it off. One of the problems withelectronic music is that very earlyon, anybody can get stuff out which isgoing to sound sort of like music, but it is essentially not feedback, butrather communication between you and the software designer (this iswhy I think people should write their own software). You are not gettingyour own head and heart into the act.The real threat to computer music is in the extent to which it's decep-tively easy. Technology is moving so fast that musicians are discouragedfrom spending the time really learning to master an instrument. Thepressures come from several sources: in the commercial music industry,new products with very different characteristics are constantly beingoffered while older technologies are made obsolete-in the research/academic community, the pressure is there which encourages one todemonstrate the superiority of your latest software or hardware. The

57


20/22

58 Perspectivesof New Music

IRCAM ISPW, for example, was not around long enough for mostpeople to do more than demonstrate its signal processing power, and ifyou were entrusted with one, the implicit understanding was that thiswas your main responsibility."Whathaveyou donewith ourgrant money?"The other thing I'm feeling concerned about these days is that I'mnoticing more and more that it's really important to make a lot of musicwhile you're growing up, play an instrument and make sounds. There iscertainly no shortcut in learning to play tennis, for example. You have toget out on the courts and spend a lot of time hitting the ball into the net.Music is no different.


21/22


NOTES

1. Paul Lansky,"A View from the Bus: When Machines Make Music,"Perspectives f New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 102-10.2. "Being a sound-giver may mean simply giving a cassette to a friend,or it may mean publishing a compact disk. The sound-giver may ormay not have made the sounds on the tape, it really doesn't matter.

... Before the advent of recording the only way one could be asound-giver was to be a performer. Today, however, most of uswould have to admit that giving and receiving sounds in one way oranother is the most active part of our musical social life.... Somesound-givers mainly want to share musical experiences; others wantto give you their latest and greatest efforts ... the sound-giver is spe-cifically activating a musical-social exchange in the most direct andsimple way." Paul Lansky, "A View from the Bus: When MachinesMake Music," Perspectives f New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer 1990),107.

3. Paul Lansky,Fantasies and Tableaux,CRI 683, 1994.4. On Paul Lansky,Homebrew,Bridge 9035.5. Columbia-Odyssey Y34149, 1973.6. Curtis Roads, "An Interview With Paul Lansky," Computer MusicJournal 7, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 20.7. Paul Lansky, "Some NeXT Perspectives," Perspectivesof New Music27, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 272-74.8. John Harbison, "Six Tanglewood Talks (4, 5, 6)," PerspectivesofNew Music 24, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1985). Frank Zappa and PeterOcchiogrosso, "Bingo! There Goes Your Tenure!" in The RealFrank Zappa Book (New York: Poseidon Press, 1989), 189-94.Morton Feldman, "Boolah Boolah" in Morton Feldman Essays,Walter Zimmermann, ed. (Kerpen, W. Germany: Beginner Press,

1985), 50-53.9. Paul Lansky,More Than Idle Chatter, Bridge 9050, 1994.10. CRI 683.11. Paul Lansky,Smalltalk, New Albion 030, 1990.

59


22/22


12. Idle Chatter, 1985; just_more_idle_chatter, 1987; Notjustmoreidle-chatter, 1988. Released on Paul Lansky, More Than Idle Chatter,Bridge 9050, 1994.13. Lansky, "Being and Going: For George Perle's 80th Birthday,"International Journal of Musicology4 (1995): 241-52. Currentlyavailable from Lansky's WWW home page at .14. George Perle, Serial Compositionand Atonality, first edition (Berke-

ley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1963).15. Lansky'sdescription of the system of Twelve-Tone Tonality (TTT)appearedas ChapterVII of the third edition of Perle's Serial Compo-sition and Atonality. See also Paul Lansky, "Affine Music," (Ph.D.dissertation, Princeton University, 1973).16. Marimolin, ComboPlatter, Catalyst 09026-62667-2, 1994.17. Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the

Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1990).18. Miller Puckette, "Something Digital," ComputerMusicJournal 15,no. 4 (Winter 1991): 65-69.19. "Room to Move: Soundout Talks to Paul Lansky,"Soundout, Issueno. 1. Accessible either via Lansky's home page or at .20. Lanskyplayswith this left-to-rightness in WordColor(Bridge 9050),where he reorders fragments of text from a Whitman poem.21. New American Musicfor ChamberEnsemble,Nonesuch H-71351,1978.

60

Documents

Lansky Interview