[Dixielandjazz] Composing for human musicians, not machines.

[Stephen G Barbone]

Could this be the start of a trend?
Long article about one man's journey from composing computer music,  
back to composing for "real" instruments. Perfect for a slow Sunday  
(except in OZ)
BTW, ozmates, I'm off to see Geoff Powers and the New Wolverine Jazz  
Orchestra shortly. Then on my way to the Ocean City Music Pier in NJ  
on the Atlantic Ocean, for a Louis Armstrong tribute concert this  
evening, with Barbone Street.
Happy 107th Birthday Louis (August 4,), your music lives and we  
celebrate it.
Delete now if not interested.
Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband
NY Times - August 3, 2008 - By Daniel J. Wakin
A Computer-Music Man Unplugs

AFTER 35 years immersed in the world of computer music, the composer  
Paul Lansky talks with wonder about the enormous capacities of  
primitive objects carved from trees or stamped from metal sheets:  
violins, cellos, trumpets, pianos.

“To create the sound of a violin — wow!” he said in a recent  
interview. “I can’t do that on a computer.”

Mr. Lansky has written a new chapter, or at least a fat footnote, in  
the annals of artistic reinvention. A professor at Princeton, he was a  
pioneering figure in the computer music field and wrote one of its  
important programs, Cmix. (He also earned a place of honor with  
Radiohead fans when the band used an excerpt from an early piece.) But  
Mr. Lansky has abandoned the art form that made his name and has  
turned to more traditional composition.

“I hate to say this, but I think I’m done,” Mr. Lansky said.  
“Basically I’ve said what I’ve had to say. Here I am, 64, and I find  
myself at what feels like the beginning of a career. I’m interested in  
writing for real people at this point.”

While his comments may sound incendiary in the world of computer music  
composers, Mr. Lansky’s long years as a mentor and his self- 
deprecating outlook seem to have tempered the response.

“His decision is mostly about his own personal life and personal  
experiences,” said Russell Pinkston, a professor of composition at the  
University of Texas, Austin, and the director of its electronic music  
studios. “He felt he had done what he could do within that approach.”

In some ways Mr. Lansky’s shift is emblematic of the field’s  
disintegration, at least from the way it was constructed even a decade  
ago.

In the early years of making music with computers, it could take days  
to produce a few measures of music. Composers went to universities and  
congregated around giant multimillion-dollar mainframes — “big iron” —  
to create pieces. Mr. Lansky used punch cards to make his first  
electronic piece, “mild und leise,” in 1973. “It was tedious,  
backbreaking work,” he said.

Now a tiny laptop dwarfs the creative power of those behemoths.  
Electronic composition has left the laboratory. Any Mac user can  
compose, and much of music making is shot through with digitization.  
Composers commonly write with computer programs. Electronic music  
trends now lie in interactive computer programs that create sounds  
together with live performers or electronically alter acoustic  
instruments.

Mr. Lansky has followed the path of other electronic music pioneers,  
like Milton Babbitt, and moved on.

“He’s always been driven by the music, and more importantly his  
internal sense of the music,” said Brad Garton, a former Lansky  
student and the director of the computer music center at Columbia  
University. “That’s the lesson I’ve learned from him.”

Mr. Lansky publicly declared his defection in a program note for his  
latest CD, “Études and Parodies.” Released this year by Bridge  
Records, it features a trio for horn, violin and piano; a suite for  
guitar; and a string quartet.

“I was comfortable, successful, and imagined sailing happily into  
senior citizenship doing nothing more than sitting at home in my  
bathrobe crafting sounds on my computer,” he wrote. But several  
performers — notably Nancy Zeltsman, the marimba player, and David  
Starobin, the guitarist — offered commissions in the mid-1990s,  
planting the seeds of his conversion. It was a daunting prospect.

“But as I settled in, I began to revel at the miracle,” he wrote. “My  
job was just to put little dots down on a page, and these gifted  
performers would generate incredible results.”

In several interviews Mr. Lansky displayed a candor about his career  
unusual in a field where big egos abound. He acknowledged feeling a  
twinge of jealousy toward successful acoustic composers, saying he  
sometimes wished he could produce the acoustic music of his graduate  
students. He even came close to admitting a dirty little secret: “I  
basically don’t like electronic music. I like to compose it. I’m just  
not a big fan of it.”

Later he elaborated in an e-mail message. Mr. Lansky said he had less  
interest in abstract electronic sounds than in “machine-made music  
that attempts to comment on the familiar sounds of the world, sounds  
made by people hitting, plucking, bowing, blowing, talking, driving,  
etc.”

His conversion, in a sense, is a relinquishing of the need to control,  
the rejection of what he called an antisocial bent. What drives many  
creators of computer music is the desire to have total mastery over  
how a piece of music sounds.

“I wanted to be a filmmaker rather than a playwright,” Mr. Lansky  
wrote. “That is, I was interested in creating the finished product  
rather than in creating scripts for other people to execute.”

Much of his computer music is based on speech and everyday sounds, and  
his roots in the acoustic world go far back. He was a trained French  
horn player who performed briefly with the Dorian Wind Quintet.

With his tenured position as professor of music at Princeton, Mr.  
Lansky’s change of course carried little financial risk. Still, it  
opened up his ego to potential bruising. But so far the switch in  
genre has kept him busy and yielded some success.

The music publisher Carl Fischer, which signed him up soon after his  
conversion, will release his two-piano piece “It All Adds Up” next  
year. The So Percussion ensemble has just recorded a quartet,  
“Threads,” which has been performed by a dozen groups in the last two  
years. The Alabama Symphony Orchestra commissioned and gave the  
premiere of “Shapeshifters,” a work for two pianos and orchestra, in  
April. Mr. Lansky is working on a guitar concerto for Mr. Starobin.  
And a program of his acoustic music is scheduled for Sept. 17 at the  
Stone, an avant-garde music space in the East Village.

Mr. Lansky grew up in the East Tremont section of the Bronx. The  
apartment was small. Neighbors would occasionally complain about his  
practicing the horn, which he took up after the guitar. His father was  
a recording engineer and amateur singer; his mother was “various  
things, a Communist — you know,” he said.

He attended the High School of Music and Art, a time he called the  
happiest of his life. His schoolmates included the music historian  
Richard Taruskin, the musicologist Joshua Rifkin and Samuel Rhodes,  
the violist of the Juilliard String Quartet. Mr. Lansky attended  
Queens College, studying with George Perle. His earliest works were  
for acoustic instruments. After his stint with the Dorian quintet, he  
went to Princeton for his doctorate in music and has been there since.

His better-known compositions include “Idle Chatter” (1985), which  
uses electronically fragmented voices to create fast, subtly changing  
rhythms and pitches; “Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas  
Campion” (1978), a hauntingly beautiful work with electronic sounds  
accompanying a reading of verse; and “Table’s Clear” (1991),  
constructed of electronic gamelanlike sounds derived from banging on  
pots and pans by his children, Caleb and Jonah. (He assigns his wife,  
the former actress Hannah MacKay, most of the text-reading in his  
works.)

A sly humor comes through. “Table’s Clear” has some rude bodily sounds  
his sons worked in, along with the fleeting spoken line that the  
noises will cause the National Endowment for the Arts to take away his  
grants. Instead, the work earned him one: he submitted it as part of a  
successful application.

Mr. Lansky gained something close to fame when Radiohead used a four- 
chord progression from “mild und leise” in its song “Idioteque” on the  
album “Kid A.” The band credited him as a co-writer of the song, and  
he still receives healthy royalties, along with e-mail from Radiohead  
fans. The connection has also helped boost sales of his own records,  
he said.

Later in life Mr. Lansky is discovering the joys of composing for  
living beings, like the thrill of hearing an audience react to the  
enthusiasm of human performers playing his creations. He has come to  
wonder whether the future success of a piece of music depends on the  
pleasure musicians take in playing it, the implication being that a  
piece with no performers has a built-in obsolescence.

Shedding electronic gear and the labor of writing computer programs is  
a “huge relief,” he said. “I’m digging out music in me that I couldn’t  
have with electronic music.” The sheer process of reinvention, Mr.  
Lansky said, is satisfying: “It’s more interesting to get good at  
something than to be good at something.”

He recalled those pioneering years fondly. “We really felt as if we  
were at the beginning of a revolution,” he said. “I don’t have any  
regrets.”

“Almost no regrets,” he added.



Steve Barbone

www.barbonestreet.com
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband