An Interview with Paul Lansky

Abstract

Cody: Mr. Lansky, you studied twelve-tone composition with Milton Babbitt, and you earlier studied with George Perle, who had a more idiosyncratic application of the twelve-tone method. What is your relationship to twelve-tone composition in general? Was there a specific rapport between those theoretical advances and the advances that electronic and computer music made in the 1950s and 1960s? Lansky: I got involved in computers at a time and place where the prime motivation for doing so was that we thought it was going to be a way in which the properties of the twelve-tone system could be more deeply investigated. The idea was that with computers, one could perform very complicated structural manipulations of sets, rhythms, timbres, and other things that one could never possibly do with instruments. The interesting thing for me was that as soon as I started to do that, I lost interest in it. It was probably the computer, more than anything else, that led me away from twelve-tone music, because as I started to use it, I noticed that anything I did on the computer was much less interesting than the most primitive sounds somebody could make scraping on a violin. Consequently, constructing complex pitch relations became much less challenging and exciting than trying to get a handle on the guts of musical sound itself. (Or perhaps I wasn't meant to juggle more than three balls at a time.) And so I got involved in the early and mid-1970s in using the computer as a sort of lens on the sounds of the world, but it certainly was the excitement of serialism in the sixties that led me to use the computer. Cody: As far as your training, did you become interested in computer music as a musician? I know you were a French horn player, but as far as composition, did you begin studying quite traditionally? How did you originally involve yourself in electronic music?