Paul Lansky

Born: 1944, New York Died: - Biography - Works - Links - Twentieth Century Composer Index

American composer, theorist, and critic. He is one of the leaders in the field of digital musical synthesis.

Paul Lansky's musical training was typical for an American composer. He studied music in high school and in college. After graduating, he began his career as a horn player (playing in the Dorian Wind Quintet from 1966 to 1967). He returned to school, eventually receiving a PhD in composition from Princeton, where he has taught since 1969. He has received numerous awards and grants, and has written many articles for musical journals.

Since the 1970s Lansky's music has focused on the use of the computer and musical synthesis. He is fascinated with the sounds of the human voice and uses the computer as what he calls an "aural microscope" to explore this world and to recreate it in his music. Many of his pieces make use of synthesized or electrically modified voices as a central element of their soundscape. More recently he has turned to other human sounds in his pieces: the ambient sounds of shopping malls and highways, for example.

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Works:

• Chamber/instrumental works, including 2 string quartets (1967, 1971/rev. 1977), Crossworks (1978, for piano, flute, violin, cello), As If (1981–82, for string trio with computer-generated tape), Hop (1993, for marimba and violin)
• Electronic/computer works, including mild und leise (1973), Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion (1979), As it grew dark (1983), Idle Chatter (1985), justmoreidlechatter (1987), Notjustmoreidlechatter (1988), Smalltalk (1988), Not So Heavy Metal (1989) Quaker Bridge (1990), The Sound of Two Hands (1990), Table's Clear (1992), Still Time (1994), and Things She Carried (1995–96, computer opera)

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Links:

• Paul Lansky's Personal Home Page
  You can learn about Lansky from the composer himself. Lots of links to sites with sound files, as well as downloadable music software by Lansky.
• Samples of Lansky's Music
  This page contains information about recordings of Lansky's music, along with audio samples of some of the works.
• The Composer and the Listener
  An interview with the composer from SoundOut: The Web
  Magazine of Contemporary Music. In the interview, Lansky talks about the relationship of the composer to the audience in the world of electronic music, where the sounds come not from a human musicians, but a pair of loudspeakers.

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