Biography
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Born
18 June 1944 (age 79)
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Born In
New York, New York, United States
Paul Lansky (born 1944) is widely considered one of the original electronic music or computer music composers, and has been producing works from the 1970s up to the present day. A former student of George Perle, he is a currently professor of music composition at Princeton University, and in addition to his music is known as a pioneer in the development of computer music languages for algorithmic composition . He is also former student of Milton Babbitt and Edward Cone.
Lansky's first album, Smalltalk, was not released until 1990. It features four tracks, two covering aspects of the human voice, and two looking at two styles of music (metal and harmonica).
His second album, Homebrew (1992) contains five tracks, including the percussive and aural 18-minute classic, "Table's Clear", featuring samples of his children playing kitchen utensils. Following that came More Than Idle Chatter, the six compositions of which focus on processings of the human voice using LPC, granular synthesis, and plucked string synthesis; its three highlights are granular synth pieces called "Idle Chatter", "just_more_idle_chatter" and "Notjustmoreidlechatter" which look at the same thing from multiple perspectives. In 1994, he released Fantasies And Tableaux, a collection of two earlier works, "Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion" and "Still Time". 1995 brought Folk Images, Lansky's personal interpretation and reworking of a "good few folk songs."
At around this point there was a slight change in the style of Lansky's music that made it sound slightly more modern, and 1997 heralded a one hour 'computer opera', Things She Carried, a musical portrait about an unnamed woman in a series of eight movements. During the following year Conversation Pieces was released.
In early 2001 the CD Ride was released, featuring a new addition to the Idle Chatter family: "Idle Chatter Junior" and the 19 minute title piece, which tries to simulate a ride through various towns and country.
The Radiohead song "Idioteque," from their 2000 album Kid A, features a prominent sample from Lansky's computer tape piece "Mild und Leise" (1973), which itself "samples" Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde"s opening motif – essentially a half-diminished 7 chord, it's famous and influential enough in musical canon that it is simply known as the Tristan chord. The sample provides the entire harmony for the song through four looping chords taken from a few seconds of Lansky's original composition. Lansky has written an essay about Radiohead that appears in The Music and Art of Radiohead, as well as online
Paul Lansky's webpage: http://www.music.princeton.edu/~paul/
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