Paul Lansky

Following up on my earlier post about DJs, I sent an email to Paul Lansky. Lansky is a professor at Princeton and is also an acclaimed contemporary classical composer. I asked for his opinion on this question about club DJs. They are not quite part of the commercial pop scene but are definitely not part of the academy. I wanted to know what Lansky, who composes electronically, thinks of the DJs who mix and remix, also creating new music electronically.

Why Paul Lansky?
Because Lansky is an electronic music pioneer. In 1973, he composed a piece called mild und leise, an electronic riff on Richard Wagner's "Tristan Chord". The piece was composed on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer about which Lansky wrote, "This IBM mainframe was, as far as I know, the only computer on the Princeton University campus at the time. It had about one megabyte of memory, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in addition to requiring a staff to run it around the clock)."

mild und leise generated a lot of discussion when a British band, Radiohead, used looped samples from the piece as the framework of their song "Idioteque". The song appeared on Radiohead's Grammy Award winning album Kid A.

I discovered Lansky when I heard him speak about Threads, a ten movement cantata. The "threads" are interwoven preludes, arias, recitatives and choruses that occur and reoccur through the different movements. Lansky introduced the piece for the public radio show, New Sounds Live. He told us, members of the audience, that the arias and preludes would rise from struck metal. The recitatives would come from "noise instruments", including bottles and flower pots. And the choruses would come from drums. Despite the instruments on which the piece is performed, Lansky said that he uses computers to compose the music. Even though a piece, like Threads, will only use acoustic instruments in performance. As Lansky told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "I look forward to the day when nobody will care whether or not a computer was used in the process of making a piece." (Harrison, Shane. "Along for the 'Ride' with Paul Lansky" The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta Constitution 2 March 2001: P3).

I don't know if he'll actually get my email, but I had to ask the question.

mild und leise, First Movement


Idioteque