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Very often, when you're listening to a piece for the first time, you're listening through a model of other pieces that you know. At a certain point, a piece becomes idiosyncratic and you start to understand it on its own terms.

Paul Lansky

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Paul Lansky
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: June 18
Composer
Musical Composer
New York City
New York
First
Becomes
Time
Term
Idiosyncratic
Start
Model
Point
Piece
Understand
Models
Often
Terms
Certain
Listening
Firsts
Pieces

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I had been creating music on tape that was to be listened to as a recording, rather than through performance.
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I was hired for a really excellent academic job early in my life I was twenty-five when I started at Princeton and I got tenure early on. I really didn't deserve this I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
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I don't think of my music as being about something.
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I came up in the '60s that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time!
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I don't think there's something that you have to 'get' with my music. It tends toward the dramatic side rather than the narrative.
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It's always a thrill for me to see new versions of my pieces on YouTube.
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The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.
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With a piece of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, on first listening I'm referencing it with other pieces by them that I know. I think that most people do this - they listen to pieces through the filter of pieces they already know.
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I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.
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I've been really fortunate to have Bridge Records interested in publishing my music for the past 25 years. Most of my music is available in their catalog.
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I think you'll find a significant number of people who decide not to enter competitions because their music just won't fit in that world.
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With repeated listenings, a piece eventually becomes its own being. I very often say to students that this is like meeting a person for the first time. When you first meet someone, you reference that person with others who are similar but, as you get to know that person better, you begin to understand his unique qualities.
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I was very fortunate to be at a wealthy institution. I do recognize the drawbacks and limitations of the academic world but it's basically the world I grew up in and there's no way in which I would have been able to survive in the so-called real world.
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When you have performers, there's the uniqueness of live performance and what performers do in concerts.
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I didn't want my music to be seen as examples of an electronic culture I just wanted them to be thought of as pieces of music.
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I found myself recycling ideas and I saw that I had to invent reasons to compose a piece rather than start from some exciting idea.
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I think of myself as experimenting with different ways of structuring pieces. A lot of it has to do with the computer, of course.
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I've had a lot of fun writing percussion music. It feels quite similar to writing computer music. But I found myself in the role of choreographer in a way, worrying about physical movement and such.
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I came to what I think of as the critical problem: the aging process of a piece of music. I noticed in the '70s that pieces I wrote would sound great the first time I listened to them and then on repeated hearings they sounded older and older until what seemed exciting and vibrant on first listening became stale.
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Sometimes I imagine that there's a binary division going on in contemporary practice that has to do with chromatic versus diatonic. I notice that I tend to listen in a diatonic sense, that I register a pitch as a member of a diatonic scale, even in a non-tonal context.
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