Paul Lansky Quotes

#1. I think of myself as experimenting with different ways of structuring pieces. A lot of it has to do with the computer, of course.

Paul Lansky

#2. I wrote a lot of software to do various kinds of special things, and I loved the idea of composing pieces in an electronic studio.

Paul Lansky

#3. 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.

Paul Lansky

#4. I had been creating music on tape that was to be listened to as a recording, rather than through performance.

Paul Lansky

#5. 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.

Paul Lansky

#6. I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

Paul Lansky

#7. I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.

Paul Lansky

#8. My perspective on the academic world is very favorable. I did certain kinds of things that I could never have done otherwise.

Paul Lansky

#9. 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.

Paul Lansky

#10. It's always a thrill for me to see new versions of my pieces on YouTube.

Paul Lansky

#11. 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.

Paul Lansky

#12. 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.

Paul Lansky

#13. If the music has a logic of its own - as I think my music has - an open-minded listener will apprehend and understand.

Paul Lansky

#14. I think of myself as an experimentalist even though much of my music sounds logical and normal, in a sense.

Paul Lansky

#15. 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.

Paul Lansky

#16. The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.

Paul Lansky

#17. I don't think of my music as being about something.

Paul Lansky

#18. 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.

Paul Lansky

#19. 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.

Paul Lansky

#20. It's very interesting for me to listen to music with my wife. She's not a musician but she very often makes comments about pieces in ways that are similar to what I'm thinking.

Paul Lansky

#21. When you have performers, there's the uniqueness of live performance and what performers do in concerts.

Paul Lansky

#22. Even today, I notice that some of my pieces are explicitly tonal; there are actually tonics and dominants. And then there are pieces that are not tonal. I tend to think that there's a dichotomy that has to do with the way pitches are structured.

Paul Lansky

#23. 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.

Paul Lansky

#24. 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

#25. 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!

Paul Lansky