Paul Lansky Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

I can't say that there's a common practice that has to do with pitch language or with the way pieces are put together because today, anything is fair game. As far as I'm concerned, my own common practice is a piece that engages the attention of listeners from beginning to end, and doesn't rely on or expect the listener to zone out.

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.

There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do.

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

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.

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.