Live Program Notes Presented at the Concert

The first two pieces on this program were created by cutting and splicing segments of magnetic tape and manipulating analog sound-generating equipment. The images projected here are of Vladimir Ussachevsky, another pioneer of electronic music, working with reel-to-reel tape equipment at the Columbia Electronic Music Center. Whereas analog tape represents sound waves as magnetically-recorded continuous voltage levels, digital computers store sound as sequences of numeric samples. Paul Lansky, in contrast to Varese and Stockhausen, composes in this digital domain, using advanced computer technology.

In order to work with digital sound, Lansky programmed his own software. Much of his work was done in the 1970s before commercial software became available, and even now he continues to compose with his own custom software because it provides a personal, flexible way of working--an idiosyncratic interface, or musical instrument--that is unavailable with commercial software.

Lansky often emphasizes the computer's ability to function as an "aural microscope"--that is, as a tool to let both composer and listener "get inside" a familiar sound; as such, the speakers surrounding us tonight are not so much musical instruments as they are windows into another world. Lansky has worked with the sounds of speech, banging pots and pans, and, as we will hear tonight, traffic. Lansky takes these seemingly unmusical sounds and imposes slowly shifting harmonies and timbres, creating large-scale musical shapes while explicating whatever implicit music lies within these "noises." As an example of this process and of his software at work, we will hear a short excerpt of traffic sound which dissolves into a segment from a new work still in progress by Lansky, called Ride. Notice how chords arise out of the original traffic noise, but with the characteristic swell and decrescendo of the oncoming traffic.

After we hear Night Traffic, we will have an intermission, at which time I would like to invite you to visit both the exhibition and the installations, if you have not already.

And now, off of Paul Lansky's compact disc Homebrew, Night Traffic, from 1990.