Guest
Paul Lansky about his piece: Mild und Leise was composed in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer. I used the Music360 computer language written by Barry Vercoe. 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). At that point we were actually using punch cards to communicate with the machine, and writing the output to a 1600 BPI digital tape which we then had to carry over to a lab in the basement of the engineering quadrangle in order to listen to it. The piece came out on a Columbia/Odyssey LP in 1975 or so as a result of a contest run by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). It was called Electronic Music Winners. It's a very “electronic“ piece, quite unlike my later work, but at that time it was hard to do much else. It uses FM synthesis, which had just been worked out at Stanford, and later became the staple of Yamaha's DX7 series of synthesizers, and also a special purpose filter design program written (in Fortran IV) by Ken Steiglitz. Oh yes, the harmonic language of the piece is related to George Perle's 12-tone modal system. George and I had been collaborating for the past four years or so on theoretical developments in this system. The piece is based on the 'tristan chord' and its inversions, hence the title. I worked out a multi-dimensional cyclic array based on this chord as the harmonic basis of the piece, but that's the boring part... I still (sort of) like the piece. And about Radiohead sample (in Idioteque): The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise, on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A. (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive. What's especially cute, and also occured to Jonny Greenwood, is that I was about his current age, when I wrote the piece--sort of a musical time warp.
