I grabbed this image from a beautiful video of Icarus Quartet’s take on Paul Lansky’s Textures.
In order to liberate that video from a sentence full of hyperlinks, here it is again:
I watched and listened from the LAX Hilton, first thing this morning. I should back up and explain how this all came to pass—the video, the correspondence with Paul that led me to it, and the thought that maybe this could be the start of a series of autotheory via gratitude journaling, or vice versa.
It occurred to me in the recent past to write to Paul. I had been tracking the threads of my recent creative work, perhaps subconsciously looking for models, mentors, heroes, or maybe trying to uncover some words of encouragement. It’s been a strange couple years in terms of the making of things and the teaching of making. I have been trying to let certain ambitions go, or maybe actually just look certain ambitions in the face so they aren’t secretly pulling my strings. Interesting things happen when you discover that you are motivatd by the secret desire to earn a “best new music” on Pitchfork. Such as:
it starts to feel like a silly thing around which to build a life;
you stop writing songs;
you stop singing;
you become sad about the above;
when you are done with that, a bunch of other nobler ambitions surface and you are off.
I think it was this “nobler ambition” idea that got me thinking about Paul. Which is not to say that I think Paul has noble ambitions—to be clear, I also don’t think he has ignoble ambitions. What I think about Paul is that he has been following his own personal and idiosyncratic joy and delight, to the source, for as long as he has been making music. And that, to me, is a noble ambition. Or rather: that’s how I need to get at it, by setting it as an ambition with moral or ethical value, and aspiring to be a person like Paul. He seems to have that barometer so deeply embodied that what you hear is the work of someone who has uncovered, time and again, and over shifting sands, the music that gives him a real kick. Can you hear it in Textures? It is like discovery of gem after gem. Remember the scene in Goonies when they finally discover the treasure? It is like that, absent being pursued by bad guys (who are literally shooting at children; the 80s were different). It is this sense of whoa, look at all THIS!
I hear that around every corner in this work, and in Paul’s work writ large. His children banging on pots and pans. Hannah’s voice. Computers singing. It is kind of how the music functions, too; there is a kind of chromatic limberness to the whole thing, an agility moment-to-moment. I kept thinking “functional but not teleological” as I listened. The moves off the white keys go places, lean places, but then they are also beautiful gems that live where they live and are what they are. If I were going to leave the diatonic scale, this is how I would want to do it, and why I would want to do it. It just had not occurred to me before this literal morning that one could delight like this. That one could foreground delight, and that delight would have a sound.
Five days ago I wrote Paul an email. I thanked him for blessing my dissertation. I don’t think he considered it in those terms, but when I played him the opening in his office in 2009 he said he had never heard anything like it, he loved it. It was the entire world to me so I kept going.
To go a bit further back in time: Paul called me, fall 2006, when he heard I was planning to withdraw from Princeton. He was concerned. This was a closing of a circle begun that April, as I felt the depression coming on. I could actually see the trigger, then, clear as day: I was to go to the graduate program at Princeton and I was writing all my music on this weird Yamaha hard disk mixer recorder thing. The poison thought was: I cannot bring Paul fucking LANSKY music that I am writing on this toy. I will finally be found out and that will be that.
It turns out I did not know what I was talking(/thinking) about, at all. Paul blessed my dissertation. Paul loved “Always Be My Baby” by Mariah Carey and unabashedly blasted it in Music 104: When Music is Made, for which I was a TA. Paul called me to say maybe stay. Maybe this could be good for you. I stayed. It was. And remembering that for me is delight, and joy—leaving the white keys in ways that turned out to be functional but not teleological. Look at these riches, I want to tell him. And so I do.
I wish you vast metaphorical riches,
A