Those of you that are familiar with Browning’s music know about his infatuation with numbers. I’m told that the piece is built around the date that the University was founded, the date of the premiere, as well as my birth date.  There are also hints of the UCF Alma Mater.  It’s a terrific piece and I highly recommend checking out some more of his music. We will perform Flying Tones again in March at the Florida Day of Percussion hosted at USF.

The disc also features the amazing JACK Quartet, the Cadillac Moon Ensemble, and Ensemble Unity.  The entire disc can be sampled below through Innova’s SoundCloud page:

Here is a video from the premiere (an incredibly windy day…).  From left to right: Kaylee Bonatakis, Ben Yancey, myself, Matt Roberts, and Josh Brink.

Anderson: Do you feel that your computer music has influenced your marimba or percussion composing in any way?

Lansky: It’s influenced my percussion composing more than anything else. Threads is really the first time I wrote for percussion ensemble. I’ve written some other percussion music. I have a piece that I wrote for the Clogs called Minor Alterations. It was tricky because they wanted something that would fit in with their kind of concert, which is mainly sort of pop and jazz. I don’t think that my piece fit in so I just revised it for the New Speak Ensemble. I substituted the cello for the bassoon and I think it works pretty well. There is sort of a drum set there and various noisemaking [instruments]. New Speak actually separated [the part] out, so they had two percussionists. They had one person play the cowbell, woodblocks, claves, and that sort of thing, and they had somebody who just did the drum set. I think that worked fairly well. But, I had never written for percussion ensemble before and I remember I was talking with the guys from So Percussion about it. I said, “Why do you want me to write a percussion piece?” We both had a piece on the Eliot Feld ballet in 2004.

Anderson: Is that how your relationship started?

Lansky: No, I knew them from Princeton. They had come down to play concerts at Princeton. I didn’t know them well but we were all at the Eliot Feld ballet and I had a piece there called Idle Chatter Junior which has a lot of percussion sounds. They were crazy about the piece, they really liked it. They said, “Why don’t you write a percussion piece?” I’ve been getting that sort of remark from players for a long time and I usually dismissed it. But, at that point, the computer was getting kind of old.

Anderson: You have been doing it for a long time [laugh].

Lansky: Yes, I kept changing the rules in order to make it harder for myself. I like becoming good at something more than being good at something.

Anderson: Sure, the path to becoming…

Lansky: That’s right. I felt with computers, I sort of think that I had done my thing. Lawson [White] and Doug [Perkins] were there, and I think Jason [Treuting] was there too, and they said, “Why don’t you write for us?” and I said, “I don’t know anything about writing for percussion.” And they said, “Well actually, you’ve been doing it for years.” And they said, “Write stuff and we’ll try it out for you, and workshop it.” So I did it and I wrote a set of, I think about twelve little studies for various kinds of instrument. I took it to their studio on Box Street and they played through them and we talked for a long time about what are the cliches and what are the things they really like to do and what kind of ensemble can they tour with and that sort of thing. And then I went home and wrote Threads and took a couple months, it really happened pretty quickly. I was really amazed at how familiar it felt. A lot of the things that I cared about in writing computer music sort of happened the same way in writing for percussion. I was very conscience of ensemble rhythm. And I was very conscience of texture and density. One thing that you have to do on the computer is you have to be very careful about balancing the spectrum. In Not Just More Idle Chatter as opposed to the earlier chatter pieces where I was using something called linear predictive coding, which is what cell phone use now, where you can spread the voice out make it high and low without sounding like Alvin and the Chipmunks. But I decided not to use that in Not Just More Idle Chatter so I just did away with it. I had to be very careful about the spectrum so I found when writing Threads that I was constantly thinking about the same kinds of things that I’d thought about. I had written a lot of computer music that sort of passes for percussion music. I have a piece called Tables Clear, which is sort of kitchen utensils and that sort of thing. I have a piece called Dance Tracks which is improvising electric guitar and those are all basically percussion music. So a lot of the same lessons sort of came through and it was great; it really felt very familiar.

Here is a brief excerpt of the electronic component (without acoustic percussion):

And here is a screen grab of the multi score:

Concert details are as follows:

Accidental Music Festival Chamber Music Concert
September 8, 2011 @ 7:00 p.m.
Urban Rethink (625 E Central Blvd • Orlando, FL, 32801)

UPDATE
You can now pick up a copy of the score and electronic/click tracks on the composition page.

Also, here is a live recording from the premiere:

The score features a simple motif, heard often in the vibraphone, along with other percussive piano timbres.  I was also able to incorporate a marimba quartet and vibraphone quartet of mine underneath parts of the soundtrack.

I finally got around to making the recorded album available for the masses through Bandcamp’s fantastic storefront. Check out the embedded player on the sidebar to the right or visit the album’s Bandcamp page to check out or purchase all of the tracks.

Up until some point in the late 1920s or early 1930s, brake drums were made of steel.  As I understand it, the steel became soft from the friction and heat build-up so the manufacturers switched to making cast iron drums as an alternative.  The switch to cast iron resulted in the clangy, anvil-like timbre that we are all too familiar with nowadays.

Why is this relevant?  Steel sounds incredibly different than cast iron.  It’s like the difference between playing a warm, sustained note on a set of chimes and the dry, crunchy sound of a trash can lid; one has resonance and tone while the other is pure clunk.  So, as the story goes, it was these spun steel drums that Henry Cowell found in the junkyards and then introduced to a young John Cage and Lou Harrison in the mid-1930s.

Not convinced?  Well, let your ears decide for you.  Below is an audio example of a spun steel brake drum:

Still not convinced?  To better understand this issue, let me point out an interview excerpt from a conversation between Alan Baker and composer Lou Harrison in 2002 (shortly before he passed away):

Harrison: …and regularly visiting junkyards, to get percussion instruments. That’s where Henry found the most beautiful bells at the time were brake drums. So, shortly after that—this was the 30s—brake brums were made of cast [iron] and lost their pink and became clunk. So now-a-days, I should print a little booklet, “What did they sound like?” Because I keep hearing these … I heard the slaughtered version of our “Double Music” recently … It was just unbelievable, and I should write a text on what the instruments were like, and more or less what they sounded like because it all changed. Nobody pays any attention to try to find out …

Rich: In terms of brake drum …

Harrison: Yes, well that’s an example. I could suggest alternatives … and then … also for example, John’s sleighbells. Atrociously mocked … . And things like that; but I should write a little treatise on how it actually sounded and why. If I ask for suspended brake drums—and John did too—what we did was to hang them up from the axle, and they were spun steel, and made beautiful bells. Now-a-days if you hung them up, you would get nothing but the thunk, and nobody hangs them up anyway. They just play the thing like that. I have three of the originals left, and an old fire alarm that John gave me, which is of the same quality. The only things that have lasted, sort of unaltered, are the gongs, and the instruments of other ethnics that we simply buy. But the junk stuff, as Henry recommended, has all changed. Junk isn’t what it used to be. So it’s a problem in those pieces in which we used stuff taken from the then industrial—world.