Mark Katz - The Uncommon Parlance of Paul Lansky (excerpt)
from Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (2004)

Notjustmoreidlechatter opens with what one might take for the Babel legend. Countless untintelligible voices—high, low, fast, slow—bombard the listener from every direction. Heard on headphones (perhaps the "natural" venue for such a piece), the voices seem to be inside one's head, bouncing and darting chaotically. In fact, we are hearing only one voice, that of Lansky's wife, Hannah MacKay. MacKay is reading from chapter 25 of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Jane tells Rochester of her unusual dreams. The subject seems appropriate to the piece, for the disembodied voices have an unreal, otherworldly sound. While MacKay's voice is digitally multiplied, fractured, and transformed so that no single word is long or distinct enough to be understood. It is still possible to pick out recognizable syllables or phonemes. Here Lansky strikes a balance between familiarity and strangeness, in which listeners instinctively "squint" their ears, as Lansky puts it, in an attempt to understand what is being said. ... This is a canny compositional strategy, for it not only encourages attentive listening but also addresses the problem of repeatability. Even the most careful scrutiny will not reveal the text, but with every successive hearing the listener cannot help trying to extrapolate meaning from these verbal scraps. Here Lansky exploits the human tendency to fill in missing or unclear information to form whole structures. This is the same tendency that leads listeners to misinterpret indistinct song lyrics, even if the result makes little sense, for nonsense always seems to be more tolerable than uncertainty. (Examples of misheard lyrics are legion: "Excuse me while I kiss this guy," instead of "Excuse me while I kiss the sky"; "The ants are my friends, they're blowin' in the wind," instead of "The answer my friends..."; and so on.) Play Notjustmoreidlechatter to a group of listeners and you will find that they all think (and even insist) that they hear particular words, though few if any will agree on what is being said.

Lansky responded to the repeatability issue in another way as well. Using what he describes as stochastic mixing techniques, he essentially instructed a computer to determine certain aspects of the chattering at random. As Lansky has explained, the purpose of this unpredictability is to compensate for the fixity of the recorded medium, and in doing so simulate the spontaneity, the "danger," of live performance:My view is that in order to recreate the sense of danger you have to make the listener into the performer. The listener has to take an active part in the experience in fundamentally different ways than in live performance, and in order to do this I think that it's necessary to compose elements into the music that are non-linear, sometimes random, sometimes noisy and not discursive in the ways that a lot of traditional music is. I want the music to challenge the listener anew on each hearing, so that identical sounds will end up sounding different depending on the performance the listener creates in his own mind or ear.

In Notjustmoreidlechatter there is no performer in the traditional sense. So the performer's task—to create a fresh interpretation of a work with each performance—is split between composer and listener. The composer imbues the work with the unpredictability of a live performance, while the listener assumes the executant's interpretive duties. In fact, for Lansky it is the listener who truly defines the music: "The essence of the music," he argues, "doesn't lie as much in its details as in the act of trying to understand them." If we compare Lansky's response to repeatability with that of the recording performer, we see a fascinating inversion. I suggested in chapter 1 that recording artists transform performances into works by creating unchanging texts that transcend the temporal vicissitudes of the concert. Lansky has done exactly the opposite: he has composed a work with the qualities of a performance.

As its title suggests, there is more to the work than chaotic chatter, which alone might well drive listeners to distraction. Just as Lansky seeks a balance between familiarity and strangeness, he also leavens complexity with simplicity. Anchoring the swiftly moving surface voices are what Lansky refers to as background singers. Where the former move randomly in complicated rhythms guided by no perceivable system of tonality, the latter do the opposite. These voices sing slowly in simple harmonies on vowel sounds, meandering in stepwise motion within a diatonic scale. Although they do not follow the traditional rules of tonal voice-leading, their deliberate and predictable movements provide structure to the piece. A broader organizing principle also helps unify the work. The chatter voices chart a gradual path from lesser to greater intelligibility and back again, providing a kind of arch form to the work. At the midpoint of the piece, the background voices fade while the chattering becomes more prominent and distinct. Lansky seems to be rewarding careful listeners; for example, I hear "dream" and "a long way" (4:23-4:24), both of which are in the source text. (Then again, I would swear that I hear certain words and phrases that are not in the source text, so at any point in the piece it is impossible to know whether I hear what I think I hear.) After this section of relative clarity, the distinctness of the text diminishes as the chattering recedes into one's consciousness, the voices dying away inarticulate, to paraphrase Jane Eyre's description of her own voice disappearing in a dream.

Notjustmoreidlechatter wonderfully demonstrates the musical and aesthetic potential of digital technologies. Like an alchemist, Lansky transforms the ordinary into the precious, where a spoken word becomes a superhuman chorus. But this is no black magic—it is virtuosic handicraft developed from an understanding of both computer software and human perception. If Lansky exploits the possibilities of the technology to the fullest, he also confronts its limitations. The 1s and 0s of Notjustmoreidlechatter will not change no matter how many times we hear the piece. But he uses those same fixed digits to create the illusion of spontaneity, and makes us squint our ears in an attempt to hear more. The piece also raises questions about the definition of music. How does mere sound become music? Can we pinpoint the transformation? Or is the transformation in the listener, achieved when something is heard as music? Lansky does not answer these questions, but he does suggest (as John Cage has done before, but with very different sonic results) that the line between noise and music is far from clear, if such a line exists at all.

Paul Lansky hopes that listeners will not dwell on the technology with which he creates his music. "Music succeeds when its machinery is less interesting than its tunes." His stance is understandable, for he certainly would not want the medium to overshadow the message. While I do not agree with Marshall McLuhan that the medium is the message, a rich understanding can come of investigating both. Although the world of Notjustmoreidlechatter springs from the imagination of the composer, it is the technology that renders it audible.