the lansky to radiohead pipeline. and mahler stuff.

Today I’m on a Paul Lansky –> Radiohead rabbit hole. Paul Lansky used to write a lot of electronic music, but I know him from percussion music, first hearing Threads in undergrad.

I just wrote a (bad) paper on Textures related to minimalism and found this interview of Lansky. Turns out his earliest electronic work got sampled by Radiohead.

As a pianist and percussionist I’m fairly interested in pursuing his music more to learn how to write cool music for percussion. I didn’t expect this cool foray into an album I haven’t heard before.

I’m also thinking that for the whole composing/sound design thing it’s good to be hearing this interesting ambient music. It would sound great for documentary.

—

Otherwise I’ve been listening to Mahler 4 since it’s mentioned in Adler’s Orchestration text. I play this piano reduction with a recording and think about distilling it to basics.

The beginning is just action above your standard tonic, IV, V. The nonharmonic tones are HINTING at action to occur later. The C#s intimate the commitment to D major at m 38. But otherwise it’s screwing around with V of V of V’s away from G Maj and then wandering back.

m 14 is basically a tritone sub (on Bb) of E7 to hinge back toward V/V (A).

Bear in mind that “E7” here I am meaning edimb9. The resolution to “A” on beat four is actually an “F” chord. Call it a mixed modal thing that works because of shared chord tones.

Then m 16 is your I6/4 with some strong nonharmonic bass for the whole cadence of I6/4, V, I.