We lost a big one in May. Larry Polansky was, for those of us privileged to know him, a wonderful person. Composer, performer, publisher, instrument maker, mathematician, teacher, author, American Sign Language aficionado, and quite a few other things. He was born and started out in New York, but soon gravitated to the West Coast, where he was mostly based in the Santa Cruz and San Francisco Bay areas. A long stint at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire happened in the middle of this, with his eventual return to Santa Cruz in 2013. His generosity was legendary. He devoted much of his time to reviving the work of early 20th century American experimental composers (Joanna Beyer and Ruth Crawford Seeger were special interests), and, following on the example of earlier American composers like Arthur Farwell and Henry Cowell, who had each started composer-directed presses, worked tirelessly in collaboration with his first wife, composer, performer and ethnomusicologist Jody Diamond in founding Frog Peak Music – a composers cooperative, which published (and still publishes) works by a large number of contemporary American composers.
As a composer, Larry was especially wide-ranging in his interests. He was one of the chief microtonal composers of the last half-century, but he never was doctrinaire or single-minded in his approach to tuning and tuning theory. (Ben Johnston, Lou Harrison and James Tenney were all formative in lineage of his intonational thinking.) Although he had particular interests that he pursued throughout his life, he had so many interests that each area of investigation was just one more kind of material he was interested in. An excellent article about one kind of technique he explored is Giacomo Fiore’s “Heterophonic Tunings in the Music of Larry Polansky.” (https://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/misc_writings/writings_interviews/fiore_tempo.pdf) In this article, Fiore explores a number of pieces where Larry modulated between at least two segments of different harmonic-series based tunings.
For those who would like a quick introduction to Larry and the wide range of his interests, a very good place to start might be the liner notes to a number of New World Records compilations of his work. The liner notes by David Dunn, Amy C Beal, Michael Winter and Jay Michael Arms are all excellent and thorough, each set of notes dealing in depth with the techniques he explored in the pieces on each CD. Here are the URLs to the notes to these CDs, downloadable from the New World Records website:
Michael Winter’s liner notes for “Three Pieces for Two Pianos” by Larry Polansky.
Liner notes by David Dunn for “The Theory of Impossible Melody” by Larry Polansky.
Jay Michael Arms notes to “These are the Generations” by Larry Polansky.
Amy Beal’s liner notes for Miwako Abe’s violin recital “Music for Violin” on New World Records. Includes “Movement in E Major for John Cage” by Larry Polansky.
As mentioned above, Larry was one of the founders of Frog Peak Music, and they published a lot of his scores. (From the Frog Peak Website: http://www.frogpeak.org/fpartists/fppolansky.html ) One collection that is invaluable in getting an idea of the breadth of his interests is “Four Voice Canons # 2-18: Notes and Diagrams,” published in 2003 by Frog Peak, and it’s expansion, “Four Voice Canons #13 and #15”, published in 2002. Larry often wrote pieces as parts of a series over the course of his life. In these series, he would explore the ramification of a particular technique or structure, often with wildly diverse media. The Four-Voice Canons are one such series.
The “Four-Voice Canons” are a series of pieces with a common structure. Each piece is made up of a melody, generated by a permutation process. This melody is then played at different tempi, sometimes in different transpositions, with the repetitions arranged such that all the repetitions of the melody finish precisely together. The material of the melodies might consist of pitches in particular rhythms (ie, “normal music”), but they might also consist of non-pitched sounds, or samples, or recordings. For the canons oriented around pitched materials, many different kinds of intonation systems could be used. Some pieces could exist in more than one tuning. For example, #4 is for marimba in equal temperament, but another version exists for Dean Drumond’s harmonic-series tuned Zoomoozophone. Gamelan tuning is called for in #7, but which particular tunings will be used will be determined by the gamelan instruments available for the performance. Any six musicians can perform #11. The pitches used can be from any intonational system. “Harmonic series pitches” are called for in #12, and any consistent set of pitch classes can be used for #15. Finally, just intonation scales are called for in #16 and #17. In #16, 13 ratios of 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 are called for, while #17 is for six electric guitars with the strings of each guitar tuned to harmonics 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. 11, with each string being played on its open, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th harmonics.
Other of the canons use sampled sounds. For example, canons #9 and #14 use samples of kids voices (Anna Diamond Polansky and her friends), while canon #10 uses samples of Australian poet-composer Chris Mann’s voice. Similarly, each canon has its four voices in four different tempi, and the ratios between the four voices are different in each canon (and often can vary between different realisations of each canon.)
So just from the choices of intonation and tempo-ratios, one can see that Larry did not confine himself to working in any single system. He freely ranged over the widest range of material possibilities. This wide ranging choice of materials is reflected in the range of his other materials he used in his pieces. Mathematical functions which determined transitions of material, folk songs, bits of recorded improvisations with friends (Canon #18), pre-existing music by, among others, Joanna Beyer and Ruth Crawford Seeger, control patterns generated by both analog and digital electronics (Canons #1-3), were just a few of the sources he used. I would hesitate, however, to call Larry an “eclectic” composer. His choices were always consistent, in a “Larry” kind of way (for example, he used the voices of his daughter and her friends, but never just “any kid’s voices”). Sensing, or defining, the kind of larger, over-arching unity which I sense in Larry’s output is something I leave to another analyst to find out, but I’m sure that if someone gives it enough analytical energy and care, it WILL be seen to be there. In the meantime, we have Larry’s dazzling collection of works to savour, and enjoy. It was a beautiful gift he gave us, part of the generosity of spirit which marked many of the other aspects of his life. He will be missed.
Editor Note: Polansky’s scores span throughout the print edition of Xenharmonikon in volumes VII & VIII, IX, X, XI. and XIV.