Andalusia, for computer processed piano & voice

• Date: 1997
• Composer: Paul Lansky
• Period: Contemporary (1950- )

Review

Electronic music pioneer Paul Lansky composed Andalusia in honor of the Spanish architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg, whom the composer had met when Baldeweg was commissioned to design a new building for the music department at Princeton (where Lansky was a graduate student before joining the faculty). The piece, featured on Lansky's 1998 release Conversation Pieces (the cover of which, incidentally, features a digitally enhanced photograph of the building's interior), draws on a variety of topical and sonic sources. The foreground of the piece is usually dominated by a florid piano part executed by the composer (with "a bit" of help from the computer, Lansky admits) against a backdrop of sustained string harmonies. The elaborate ornamentation with which Lansky decorates his lines is electronically enhanced in subtle but effective means, as in the quick ascents and descents or trills that Lansky parses or zigzags between the left and right stereo channels. The piano/strings texture is counterpoised with another, that of the composer singing an Andalusian folk tune. This element can hardly be recognized as such, though, as Lansky subjects his voice not only to heavy digital manipulation, but also projects other timbres onto the contours of the sung melody. These two interacting textures, the florid, improvisatory piano and the electronically transformed folk song, seek to evoke both the character of the dedicatee (and something of his native Spain) and the musical legacy awaiting the building he designed. It also demonstrates a sophisticated type of integration between the un-performable computer-aided components and the real-time human elements. ~ Jeremy Grimshaw, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Paul Lansky: Conversation Pieces	1998

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