What role, if any, do you think technology will play in the composition and performance of your music in the next 25 years? Paul Lansky

Paul Lansky Photo courtesy New Albion

I’d like to reply by first rephrasing the question: how do you think your music will change as a result of technology?

I haven’t the faintest idea.

All I know is that technology has already had, and will continue to have a radical effect on the music I write and the processes I use to write it. Very little I’ve done would have been possible without the radically different perspectives and working methods offered by computing technology.

But just as we no longer notice that the bends, bobs and weaves of some electric guitar playing are the result of a technology that allows the use of a lighter gauge string, for example, or that the construction of the modern flute was facilitated by the industrial revolution, I would hope that the music I write will ultimately hide the technology used to create it and that its technological underpinnings will consequently be uninteresting. I hope that new technologies will continue to influence the music I write, but I will do my best to write music which succeeds in hiding them, or at least making them worthy of a footnote at best. My feeling is that music succeeds only when it transcends its machinery.