And one my ‘best enemies’ ………………………….who just died.
Search online for the name Larry Polansky and you will find semi-factual information beginning with Frog Peak Music.
I began working with Larry and his wife Jody Diamond back in the 1980s. David Rosenboom was part of our gang. Leonardo Journal had been over focused on the visual arts, and branching out to the sound arts was a natural.
Larry Polansky initiated the Leonardo Journal involvement with music and the sound arts, David Rosenboom was part of the trouble making gang.
Jody Diamond, Larry’s wife, is an expert in Indonesian and gamelan music and opened Leonardo to cultures it had never connected to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jody_Diamond
I just searched by email accounts and could not find any emails from Larry Polansky or Jody Diamond. Polansky and I have not communicated since before the internet was founded. I don’t have access to my DARPANET accounts where our discussions blossomed as well as meetings at the annual computer music conference.
How could some best friends vanish from my life? Well. After Larry Polansky broke the Leonardo silo to let sound in, we put a call for applications for the editor of the new annual Leonardo Music Journal. And. We hired someone else as Editor in Chief: Nicolas Collins, details below.
Several people in my network have become ‘best enemies’ after we came to disagree on something important. Bruno Latour is my exemplar:
Bruno Latour (French: [latuʁ]; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.[5] He was especially known for his work in the field of science and technology studies (STS).[6]
At the time, when I was still a professional astrophysicist, his participation in Actor Network Theory (ANT) left me cold and disbelieving. I now think otherwise. Latour and I had dinners together where our disagreement was just part of the music.
I have millions of neurons that connect to Larry Polansky, but no emails.
History and Memory
from Leonardo publications (search it, who needs URLs that are so forgettable)
By Nicholas Collins
Sometime in the spring of 1990 I received a phone call from Larry Polansky inviting me to contribute to the premiere issue of Leonardo Music Journal (spun off from the venerable Leonardo journal of art and technology), of which he was the founding editor. Larry’s timing was auspicious: ordinary life was suspended in my Bleecker Street loft as I awaited our firstborn and engaged in rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape of my life. Fearing that the blessed event would render me incapable of composing for months to come, I accepted the offer on the assumption that writing words would be somehow easier than writing music. I was wrong on both counts: the expanded family slipped into a blissful trio state, but writing turned out to be a more serious challenge than anticipated [1]. My previous writing experience had been largely confined to grant applications, concert and liner notes and the odd lecture. Larry’s invitation provided an excuse to indulge in musical self-analysis on a larger, more detailed scale. So, as my son napped, I typed, slowly cobbling together an essay whose style perhaps owed more to the ghost-written sports autobiographies of my childhood than to academic journals but that nonetheless accounted reasonably well for the evolution of my recent musical activities [2]. I found the process cathartic. Over the next few years I became increasingly involved in writing and editing essays, lectures and a book, An Incomplete Handbook of the Phenomenology of Whistling [3]. Self-reflection gave way to broader analyses of the interaction of musical aesthetics with technological, social and economic developments. Writing became an integral part of my life. Seven years after Larry’s phone call, I found myself sitting in a sunny Berlin apartment with my new daughter in my lap, while fellow composer Jonathan Impett prodded me to apply for the now-open position of Editor-in-Chief of LMJ. A paternal déjà vu of my first encounter with the journal prompted me to reflect on the current state of music. Post-Cagean composers developed approaches to technology that were experimental, analytic and, above all, idiosyncratic. The existing tools of musicology were ill suited for analyzing music based on echolocation, CD error correction, Doppler shift or speech patterns. Criticism fell into the gap between journals serving academic composers and musicologists and magazines dedicated to more popular styles. As a result, we were left with a body of work—conveyed largely in oral tradition, unlabeled circuits and forgotten computers—whose details, and sometimes very existence, were unknown outside a small circle. The desire to chip away at this ignorance fueled my modest activities as a writer and editor. LMJ had given me my first opportunity to make a statement about my own work, so it seemed appropriate that I offer others a boost onto the same soapbox. Since 1997 I have organized each annual volume around a rubric that I hoped would be specific enough to provide focus but broad enough to attract a diversity of contributors and contributions: Southern Cones: Music Out of Africa and South America, Pleasure and The Politics of Sound Art, among others [4]. My initial three-year contract was extended to five, after which I seemed to have acquired squatter’s rights to the position of Editor-in-Chief. Some months back I realized I was coming up on 20 years, 20 volumes, some 500 papers and authors. Both children are out of college; a generation has passed. It is time for a change of leadership, but also for reflection; hence this meandering preface and the theme for my final volume: History and Memory. In this issue, writers take the prompt both literally and metaphorically: memory embedded in neurons, silicon and architectural spaces; history as archive and as distant experience. Several contributors look at the metaphor of faulty memory embodied in recorded media, often in “obsolete” formats such as cassette, DAT and MiniDisc (Michael Bullock; Mat Dalgleish; Joseph Kramer), but also through encoding for the Web (Justin Gagen and Amanda Wilson). Others have addressed the intersection of location with memory, through sonification and focused listening (Richard Graham; Mikael Fernström and Sean introduction ©2017 ISAST doi:10.1162/LMJ_e_00998 LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 27, pp. 1–2, 2017 1 History and Memory Taylor; Edmund Mooney; Verónica Soria-Martínez), site specific installations (Lukas Ligeti) and oral histories (Úna Monaghan). Laura Cameron and Matthew Rogalsky retrace one of the World Soundscape Project’s earliest soundwalks; Lawrence English revisits Luc Ferrari’s landmark Presque Rien No.1; Charles Eppley discusses the problems of preserving one of the very first works of public sound art, Max Neuhaus’s Times Square; while Chrysi Nanou and Rob Hamilton write about issues in the archiving and recreation of contemporary piano repertoire, and Jim Murphy and Trimpin transcode Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano Studies for modern MIDI-equipped acoustic pianos. Luke Nickel’s compositions mine the specific musical memories of his performers, while Arto Artinian and Adam Wilson analyze the significance of memory in improvisation and David Kim-Boyle discusses memory’s role in live-coding performances. Other contributors incorporate historical material in their work (Ludwig Elblaus and Åsa and Carl Unander-Scharin; Jonathan Impett), discuss the use of sound in the design of museum exhibitions (Gerald Fiebig, Uta Piereth and Sebastian Karnatz), or build shrines to discarded pianos (Erik Griswold). Nick Collins (not the editor) describes techniques for “corposing” new electronic pieces based on a massive database of historical works. Scot Gresham-Lancaster provides a tidy history of networked computer music. Bernhard Gál traces the origin of the term “sound art,” focusing on activities in the United States, while Katsushi Nakagawa and Tomotaro Kaneko look at the history of the genre in Japan. Giuliano Obici describes the evolution of DIY “gambioluthiery” in Brazil, while Renzo Filinich Orozco provides a much-needed account of early electronic music in Peru. Veniero Rizzardi curated the audio companion to this volume, a collection of music about forgetting and rediscovering. When Leonardo Music Journal was founded, “music” seemed a broad enough term to cover any submission that might come its way. But in the past two decades the cultural terrain has shifted, “sound art” has emerged as a distinct genre, and the journal’s title now seems quaint, even a tad restrictive. Over the course of two decades, I’ve largely satisfied my initial urge to preserve and disseminate otherwise ephemeral work by under-recognized masters. But perhaps more importantly, this editorial position has brought me in contact with emerging artistic scenes on a global scale—a ringside seat from which to observe the rise of sound art. I will miss this work, but the journal needs a fresh pair of ears—I want to learn about what they are hearing. Goodbye, thank you and stay noisy. nicolas collins Editor-in-Chief Email: .
From you know where:
Bio 12/29/14 Larry Polansky is a composer, theorist, performer, editor, writer and teacher. He is the Emeritus Strauss Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, the co-founder and co-director of Frog Peak Music (A Composers’ Collective), and is currently Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz. He has also taught at Bard College and several other schools. His five solo CDs are available on New World Records, Artifact, and Cold Blue, and his music is widely anthologized on many other labels. His own works are performed frequently around the world. From 1980-90 he worked at the Mills Center for Contemporary Music, where he was one of the co-authors (with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom) of the computer music language HMSL, and a contributor to the widely-used program SoundHack (by Tom Erbe). His articles are published widely in journals such as Perspectives of New Music, the Journal of Music Theory, the Computer Music Journal, the Musical Quarterly, Leonardo and the Leonardo Music Journal (of which he was the founding editor), as well as many other publications. He is the editor of around 20 the scores of Johanna Magdalena Beyer, as well as scores by Ruth Crawford Seeger and others. In 2004, at the request of Crawford Seeger’s estate, he completed and edited her major monograph The Music of American Folk Song (published by the University of Rochester Press). His writings on American music include works on James Tenney, Crawford Seeger, Lou Harrison, Beyer, and many others. He is also the co-author of Music and Computers, a web-text published by Key Publications. He is the recipient a number of prizes, commissions, and awards, including Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Mellon New Directions Fellowships (the latter for work in American Sign Language performance). He was the inaugural recipient (with David Behrman) of the Henry Cowell Award from the American Music Center. As a performer (primarily as guitarist and mandolinist), he has premiered and recorded important contemporary works by Christian Wolff, Barbara Monk Feldman, Michael Parsons, James Tenney, Lou Harrison, Lois V Vierk, Ron Nagorcka, Daniel Goode, David Mahler, and many others. A member of several contemporary music ensembles, he also served as the curator for the Downtown Ensemble (NYC) for a number of years, and as part of Trio (with Kui Dong and Christian Wolff) for over a decade. In 2010, he wrote the score for Stacey Steers’ Night Hunter, an experimental animation chosen for the Telluride, Sundance, Rotterdam, and other film festivals, and selected for the New York New Films/New Directors festival at Lincoln Center. Currently he is working on new pieces, actively performing on the guitar and mandolin, editing of James Tenney’s collected theoretical writings, and developing a theoretical software-based investigation of a unified theory of form. Recently, he produced a major festival of American Sign Language (ASL) poetry at UC Santa Cruz, and has written a short opera in ASL and a series of articles and festivals about poetry and performance in the that language.
To Larry Polansky and Jody Diamond- thank you for triggering epigenetics and auto-poesis change in Leonardo and elsewhere from Indonesia to Dartmouth to….
Roger F. Malina