Paul Lansky Listening

Growing up in two of the world's biggest cities, Manchester and New Delhi, I have a pretty good sense of the inspiration behind and the underlying idea of the piece. At some point, even I thought of composing of a piece to reflect upon my big cities influence and one thing that would have been the most significant in it was the traffic.

 It not horrible, it's not bad, it's not a hassle. It's just traffic, just people going from place to place in their cars. Even though its just traffic, it's different everywhere. I have noticed the difference in the sounds of traffic for every place I have lived in. For example, the traffic in Manchester was a lot of stopping and starting of the engines of the cars because of the taxi culture there. In New Delhi, it was mostly richie cars with their amazing suppressed engine sounds. In Tennessee, you can almost always hear a siren in the traffic and sometimes even catch someone honking.

From Paul Lansky's piece, I was able to relate to what kind of a city he was living in, thus interpreting his statement about the people who live there. Lansky slowly morphs his piece by adding elements that colour the scene even more. For example, when he adds the melodies, pianos, the bells etc. Every element adds one part to his intention of the piece.

The ending of the piece is also very interesting and sounds very natural. I related this to a piece of advice my composition teacher, Professor Joyce gave to me for one of my pieces - make the ending sound more natural, in a way that the ending feels deserving.