Larry Polansky

Larry Polansky was a prolific composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator who wrote and arranged many works for a variety of instrumentations. He was a core member of the Frog Peak Music composer's collective and a widely published music theorist who co-wrote HSML, or Hierarchical Music Specification Language, with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom, as well as other computer software. Polansky was born on October 16, 1954, in New York. His brother is author Steven Polansky. Larry attended the New College of Florida, where he studied with Ron Riddle. He then attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, earning bachelor's degrees in music and mathematics in 1976. In 1977, he studied with James Tenney at Toronto's York University, completing his master's with Ben Johnston at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1978. Polansky took an assistant professor post at Mills College in 1981, later becoming the director of the Center for Contemporary Music there; he remained at Mills until 1990. In 1984, he and his wife, composer and ethnomusicologist Jody Diamond, co-founded and co-directed the composer's collective Frog Peak Music; its membership has included Lou Harrison, Frederic Rzewski, and Anthony Braxton, among others. While teaching at Mills, Polansky teamed with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom to write the music programming language Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL), which allowed for musical notation and performance on computers. In 1990, Polansky took an assistant professor post at Dartmouth College and co-founded the annual Leonardo Music Journal as part of the Leonardo: The International Society of the Arts, Sciences, and Technology; it was published through MIT Press. He earned the Fullbright Fellowship for the 1995-1996 season, which allowed him to teach and study at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, in 1996. He would go on to hold the positions of Jacob Straus Professor of Music and co-director of the Bregman Electronic Music Studio at Darmouth. In 2001, he and Judith Tick issued the critical edition of Ruth Crawford Seeger's The Music of American Folk Song. That year, Polansky earned the Sony Music Fellowship. The 2010 album, The World's Longest Melody, contained his compositions spanning from the 1970s to 2000s and featured the Zwerm Guitar Quartet, among other performers, including Polansky. Dartmouth named him professor emeritus in 2013 when he took a teaching post at UC Santa Cruz, remaining there until 2019 when that school named him emeritus as well. Polansky died on May 9, 2024, in Santa Cruz. Recordings of his compositions appear on the Artifact, New World Records, and Tellus labels; The Theory of Impossible Melody features the use of HMSL.
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