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Larry Polansky Papers

Call Number

MSS.405

Dates

1937- ongoing, inclusive
; 1970-2010, bulk

Creator

Polansky, Larry, 1954-
Polansky, Larry, 1954- (Role: Donor)

Extent

77.50 Linear Feet
in 4 record cartons, 72 manuscript boxes, 1 half manuscript box, 8 tall manuscript boxes, 23 flat boxes, 9 oversize flat boxes, 2 media boxes, and 1 flat-file folder

Extent

268 Gigabytes
in 127,537 computer files.

Extent

917 audiocassettes

Extent

131 DAT

Extent

19 Betamax

Extent

9 VHS

Extent

2 Video8

Extent

2 Half_Inch_Video_Reel

Extent

131 Reels
audio reels

Extent

1 websites
in 1 archived website.

Language of Materials

Materials are in English.

Abstract

Larry Polansky (b. 1954) is an American music composer, performer, teacher, writer, and computer programmer. The Larry Polansky Papers document an individual's ongoing career in the creation, performance, and education of music, beginning in the 1970s to the mid-2010s. The bulk of these papers consist of Polansky's extensive output as a composer through work files, performance notes, and sound recordings. Event ephemera and audiovisual recordings document musical performances and festival/conference appearances from the 1980s through the mid-2010s. This collection contains office files for Frog Peak Music, an artists' collective co-founded by Polansky and Jody Diamond, as well as administrative files for Lingua Press, a company absorbed by Frog Peak Music in 1995. Polansky's departmental files from Mills College and Dartmouth College dating from the 1980s through 2013 can also be found in this collection. Writing and project files in both paper and electronic format document Polansky's extensive and varied interests within the modern music field, covering subjects such as music composition, psychoacoustics and formal perception, new tuning systems, instrumentation, and computer programs for algorithmic composition. Of note are his work files on his profiles and analysis of various composers and their works including Johanna Magdalena Beyer, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and James Tenney. Polansky's personal files contain correspondence and subject files related to his work, illustrating his extensive network of colleagues and friends within his field. Large groupings of regularly backed up computer files containing a combination of personal and professional documents from the 1980s to the 2010s are in this collection.

Biographical Note

Larry Polansky is a composer, performer, teacher, editor, and writer. Polansky taught at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music from 1980-1990, where he also co-authored with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom the computer music language Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL). He is the Emeritus Strauss Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, where he taught from the 1990s to 2013, and in 2019 retired from his teaching position at University of California, Santa Cruz. His articles are published in many journals including Perspectives of New Music, the Journal of Music Theory, and the Leonardo Music Journal (of which he was the founding editor). In 2004, at the request of composer Ruth Crawford Seeger's estate, he completed and edited Seeger's major monograph The Music of American Folk Song. His writings on American music include works on James Tenney, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Lou Harrison, and Johanna Magdalena Beyer. As a performer of primarily guitar and mandolin, Polansky has premiered and recorded contemporary works on his own, as well as with several contemporary music ensembles. As a recording artist, his solo albums include Artifact, and Cold Blue, and his music is widely anthologized on a number of recording labels. Among his other projects, Polansky is co-founder and co-director of Frog Peak Music, a composers' collective and in 2010, he wrote the film score for Stacey Steers' Night Hunter. He is a recipient of a number of prizes, commissions, and awards, including Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Mellon New Directions Fellowships.

Arrangement

The collection is arranged in six series, one of which has been further arranged into two subseries.

The series and subseries arrangement is as follows:

Series I. Compositions and Arrangements

Series II. Event Ephemera

Series III. Frog Peak Music
Subseries III. A. General
Subseries III. B. Lingua Press and Kenneth Gaburo

Series IV. Writings and Projects

Series V. Teaching and Appearances

Series VI. Personal

Scope and Contents

This collection documents Larry Polansky's ongoing work in the contemporary music field from the 1970s to the mid-2010s through music compositions, recordings, teaching notes, business and project files, as well as concert ephemera in paper and electronic formats. Business files in this collection were generated by Polansky's artists' collective, Frog Peak Music, and contain promotional catalogs, publicity material, as well as client files which provide insight into the operation of a collective devoted to publishing and producing experimental and unique works by composers active during the 1980s into the 2000s. Office files for Lingua Press contain administrative material, as well as documentation of the company's 1995 acquisition by Frog Peak Music. Polansky's extensive writings on modern music theory, composers, and compositions are represented in this collection through paper and electronic versions of notes and edited drafts of articles, papers, and reviews written throughout the 1970s to the 2000s. Paper and electronic files, as well as audio recordings document Polansky's various projects, including his music recording career, development of his computer program Hierarchical Music Specification Language (HMSL), and his project with Indonesian composers and performers from the 1980s with Jody Diamond. Lectures notes and slides, correspondence, and faculty-related material in this collection relate to Polansky's music composition and theory classes he taught at Mills College Center for Contemporary Music from the 1980s to 1990s, and Dartmouth College from 1990 to 2013. This collection also contains his archived website; his backed up personal and professional electronic files; news clippings; correspondence and subject files; and his private audiocassette collection can also be found in this collection.

Conditions Governing Access

Materials are open without restrictions.

Conditions Governing Use

This collection is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use materials in the collection in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Preferred Citation

Identification of item, date; Larry Polansky Papers; MSS 405; box number; folder number; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

Location of Materials

Some materials are stored offsite and advance notice is required for use. Please request materials at least two business days prior to your research visit to coordinate access.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Donated by Larry Polansky, 2014. The accession number associated with this gift is 2014.405.

Custodial History

The website was selected by curators and captured through the use of Archive-It. Archive-It uses web crawling technology to capture websites at a scheduled time and displays only an archived copy, from the resulting WARC file, of the website.

Audiovisual Access Policies and Procedures

Access to audiovisual materials in this collection is available through digitized access copies. Researchers may view an item's original container, but the media themselves are not available for playback because of preservation concerns. Materials that have already been digitized are noted in the collection's finding aid and can be requested in our reading room. To request an access copy, or if you are unsure if an item has been digitized, please contact special.collections@nyu.edu. A staff member will respond to you with further information.

Electronic Records Policies and Procedures

Advance notice is required for the use of computer records. Original physical digital media is restricted.

An access terminal for a large portion of the born-digital materials in the collection is available by appointment for reading room viewing and listening only. Researchers may view an item's original container and/or carrier, but the physical carriers themselves are not available for use because of preservation concerns.

Some born-digital materials have not been transferred and may not be available to researchers. Researchers may request access copies. To request that material be transferred, or if you are unsure if material has been transferred, please contact fales.library@nyu.edu with the collection name, collection number, and a description of the item(s) requested. A staff member will respond to you with further information.

Archived Website Policies and Procedures

Due to technical or privacy issues, archived websites may not be exact copies of the original website at the time of the web crawl. Certain file types will not be captured dependent on how they are embedded in the site. Other parts of websites that the crawler has difficulty capturing includes Javascript, streaming content, database-driven content, and highly interactive content. Full-Text searches of archived websites are available at https://archive-it.org/organizations/567.

Take Down Policy

Archived websites are made accessible for purposes of education and research. NYU Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible; however, due to the nature of archival collections, we are not always able to identify this information. If you hold the rights to materials in our archived websites that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials. If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by submitting a notice, with the elements described below, to: fales.library@nyu.edu. Please include the following in your notice: Identification of the material that you believe to be infringing and information sufficient to permit us to locate the material; your contact information, such as an address, telephone number, and email address; a statement that you are the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed and that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in the notification is accurate and made under penalty of perjury; and your physical or electronic signature. Upon receiving a notice that includes the details listed above, we will remove the allegedly infringing material from public view while we assess the issues identified in your notice.

Appraisal

Robots.txt was ignored with the permission of the content owner. Crawl was limited to domains and subdomains of https://wayback.archive-it.org/4049/*/http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/ in order to remain within the collection scope and data constraints.

Appraisal

Twenty-nine commercial audio CDs already available to researchers in the Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media were separated and removed from this collection.

Four damaged data discs, a dvd, and 11 floppy disks were removed from the collection.

Duplicate copies of concert ephemera and publications were removed from the collection. Paper and electronic material containing student records or faculty information, as well as personal material outside the scope of collecting were separated and removed from the collection.

Separated Materials

131 items of Polansky's inventoried/numbered personal cassette tape collection were transferred to the Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media on 10/2/2018. These cassettes were commercially produced, widely distributed recordings. A list of titles transferred, as well as the complete list of cassettes in his personal collection can be found in the Curator's collection files.

Collection processed by

Stacey Flatt and Samantha Rowe.

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2024-02-06 14:23:31 -0500.
Using Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language: Finding aid written in English

Processing Information

Boxes were transferred from the donor to the Fales Library and Special Collections in 2014, along with a box-level container list written by a donor associate. Documentation supporting the container list indicated the boxes were not in any particular order. Upon arrival at the library, staff transferred box contents to standard size record cartons and oversize boxes for appropriate onsite storage. This reboxing altered the original box numbering and content descriptions as some boxes were combined, or separated. A new spreadsheet was created with updated box numbers, while notating in a separate field the original box content descriptions and old box numbers from the donor's inventory.

Before processing, an initial survey was completed, confirming the material did not have any logical original order, with the exception of small groups of alphabetical correspondence/subject folders removed from file cabinets as well as Frog Peak/Linqua Press office files. The majority of the material had been placed loose in cartons, sometimes grouped by format (e.g. audio reels, cassette tapes, selected sheet music).

Material in this collection naturally fell into rough groupings such as compositions/arrangements, teaching files, writings, performance ephemera, Frog Peak/Lingua Press files, and personal material.

When possible, original file folders were retained. If it was necessary to replace the folder, the original file titles were transcribed onto the new acid-free folders in brackets. Loose material was grouped and placed in acid-free folders and boxes, with archivist-designated titles.

Audiovisual material was grouped by format and listed at the box level within appropriate series.

144 carriers of born-digital material were forensically imaged, analyzed, and arranged in Forensic Toolkit. New York University Libraries follow professional standards and best practices when imaging, ingesting, and processing born-digital material in order to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the content.

Larry Polansky's website was archived to the Internet Archive using the Archive-It service beginning in 2015 and site crawls are as of 2019 being accrued semiannually.

Repository

Fales Library and Special Collections
Fales Library and Special Collections
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10012