Faculty Spotlight: Paul Lehrman
How did you find your area of focus within music?
I became interested in electronic music when I was in high school and my older brother, who worked at his college radio station, brought home all these weird records. I thought they were fantastic, and when I went to college myself, it was with the singular goal of learning about and composing electronic music. Then later on, I realized that having my own studio would be insanely expensive, so I stopped doing it for a while. But then in the early '80s music software for personal computers started to happen, and I jumped on that train. I’ve been on it ever since.
How did you find yourself at Tufts? How many years have you been here?
I was originally recruited by Prof. David Locke, who was music chair at the time, to help design the audio systems in what was going to be the new music building. But that didn’t happen for a number of years, and in the meantime the music department, and other departments, were getting very interested in multimedia and computer applications in the arts, and Prof. Locke asked me if I’d like to teach. I was working at another college, and I was unhappy with the support I was getting there, so his offer came at a very opportune time. I started teaching at Tufts 25 years ago in January.
What classes do you teach at Tufts?
I teach Computer Tools for Musicians, Electronic Musical Instrument Design, and Origins of Electronic Music 1890-1980. I supervise a course that I created and used to teach, Music Recording and Production, and I direct the Tufts Electronic Music Ensemble.
How many years have you been involved in this ensemble? What is your favorite part about leading the ensemble? How do you find new inspiration and choose a repertoire for each semester?
We started in an informal way when the Granoff Music Center opened in 2007, and became an official course in 2012. My favorite part is introducing students to repertoire that they would not otherwise know about, and for them to introduce me to music I don’t know. I usually go into each semester with a handful of ideas I'd like to try, and then I let the students' skills determine where to go from there. They also often come up with ideas and because they feel they have ownership of the music, they work really hard. The progress I see them making on the electronic instruments, which are new to many of them, I find inspirational.
What methods do you use for your work? How has your field changed during the course of your research? Do you communicate your work, whether through writing or speaking or something else? What projects are you working on at the moment?
The field is constantly changing, with new ideas and hardware and software being introduced all the time. It’s almost a full-time job keeping up. I do a lot of beta-testing for new products, and often then incorporate them into my courses or the ensemble. I’ve written several hundred articles on music and audio technology over the years, and I’ve done dozens of papers and presentations at conferences and schools about the work I do at Tufts, and outside.
Are you involved in performance, teaching, or scholarship outside of Tufts? Do you play any additional instruments or sing?
I play a number of different instruments, and got my college degree as a bassoonist, but these days I’m focused on piano and electric bass. I play bass with a jazz group that gigs occasionally around the area, and for a while I had a group with Tufts faculty and students that did ‘60s and '70s protest songs. But outside of Tufts my major work has been on a piece written in the 1920s called "Ballet mecanique" which was unplayable at the time because it was too technologically advanced. We can do it with today's technology, and that's been my main research focus since 1998. In fact I did my PhD here at Tufts on it. I've supervised over a dozen performances of the piece, including a recent run at the Zurich Ballet, and a robotic orchestra that performed it at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In a completely different area, my wife is a professional storyteller and oral historian, and we have done a number of book, website, and record projects together. We are right now working with a group that just received a grant to collect and record immigration stories from Haitian-Americans in the Boston area.
What are your hobbies or interests aside from the above?
I go to live theater and music a lot, and recently I’ve taken a couple of European trips. I cook, swim, bicycle, and grow killer tomatoes.