Larry Polansky (October, 16 1954-May 9, 2024) was a composer, guitarist, mandolinist, and professor emeritus at Dartmouth College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was a founding member and co-director of Frog Peak Music (a composers' collective). He co-wrote HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language) with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom. He had been a Mellon New Directions Fellow, studying poetry and performance in American Sign Language.
At MacDowell, Polansky worked on a large string quartet, as well as a series of theoretical essays on form. He wrote one round each day, as a kind of daily compositional discipline/diary, and called the works "The MacDowell Diary Rounds."
