Paul Lansky's Late August was composed in 1989 as a kind of follow up to a work from a year before, Smalltalk; both works use complex computer manipulation to turn ordinary speech into elaborate musical gestures and textures. The earlier piece used as its generative speech element a recording of a conversation between the composer and his wife and artistic collaborator Hannah MacKay; in Late August, Lansky utilizes similar methods but takes as the generative speech material a recording of a conversation between two Chinese graduate students speaking in their native language. Thus, although the two works share certain conceptual and timbral aspects, the distinctive contours and shapes that characterize the Chinese tongue translate in musical gestures that seem somehow broader and more angular than those of Smalltalk. At the same time—for non-Chinese speakers, anyway—the two works have somewhat different effects in another regard: the speech used in Smalltalk almost emerges clearly enough at various points to suggest syntax, thus tempting the left brain to wrest control of the ears and listen for language; the speech in Late August is already a mystery for those who don't understand Chinese, so that the air of semantic mystery and abstraction is already built in.

A pioneer in the field of electronic music, Lansky has developed many algorithms and software tools used by electronic musicians all over the world. In Late August, Lansky uses his digital resources to translate the pitch content, rhythms, and dynamic inflection of the speech source into melodic lines. The processes used in this compositional approach quanticize the seamless curves of vocal inflection so that scoops, pitch bends, and portamenti conform to discrete scalar units; the musical figures thus translated are then realized as electronic sounds, primarily a kind of softened harpsichord tone that Lansky utilizes in a number of his works. This is set against a background of soft, sustained vocal harmonies. These layers of texture all but conceal the speech element itself, which usually remains hovering at the edge of discernibility and only occasionally steps into the foreground. In treating the speech element in this manner, Late August demonstrates a concept that functions in a number of Lansky's works : as the composer puts it, "Conversation in particular has [an] ability to change its nature when one no longer concentrates on the meaning of the words."

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