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21 AMK: There is much intelligent, thoughtful material written about your work. And, you have written about it so clearly and extensively. However, covered to a lesser extent are your early years—your childhood and adolescence in Nashua, New Hampshire, your time as a student at Yale, Tanglewood and Brandeis, where you subsequently assumed your first academic position as Director of Choral Music in 1962. That was your last stop before arriving to teach at Wesleyan part-time in the fall of 1968 and then full-time in 1970. Both of your parents were musical, and you valued growing up in a musical household. Can you say more about that? AL: My first memory of music was hearing my mother and father playing popular music at home. My father was an amateur violinist. As a boy he had studied with a member of the Boston Symphony, and it was up in the air whether he would go into music or become a lawyer. He finally became a lawyer and the mayor of Nashua, New Hampshire for two terms in the thirties, but he was always fond of jazz, such as it was in the teens and twenties. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1918, where he had organized a band later called the Barbary Coast Orchestra. AMK: Dartmouth is still home to the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble! AL: Yes, I don’t think the term “jazz” had come into use at that time. My father was a classically trained player, but also a good improviser. In high school my mother played piano for silent films in local movie theaters. She also, with her sister Louise (violin) and her brother John (drums), had a small dance band called the Lemery Trio. Can you believe that? They would play for all sorts of events—dances, wedding receptions. Once they were asked to play at a bar mitzvah. This must have been about 1915 or so. When the trio would add instruments for certain larger engagements, my father would sit in. I guess that’s when their romance developed. And the parties at my house...you can imagine! We had a gracious home, and The Early Years: Excerpts from an interview with Alvin Lucier Interviewer: Andrea Miller-Keller 22 there would always be a small orchestra playing: my father, a couple of friends on piano and guitar. Blue Skies, Honeysuckle Rose, songs like that. Really wonderful playing! So at a very early age it became a major part of my mythology, but behind it all was a belief that there was a higher kind of music. What they meant by that was probably semi-classical music. My father used to mention Sibelius, but he really loved George Gershwin. I remember the whole family sitting around the dinner table at night singing. My mother and my sisters would split up the soprano and alto parts and my father would sing bass. I would try to improvise the tenor part. This experience was wonderful. I also remember that before I ever knew anything about notes—maybe at the age of five or six—writing down a bunch of dots on a piece of music paper, and my mother would sit down and play beautiful melodies and arpeggios, pretending that that was what I had written. In high school I wrote a school song, but barely knew how to put the notes down on the page. I remember going into Boston and buying Walter Piston’s book, Harmonic Analysis, and trying to figure it out. AMK: So, you wanted to be a composer even before you knew much about music. And with this rich background you went on to make music your profession? AL: I think what was more important than that was that my mother and father put such a premium on music. There was never doubt that being a musician or an artist was a high form of activity. It was never stated, but I think—this may be wrong—my sisters and I felt that our father might have been better off pursuing a career in music than being a lawyer and a politician. He was mayor of Nashua for two terms, but he didn’t succeed in politics as he had hoped. He was defeated Technology is just one tool after another.…I don’t think of technology as technology….I think of it as the landscape....We’re all born into a landscape....A 19thcentury composer is talking about the 19th-century...

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