Alvin Lucier: A Celebration

Vespers

13 One of the peculiar charms of American universities is their warm embrace of the clueless applicant. In most countries, admission to higher education is predicated on one’s having a pretty clear idea of a specific course of study. American colleges, by contrast, have a fondness for the applicant who avows passion for physics, poetry and pottery in equal measure. I was one of those typical confused 18-year-old souls when I arrived at Wesleyan in 1972. Alvin Lucier’s Vespers saved me. On an April day midway through my second semester, Lucier presented his composition Vespers as part of his Introduction to Electronic Music course. He handed four of us blindfolds and flashlight-shaped electronic instruments called “Sondols,” and dimmed the lights. We shuffled awkwardly through the darkness, the Sondols emitting streams of sharp clicks. Aiming the instruments around the room and listening to the sounds reflect off the walls and furniture, we were told to navigate across the space by echolocation, in emulation of bats. We could switch the devices on and off and change the speed of the clicks, but the output of the Sondol was otherwise unvarying and, to be honest, musically unpromising. Listening carefully, however, I found that the echoes coalesced into a richly detailed, ever-changing, immersive cloud that hung in the air—a stippled sonic portrait of the architecture in which we stood. Most of the electronic music I knew came from a pair of loudspeakers—Vespers came from everywhere. This was more than just the weirdest, coolest music I had ever heard; it changed all my assumptions of what music—and composers—could be. A native New Yorker, I was no stranger to the avant-garde. My mother still waxes nostalgic about taking me to Stockhausen and Ives concerts when I was a tot, although I displayed a consistent lack of musical talent from grade-school recorder classes through teenage flirtations with electric guitar. I was, however, a fanatical music consumer—mostly pop, blues, some jazz and “world music”— and at age 17, I bought a secondhand Tandberg reel-to-reel tape recorder to dub Vespers Nicolas Collins 14 radio broadcasts and my friends’ records. As it happens, this machine contained a hidden, undocumented switch that, when thrown, induced delicious, semicontrollable swoops of feedback. I was smitten by the siren call of electronic sound. A Moog was way beyond reach, but a simple oscillator could be had for the cost of a soldering iron, an integrated circuit from a touch-tone telephone and a copy of a hobby magazine. I gradually picked up enough electronic technique from books and magazines to accomplish the engineer’s equivalent of ordering a beer in a foreign bar. My understanding of Serious Music, however, was hobbled by the fact that I still felt more comfortable at the Fillmore than the Philharmonic. Bach, Bartók and Berio lived on the other side of an ocean, they spoke another language, and I knew I was missing their nuances and jokes. I simply didn’t have the intuition for European classical music that I had for the rest of my audio world. So while I worked hard to learn as much music theory as possible, I worried that at 17 I was already too old to become truly fluent. Thus, my first year at Wesleyan I studied archaeology, linguistics, history of science, studio art, geology and tabla. This academic smorgasbord was an accurate portrait of my mind at the time. My advisor, Jon Barlow, encouraged me to enroll in Lucier’s class, promising “he makes music with bats and porpoises.” I signed up. It was my entrée to the work of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, the Sonic Arts Union—serious non-pop voices from my side of the ocean. Even for a smart-ass kid from New York this was an ear-opening experience. But nothing quite prepared me for Vespers. To perform Vespers is to experience sound as survival rather than as selfexpression or mere entertainment. At the same time, in its engagement with 15 fundamental acoustics, the piece evokes the kind of ineffable axiomatic musicality I associate with strict species counterpoint. Earlier in the semester, Lucier had introduced Glass’s Music in Parallel Fifths as a “return to the year zero” in Western music: going back...