On-Line Supplement: Lucier Celebration

The following are abstracts of papers focused on the work and influence of Alvin Lucier. A number of the papers were presented at the Lucier Celebration Symposium, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 4-6 November 2011. The symposium was part of a series of events commemorating Lucier's 80th birthday that also included an exhibition, films and a series of concerts. An additional paper, by Justin Yang, has been added to the on-line collection of papers. The full papers can be viewed at <mitpressjournals.org/toc/lmj/-/22>.

Between Composition and Phenomena: Interpreting "In Memoriam John Higgins"

Anthony Burr, E-mail: <aburr@ucsd.edu>.

ABSTRACT
In an interview discussing his shift to what might be termed conventionally composed concert works in the early 1980s, Alvin Lucier makes a distinction between "composition" and "phenomena." In his usage, the former refers to the conscious aesthetic decisions involved in making a piece of music, while the latter refers to the kinds of acoustical or psychoacoustical concerns that shaped much of his work from the 1960s and 1970s. The author proposes that negotiating this dialectic is, in no small degree, a question of interpretation, and traces this through a description of his experiences in performing Lucier's music (especially In Memoriam Jon Higgins) over the period of 10 years. When the author began to perform this music, he initially emphasized the independence and clarity of his performative actions, but found that by playing very softly he was eventually able to better focus on the resultant phenomena— even to the point where the instrumental sound as a separate entity became completely subsumed. Examining the issues facing the interpreter in performing the 1980s pieces in turn reveals some important features of Lucier's earlier music, especially the degree to which it was achieved by substituting performative actions, in particular listening, for what might more conventionally have been termed "composition."

Resonance Comes between Notes and Noise

Nic Collins, E-mail: <ncollins@saic.edu>.

ABSTRACT
Alvin Lucier was at the epicenter of a paradigm shift in music that took place between 1965 and 1975, in the backwash of John Cage, and his work from this period served as a roadmap for new music. Reaching back to a pre-hominid time before the divarication of music from other sound, Lucier composed works that reconnected music to physics, architecture, animal behavior and social interaction. These pieces implied that one could make music "about" anything, not just some finite set of concepts handed down the European classical lineage—that composition was not an activity bound by five lines, but a more amorphous "glue" for unifying the larger world. The author comments on Lucier's work from this period, as he experienced while a student at Wesleyan University in the 1970s.

Reframing Sounds

Andrew Raffo Dewar, E-mail: <adewar@ua.edu>.

ABSTRACT
This essay examines processes of recontextualization, reframing and cross-domain mapping as compositional techniques employed in a number of works by composer Alvin Lucier, with a particular focus on the early compositions Music for Solo Performer (1965) and Vespers (1967). In these works, Lucier takes existing technologies and recontextualizes their functions by placing the frame of music performance around their sounds. Lucier's use of reframing extends to other domains, such as in the 1970 composition Quasimodo the Great Lover, which employs a performance practice inspired by the long-distance communication systems of whales, his transformation of Ernst Chladni's experiments with modes of sonic vibration into Queen of the South (1972), and the exploration of natural radio frequency emissions in the ionosphere that resulted in the 1981 composition Sferics.

Music on a Long Thin Wire

Hauke Harder, web site: <www.haukeharder.net>.

ABSTRACT
This article relates works of Alvin Lucier to a commonsense definition of process and discusses how processes determine the musical perception in these works. Special emphasis is given to his sound installation Music on a Long Thin Wire, which is unique in the sense that the musical development of the installation can hardly be traced to a single phenomenon or principle. Based on examples from nonlinear physics and experiences from various setups suggestions are presented if and how processes are at...