Smalltalk by Paul Lansky (review)

violin and small chorus in heterophonic fashion creates an evocative and plaintive statement. The live passages on this cassette are clear and well balanced, if limited by their technologically simple recording media. In contrast, the recording quality of “Sekitar12-1 4 Menit”, completed by the staff of STSI, is overmodulated in several places. CROSSINGS by Alvin Lucier. Lovely Music, Ltd. LCD 1018. DIGITAL MUSIC by Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta. Mode Records mode 21. Reuiewed b~TimPerkis, 1048 Na’lsen, Albany, G4,U.S.A. Of all his contemporarieswho came to public attention in the 1960s,Alvin Lucier has taken most seriously the prime edict of minimalism: find one simple idea and stick to it. His work, like the work of his contemporaries David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros and David Behrman, has largely been about redefining music in terms of a meditation upon the physical properties of sound. Working often as composers/performers, these musicians also articulated a new social role for composers as solitary explorers, akin to the heroic stance taken by visual artists. In fact, oftentimes their work would be presented in gallery or installation settings rather than in a traditional concert situation. Lucier’s work has been built upon the minimalist faith that the world itself provides infinite interest, and that the artist- whether working in light, space or sound-can merely focus his or her work to present nearly natural phenomena as clearly as possible. In Lucier’s case, this most American of ideas has worked out well. Over the last 25 years, one strand of his work has explored the acoustic properties of various objects by driving their resonances with the simple sine oscillator. He has explored the response of a brick wall in Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, of an 80-foot-longsteel wire in Music on a Long Thin Wire,and of a chest of drawers inJob’s Coffin;in other pieces he has used ice, water, briefcases, teapots and a canoe. With the pieces on this disc, Lucier has returned to the fold of classical musical practice in an idiosyncratic way, bringing his decades of work with standingwaves and other acoustic phenomena to works for players of classicalWestern instruments. All three pieces reproduced in Crossings are based on one trick: instrumentalists play sustained tones or chords against a fixed sine-wave oscillator that never varies in volume. In two of the pieces, “In MemoriamJon Higgins” for solo clarinet and “Crossings”for small orchestra, the oscillator is very slowly sweeping up throughout the piece; in “Septet for Three Winds, Four Strings and Pure Wave Oscillator ,”the oscillator isjust fixed at middle C. The impact of these pieces is physiological: the unrelenting sine waves cause a strong trance effect. The combination tones, beatings and other interferences between the sine tone and the players form the heart of this music. At a certain point, the difference between changes in the music and changes caused by the listener swallowing,moving his or her head or moving across the room become indistinguishable. The sound has the remarkable property of seeming to happen right in the ear-and, certainly, some of the perceptible effects are caused by breakdowns and hallucinations in the brain’s soundlocalization apparatus. The effect is unlike anything one is likely to have heard in normal life or in normal music. The results are fascinating, but this is a warning: some listeners may find it an unpleasant, even nauseating experience. But there is another beauty and power in this music, rooted in the intense concentration these pieces obviously demand from the performers. Lucier’s live solo performances always gained power from the intensity of Lucier himself, who was often moving through the space, exploring and setting a standard for the audience as the chief listener. In these pieces, that sense of heightened attention takes on a new delicacy, as we become aware of the extraordinary concentration and skill required from the musicians to control their instruments. The performers meet this challenge well, and ably carry out the slow and subtle transformations that are the body of this music. Tom Ridenour, the clarinetist for whom “In Memoriam Jon Higgins” was...