Introduction On-Line Supplement: Lucier Celebration

The articles in this on-line supplement are drawn from a symposium [1] presented in November 2011 at Wesleyan University as part of a celebration of Alvin Lucier's work as a composer and teacher. The symposium was structured as three panels focused on his instrumental works since 1984 (Notations), his electronic works since 1965 (Processes) and his early work as a conductor, performer, and composer (Performance). A particular goal was to explore the connections between his electronic and instrumental music.

Both Nicolas Collins and Richard Lerman were careful to point to the central role of listening in Lucier's approach to live electronic music. Typically, those pieces arose from "extra-musical" ideas (brain waves, echolocation, room resonance), a process Andrew Dewar termed "recontextualization" or "cross-domain mapping." A crucial property of this approach is that the mappings into sound seek an immediate aural encounter with the generative idea, eschewing conventional musical structures as distractions. For example, the brain waves of Music for Solo Performer are not treated as an objet sonore for manipulation but as an immediate physical reality at the moment of performance. Consequently, each of these pieces begin from scratch as a trial-and-error process of listening, searching for a simple, clear mapping that was musical, but only on its own terms. Any recourse to conventional musical structures would be a distraction. Needless to say, the identification of such mappings was a difficult and anxiety-filled process.

Beating patterns, a central focus of many of Lucier's instrumental works, provide an example of some of the difficulties. Acoustical beating involves the fusion of two sounds into a single sound that possesses its own rhythm (the beat frequency). Justin Yang argues that Lucier's singular focus on beating patterns serves to detach the listening experience from historical association. He describes this effect as "prehistoric" in contrast to an ahistoric quality he attributes to the deconstructed instrumental sounds of Helmut Lachenman's music. In his presentation, the cellist Charles Curtis recounted his initial inability to even recognize beats, commenting that "we train ourselves [as musicians] under the other model of music as a rhetorical or pseudo-semantic system to filter out beats." Beating patterns between spatially separated sources have a spatial character that Nicolas Collins described as lying "beyond the loudspeaker." Anthony Burr explained how his interpretation of In Memoriam Jon Higgins required him to learn to hear beating patterns spatially while not being able to clearly distinguish the sound of his own instrument. He commented that this has allowed him to interpretively shape the total sound of the piece to a much greater extent than in most of the other contemporary music he plays. Thus, these pieces require a reconception of sound on the part of the composer, the performer and the listener. The sound of this music is not a signal being broadcast but a field being activated where frequency manifests itself as wavelength as much as pitch.

Hauke Harder introduced the term "scanning" to describe how Lucier's electronic pieces unfold in time. Scanning may take the form of a systematic "gradual process" as in the repeated re-recordings of a text in I am Sitting in a Room, a relatively undirected physical exploration as first enacted in Vespers and found in Still and Moving Lines of Silence and Bird and Person Dyning. Nicolas Collins emphasized the role of trust in performances of pieces such as Music for Solo Performer where a secondary performer enacts this scanning based on verbal instructions. At the same time, Lucier has always been interested in finding alternatives independent of individual decision making. In the case of Music for Solo Performer Lucier conceived a version recorded by Pauline Oliveros that combines three separate takes performed with different instrumentation. The varying levels of activity of the three realizations allow the recorded version to "scan itself" without the intervention of another performer.

In my symposium presentation, I considered how Lucier's music is composed through the interaction of governing images, aural, theatrical, conceptual and visual, with physical and psychological phenomena. In his talk, not reproduced here, Daniel Wolf...