Do you notice a mistake?
Alvin Lucier was a North American composer of experimental music whose life work was the exploration of sound phenomena. Where many composers limited themselves to modelling material to fit with the requirements of the piece they were writing, Lucier seemed to prefer to exhibit acoustic properties as themselves, showcasing them earnestly in ways that allowed listeners to experience them anew. Starting with Music for Solo Performer, (1965), Lucier’s goal was not to show off the performer’s virtuosity, or the ingeniousness of a piece’s logical permutations, or any kind of compositional complexity. Instead, he sought to leave sounds for and to themselves. From here, the role of the musician appeared almost secondary. The musician sketched out something resembling a sidestep, pulling back with regard to the sound phenomena he or she was activating, so that all auditory attention could be focused on them.
In this regard, Lucier may be identified as a direct heir of John Cage, whose experimental approach requires the composer become a listener before all things, abandoning their own tastes and habits to “let the sounds be themselves1”. Lucier reformulated this principle in his own singular manner, setting it on the path to phenomenal transformation: for him, the point was not to thwart preconceived aesthetic notions by opening himself or listeners up to sonic multiplicity, but rather to narrow the focus onto the activity of sounds themselves, from their propagation to the multiple interactions inherent in that propagation. As James Tenney, once remarked, Lucier in this respect belonged to the relatively small category of composers “whose work is so compelling and yet so different from that of both his peers and his predecessors that we find ourselves having to revise our basic (and often unconscious) assumptions – our ‘self-evident axioms’ – about music2”.
The first work to show this kind of close attention was none other than Music for Solo Performer, subtitled “for enormously amplified brain waves and percussion”. As Lucier emphasized, the piece represented a real turning point in his work3. Following his return from Italy in 1962, where he had travelled on a Fulbright scholarship to complete his studies, the young musician experienced a fallow period as a composer. He no longer felt connected to the neo-classical music that had been the focus of his studies; nor did he find inspiration in the post-serialist music he had encountered at Darmstadt. While working as the director of Brandeis University’s Chamber Chorus, he met physicist and United States Air Force officer Edmond Dewan, who proposed that he experiment with musical uses for electrode equipment that captured brainwaves. Lucier was fascinated by the idea of generating alpha waves, which have a frequency between 8 and 13 Hz and which appear only when a subject is relaxed, with their eyes closed. While inaudible to the human ear, these waves were nevertheless a living phenomenon of vibration that Lucier was interested in making audible as such. Anticipating the method that would guide him throughout his career as a composer, Lucier refused to transpose the wavelengths to make them audible, or to make a tape piece that would allow him to circumvent their erratic nature: “I had to learn to give up performing to make the performance happen4”. In the manner of analog sonification, the composer designed a system that restituted the phenomena of alpha wave production in its very fragility, by considerably amplifying these capricious waves such that they could cause various resonant instruments (snare drum, gong, kettledrum, etc.), arranged on a stage with no musicians, to vibrate.
His research on whistlers, begun in 1966, was a natural next step. These sounds are caused by the propagation of waves produced by electromagnetic storms in the ionosphere traveling from one hemisphere to another and back, and although they are not a mechanical wave phenomenon, they are nevertheless audible to the human ear. A first piece, titled simply Whistlers, was tested in 1967, and consisted in playing an electronic processing of a recording of these waves published by Cook Laboratories. Unsatisfied with merely using a fixed representation of this phenomenon, Lucier soon began looking for a way to create a performance that picked up and broadcast the frequencies live. After several fruitless attempts, he abandoned the project, returning to it many years later in a new form, with Sferics (1981). This new work in this arena expanded to the entire range of naturally produced radio waves propagating in the ionosphere, and, among other projects, included an outdoor sound installation in New Mexico in 1984, where patient listeners could hear electromagnetic waves live via a panel of antennae.
Lucier’s research into natural phenomena narrowed in the 1970s to strictly acoustic ones. In Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1973-1974; 1984), the composer explored stationary waves and their propagation in hyperbolic curves. Sine waves played over loudspeakers allowed Lucier to sketch out a sonic geography of fixed waves within the performance space. A first version of the piece involved dancers, whose movements followed the knots of “silence” of these fixed waves, using them “as a kind of guidance system5” which they followed through the space; musicians could inflect the wave propagation – Lucier described this as making them “spin” – by playing notes close to or in unison with the electronic frequencies, in this way gently disrupting the spatial arrangements of the initial sonic landscape. Not entirely pleased with the improvisational nature of the instrumental parts, the composer returned to the piece in 1980 and wrote a series of solos. The beating produced by the simultaneous propagation of proximate frequencies – the ones played by the instrument and the oscillator – which recurs in later pieces, as well, emerges all the more clearly here because the musicians are instructed to scan the minute possibilities for variation in the oscillation6. In Outlines of Persons and Things (1975) for microphones, loudspeakers, and electronic sounds, the phenomenon being “studied” is diffraction, or the way that sound waves bend when they encounter an obstacle. In the piece, a group of waves whose length is determined by the size of the objects (in the first version, for example, one of them was a canoe) and the people participating in the performance is played over a set of loudspeakers. In this way, Lucier draws the sonic outlines of these persons and things. At the same time, the score allows the performers to slowly move around during the piece, creating what appear to be sound shadows caused by the shifts in diffraction, while directional microphones linked to a second system of amplified loudspeakers help the audience to pick up these contours as they listen.
For Lucier, focusing his writing on pieces that explored the specifics of particular acoustic phenomena implied considering the spatial nature of sound as a starting point. This stands apart from other work on spatializing sound sources pursued by certain contingents of the avant-garde starting in the 1950s. The goal here was not to work on the arrangement or the distribution of sonic masses but rather to explore the propagative qualities of the waves themselves, to traverse the length and amplitude of their spatiality. As Lucier explained in an interview with Douglas Simon, “Thinking of sounds as measurable wavelengths, instead of as high or low musical notes, has changed my whole idea of music from a metaphor to a fact and, in a real way, has connected me to architecture7”. This interest in spaces’ resonance was already evident in pieces such as Shelter (1967) or Chambers (1968), but it was in Vespers (1968) that the composer first really settled into examining fully the acoustics of the actual place in which a performance was held. Based in the phenomenon of the echo, the composition invites the performers, who are blindfolded, to move through space using only a portable echolocation device. The instruments produce directional clicks whose echoes vary depending on the surfaces they encounter, as well as on the position of the performers; the way their patterns layer over the space and any objects within it is what informs the performer of the space’s configuration. While the score gives some instructions for setup, the real score is the space itself, a space one must crisscross patiently with one’s ears in order to experience every detail of its acoustic peculiarities8. The use of an extra-musical technical device as the only instrument is also significant. Similar to oscillators, which he frequently employed in his work, Lucier’s use of scientific tools is a way of stripping away all aesthetic considerations in an attempt to isolate and then not interfere with the observed acoustic phenomenon.
Listening to a sound’s spatial qualities is expressed in Lucier’s work in conjunction with his consideration of the sonic properties of propagation spaces; in other words, their acoustic signature. In this regard, “I am sitting in a room” (1970), which is probably Lucier’s best known piece, is exemplary. The process-based piece uses the principle of repeated reinjection of sound into the same space: the recording of a source text, which serves as a protocol, is immediately played into the space, where it is recorded again, immediately replayed into the same room, and so on. As the process continues, the resonance frequencies of the space shared by the voice of the narrator are reinforced. The meaning of the text grows gradually less intelligible as the speaking voice slowly becomes a drone, magnifying the acoustics of the architecture, in which only the rhythmic cadence of the original speech seems to remain. As Lucier wrote, “The space acts as a filter. We discover that each room has its own set of resonant frequencies in the same way that musical sounds have overtones9”. The text of the score nevertheless specifies that the work should not be a reduction to the demonstration of scientific fact; rather, its goal was rather to “smooth out” the composer’s stutter. This note underlines the extent to which the work is ultimately less about listening to the resonance frequencies of a given architecture than it is about the relationship between subject and space; in other words, the renewal of the attention likely paid by people to the places they live, and, in return, the influence their surroundings have on people’s individuation. This same impulse, in a different way, is also what lies at the heart of (Hartford) Memory Space (1970). Here, the performers explore the surroundings of the venue before the performance, taking in the sound environment using various tools (notes, recordings, memory) and then attempt to reproduce that environment on stage, using their instruments, once the concert begins.
The introspection of a space through listening can be found again in Bird and Person Dyning (1975). An electronic bird placed in the performance space intermittently emits high chirping sounds, while the performer, equipped with a binaural microphone linked to a stereo system set to create feedback, moves around slowly, seeking out acoustic phantoms of the mechanical bird – in reality, the heterodyne frequencies created when the birdsong collides with the feedback. As the score specifies, the piece seeks to “map the acoustic characteristics of the space […]10”. But the relationship to space here is envisioned dynamically, as the performer wanders through it following the reconfigurations produced by their own mobile and device-equipped listening.
In the 1970s, his work on space sparked an interest in sound installations, although he never made much of the different artistic categories into which his pieces ought to have fit11. Pythagoras’ experimentation with a monochord inspired Lucier’s first installation, Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977), in which a long cable is stretched across a space between two bridges, and seems to vibrate on its own. Each of its ends is plugged into the loudspeaker terminal of an amplifier connected to a sine wave oscillator, and a magnet straddles the wire on one end. The interaction between the current running through the cable and the magnetic field of the magnet causes the cable to vibrate, and this vibration is picked up by contact microphones affixed to wooden bridges under the wire, and sent through a playback system. Independent of any musician’s intervention, the drone produced by the vibrating cable is propagated, evolving slowly and subtly as small differences in temperature or air currents in the space change the tension in the wire, and thus transform the sound.
During the first period of his career as a composer (1965-82), Lucier mainly used the tools of live electronic music, showing a marked preference for devices employed in scientific laboratories over classical instruments (thus, oscillators and amplifiers tended to be found alongside magnets, electrodes, sonars, and even Bunsen burners). By the early 1980s, however, he was beginning to explore instrumental writing more seriously. Over time, it would become central to his work. Crossings (1982-84), for small orchestra and slow sweep pure wave oscillator, marks the beginning of this new period. In the work, the oscillator sweeps the frequency range of the orchestra, in one slow upward and continuous movement. In this work, the oscillator sweeps the frequency range of the orchestra, from low to high, while the different instruments intervene when the sine wave crosses their own range. This creates audible beats, which slow down or accelerate as the rising frequency of the oscillator approaches or moves away from the notes played in unison by each instrument. As Lucier observed, the purpose of these interferences is not ornamental: they are mobilized from a “functional” and “structural” perspective in order to make it possible to hear the phenomenon the work seeks to stage12. Here, and in the wake of Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, the focus of the piece is the beating produced by the simultaneous playing of two adjacent frequencies of similar intensity – periodic modulation, in other words. However, as he underlines in his piece for clarinet and oscillator In Memoriam Jon Higgins (1984), composed according to the same principle (here, the sine wave sweeps the range of a clarinet in A), this beating should be listened to not for the rhythm produced by the modulation but for its spatial dimension13. From this perspective, and in line with his early pieces, Lucier’s instrumental writing, as it developed starting in the 1980s, was still exploring the perception of sound spatiality. In an introduction to his article “The Propagation of Sound in Space” (1979), the composer, referring to the Western musical tradition his work was seeking to escape, wrote, “We have been so concerned with language that we have forgotten how sound flows through space and occupies it14”.
While many of Lucier’s pieces centered on beating involved the use of an oscillator, some used instruments or groups of instruments capable of producing a glissando of frequencies. In Fidelio Trio (1987), for viola, cello, and piano, which was the composer’s first venture into music without electronics, the strings act as the oscillators. Starting by playing in unison, the viola and the cello slowly move away from each other, continually varying their respective glissandos between a G-sharp at 208 Hz and a B-flat at 233 Hz, occasionally coinciding with each other, as the piano plays a single A at 220 Hz at irregular intervals. Beating is naturally produced as these sounds collide, but the absence of electronics inevitably makes it less distinct. Here, it is not so much the clear-cut modulation that is highlighted for the listener, but rather the change in timbres in each instrument that arises from this phenomenon.
Lucier’s research into the acoustic qualities of different instruments also led him to experiment with phenomena other than beating. For example, in Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (1988), for amplified triangle, the performer patiently explores the instrument’s resonance. Gripping the triangle more or less tightly between the thumb and forefinger, the musician uses their other hand to strike the instrument at regular intervals, varying the speed and force of the gesture slightly from time to time, progressively revealing the different acoustic qualities of the bent metal rod. As is often the case, in pieces such as this one, microphones placed at very close distances from the instrument serve to amplify and magnify the sound, allowing the listener to perceive the phenomena displayed in the performance more sharply than would be possible without them. Listening to the tiny variations arising from the resonance of a given object in this way continues the experiment undertaken in Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums (1980). The piece is as much a sound installation as it is a performance piece. In it, a single sine wave sweeps across four identical bass drums. A ping pong ball hangs suspended in front of each drum head, like a pendulum. As the identical instruments slowly begin to vibrate, the balls bounce against the drum heads at different rhythms, making audible each resonance’s idiosyncrasies.
Hearing sound as the perception of the propagation of a wave phenomenon and the various resultant effects was a unifying thread in Lucier’s work throughout his life, all the way to his last compositions. Over time, this long-term research into the spatial nature of sound extended into the composer’s approach to notating certain scores. While the scores of his first experimental works were largely written as prose, occasionally with the addition of synoptic schematics for the set-up of the material, over time, in his instrumental period, he began to favor diagrammatic writing; it may be noted in passing that he approached the two-dimensional space of the page as a physical space that held the graphic representation of frequency motion. In each movement of Six Geometries (1992), for choir and slow sweep pure wave oscillators, the evolving settings of the sound wave generators “draw” a different geometric image (a right angle, the letter X, etc.), inspired by the poetry of William Carlos Williams15. Lucier subsequently used other motifs, notably landscapes, as the matrix of his compositions’ melodic lines. In Panorama (1993), for trombone and piano, the line traced by Alpine peaks guides the glissando of the trombone, while each individual peak is represented by a note punctuated on the piano. More recently, Ever Present (2002), for flute, saxophone, piano, and oscillators, was inspired by the hillside garden design by Robert Irwin for the Getty Center in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Glacier (2009), for cello, proposes listening to the curve of a graph representing, over the years, the progressive melting of the glaciers, since the already long-ago era of the first alerts to the looming climate crisis.
From listening to natural phenomena to observing the curves of the landscape, Lucier’s work invites the listener to revive an understanding of perception not simply as a form of knowing, but also as a way of belonging to the world. The goal of this approach was never to grasp wave movements and the bodies attending to them as the manifestation of some kind of separate entity; to the contrary, it came from a perspective closer to environmental ethics, perceiving entities as interrelated and interconnected – as active, and even dependent, parts of a single ecosphere.
Do you notice a mistake?