Newm Icbox: Sitting in A Room With Alvin Lucier
Newm Icbox: Sitting in A Room With Alvin Lucier
Newm Icbox: Sitting in A Room With Alvin Lucier
NewMusicBox
Sitting in a Room with Alvin Lucier
Wednesday, February 9, 200511 a.m.
A Conversation with Frank J. Oteri at Lucier's pied-a-terre in Tudor City, NYC
Edited and transcribed by Frank J. Oteri and Molly Sheridan
Videotaped by Randy Nordschow
I still remember the first time I listened to I Am Sitting In A Room. As an undergrad eager to hear everything there
was to hear of new music in the Columbia University Music Library, I had stumbled upon the various issues of Peter
Garland's SOURCE Magazine, an audiovisual compendium of new music which, to this day, inspires NewMusicBox. I
was immediately captivated by the title: I Am Sitting In A Room. At that point, I had never heard of a piece of
serious contemporary music with a title so mundane and personal. But my surprise over the title was nothing
compared to the shock I experienced after putting the needle onto the groove. The composition was nothing more
than a recording of Lucier speaking in a room and then having the recording played back over and over in the room
until his speech turned into ethereal harmonies. So absurdly simple and even somewhat vulnerable, yet so unlike
anything else Wow, music could do this!
I soon played the recording on my radio show at WKCR. Someone I was training to use the equipment during my
broadcast was appalled. What was it? How could I be playing such a thing on a classical music show? Of course, it
made me an even bigger fan of this piece.
About a year later, I attended Columbia's Varse Centennial Symposium. Someone mentioned the name Alvin
Lucier in one of the panels and people in the audience booed. I had to learn more about this man. Whenever a
piece of Lucier's appeared on a concert, I made sure to go. And whenever a new recording of his came out, I made
sure to get it, even though most of his music is concerned with processes that are extremely difficult to convey on
commercial 2-channel recordings.
Over the course of the hour I finally sat in a room with Alvin Lucier to talk about his music, I found the same
simplicity and vulnerability. Here is a composer who admits that not all his pieces work, who is unafraid to explore,
and is still searching for new ideas and is still finding them. Like that first time I heard I Am Sitting In A Room, I
walked away in total awe.
-FJO
Not Fitting In
FJO: Here we are in this lovely little apartment in Tudor City. Usually we visit composers and there's a
grand piano over there and a synthesizer there and a pile of scores. None of that's here.
AL: No, I have a piano at home which I use to compose these pieces with single pitches, but I don't have
a studio, I don't have loudspeakers set up downstairs. I think I'm a post-studio composer. I never wanted
that. I have two CD players. I have a cassette recorder. I have an Otari 5050B beautiful reel-to-reel
recorder. I never use it; it's in the basement. My sine waves, I compose the values for those and I send
them to an engineer who executes them.
AL: My father was an amateur violinist and my mother played piano. There was a lot of popular music in
our house. My father liked serious music, but I would have to say it was more Gershwin and things of that
kind. There was a music store in my small town. I went there once and there was a recording of
Schoenberg's Serenade, of all things. I bought it and it was shocking. It didn't make any sense, but there
was something about it that kept my interest. At that point I decided I was interested in challenging things.
FJO: What you wound up doing musically seems to be a complete break from the music of the past.
AL: It strikes me that experimental music is totally different from European avant-garde music or
American avant-garde music that comes from there. It's made out of totally different stuff. It has different
ideas that don't come from the music of the past. They come from another source. For example, Vespers
is based on physical echoes in the environment, not echoes that you hear in Monteverdi, which are
instruments imitating each other, but actual physical echoes. So it doesn't fit in.
Somebody used that term "fit in" the other day with me. The composers in America who are successful
with orchestras write work that fits in and sounds like other music that is written for orchestra. It doesn't
challenge anything. He didn't think it was going to last that long either because it was made to fit in. We
have a building at Wesleyan, where I teach, that was put in between two 19th century buildings and it's
made of glass and steel. Some people say that it's bad architecture because it doesn't fit it. But if it fit in,
then it wouldn't be good architecture because the architect would have had to relate to this other
architecture. Years ago we performed in Arizona where there was a frank Lloyd Wright auditorium.
People hated it when it was put up. Now you go and there's a tour guide who says, "This is our frank
Lloyd Wright building." They love it now. Anyway, I think a lot of us are making work that doesn't come
from that other source. I'm thinking of Bob Ashley's works. They're a genre of their own, but he thinks
they're operas.
FJO: But clearly this had to come from somewhere.
AL: I was lucky to go to Europe on a Fulbright in 1960 and I heard all the wonderful European avantgarde pieces. I think I heard the first performance of Luigi Nono's Canto Sospeso. It dawned on me that
this was their music and they were good at it. It was in their souls. Structuralism, serialismI was
incompetent in that field. I could imitate it, but it would be that, an imitation. So I was at an impasse. Then
I went to the Fenice in Venice where Cage and David Tudor and Merce Cunningham did an event. That
just stopped me dead in my tracks. After that, I decided to do something totally different that would seem
to be something my own.
FJO: So what makes American experimental music different from classical music and modern European
music? How did it become something else?
AL: It's hard to actually pin that down. I think a lot of it came from Cage, the early tape pieces where he
ecologized. He would record sounds of the city, sounds of the country. He made these works that mixed
these found sounds and environmental sounds. Then there was 4'33" which was about hearing the
sounds around you and the idea of non-intentionalitywhatever you do, you don't control. When I was in
Milan, I had access to work in an electronic music studio and everything was controlled. People like
Luciano Berio were in there. Control and possibility were the words they used to use a lot. We've got all
the possibilities and we control them. The idea of Cage is that you have all those possibilities but you
don't control them, and if you don't control them something wonderful is going to happen.
I was at an improvisation concert the other night and it just didn't interest me at a certain point. It
reminded me of a misconception of Cage's ideas about chance. Two things happen simultaneously and
something really special occurs that you can't get if you plan it; you can't get that if you react to someone
else. And the improvisers were reacting. They were hearing the other players and deciding to do things.
It's got the randomness of the six players improvising, but they're all reacting to each other so nothing
special happens. It drives me crazy to hear performances of Christian Wolff's For 1, 2 or 3 Peoplewhich
is based on coordinations and uncertainty, anxiety, accidents[but some] players plan in advance what
it's going to be like. The result is a spectacular performance but it doesn't have that quality. That's what
they miss. I don't know why they don't understand that quality.
FJO: But all of the training for classical musicians is predicated on having a score with lots of details. If
those details aren't there, what is the musician supposed to do? And if it's a large ensemble, that control
goes even one step furtheryou follow a conductor who tells you how to interpret that music.
AL: Oh, don't talk to me about conductors! [laughs] I was a conductor of the Brandeis Choral Society and
I did Morton Feldman's The Swallows of Salangan. That piece is for a huge orchestra and a four-part
chorus. You give a down beat and then everybody proceeds at their own speed, so you get this beautiful
phasing thing. The singers do the same, even though they're following a single part. When I did it in Town
Hall, and Morton Feldman was sitting there, I gave a downbeat and that was the performance. [But] I
heard of a performance in Europe where the conductor would give a downbeat at turns of the page to
keep everybody together, which is anxiety about letting it happen. I had an argument with another
conductor who wanted to conduct the choral parts because they were single parts.
FJO: So I imagine you don't really like writing for the orchestra.
AL: I'm doing a new piece for the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble. It's based on an overture by
Beethoven called The Consecration of the House which he wrote for the reopening of a concert hall in
Vienna in 1823. I've done these acoustic experiments like I Am Sitting In A Room and so forth, and I
thought of a piece called The Exploration of the House where I would have an orchestra play in a concert
hall, preferably a new one, and use the recycling technique of I Am Sitting In A Room to explore the
acoustics of that space. I thought about what I would have the orchestra play, and for the life of me the
idea of composing something didn't ring a bell for me, so I finally decided to take the Beethoven overture
by itself.
It's a dangerous thing I'm doing. I chose seventeen fragments from that overture. The conductor conducts
one fragment, seven seconds perhaps, nine seconds, and it's stored in the memory of a computer in
digital delay. Then he stops the orchestra and it's played back again and again and you start to hear
these beautiful resonances, and then he'll conduct another fragment. So I'm using the Beethoven as a
found object, but the process transforms it so much that it seems to make no sense.
FJO: Do you know what the sound resulting from this process will ultimately be?
AL: No.
FJO: That's part of the excitement for you?
AL: Sure. I don't know how fast it's going to happen. There are seventeen phrases, some of them are up
to thirty seconds long. The mock-up version I made of the piece, with ten iterations of each fragment, is
about fifty-seven minutes which is a little long for a concert. But in a place such as Zankel Hall, which is a
live space, I have the feeling the transformation is going to be a lot faster, maybe four or five iterations,
which is O.K. I don't really care. The conductor can decide how many iterations. I just told you I hated
conductors but here I am making a piece for a conductor! So he could conduct one fragment, it may go
six times, and transform itself into something very nice, and then he may decide to move on. We can also
eliminate some of them. I'm not wedded to the idea of seventeen. That's just what I chose as material.
AL: That was that piece. I enjoy pieces that do that. I have so many pieces that have sustained sounds
and I'm trying to find a way to make pieces without that.
FJO: Slow motion certainly gives listeners a chance to actually hear how these processes play out, like
all your pieces where pitches come extremely close together and then move slightly apart. In some ways,
it's the ultimate microtonal music.
AL: My pieces are not microtonal, although I use that word sometimes to describe it. If you try to have a
player play one cycle away from a sine wave, he can't do it exactly. Sometimes he can, but he can't do it
all the time. When you microtune something, you're getting different intervals of different sizes. When you
are closely tuning, as I do, you're getting rhythmsone cycle away is one beat a second. So it's the
rhythmic quality, not the tonal quality.
Now, in some of the pieces, under certain circumstances when the beats are so close, you hear the
sounds move in space. That's what I'm trying to get after. It very seldom happens, but sometimes it does.
There's a phenomenon which was described to me by a scientist: If one pitch is above the other, the
beats spin towards the low sound. So if one pitch goes above and below, theoretically I can spin the
beats in one direction and then the reverse. That only happens once or twice in my work, but that's what
I'm trying to get at. The intention of doing it is very important, even if it doesn't really work. So many of my
pieces don't work.
FJO: Don't work in terms of what you initially wanted to do?
AL: The intention is important and I always have the feeling that someday they will work, somehow.
FJO: So what are examples of piece in your opinion that work and pieces that don't work?
AL: Well, Anthony Burr played a piece of mine two nights ago for bass clarinet and low oscillator. I think
the low pitch is an F in the score, and he's not supposed to go more than three cycles on either side of
that sustained sine wave low F, and there are symbols for sliding up and down a little bit. If he starts two
cycles above and slides across the unison to one cycle below, theoretically when he's close those beats
should spin. If the sound of the clarinet in some way matches the sound wave, you should hear some
kind of spinning or some spatial aspect. Well, of course there is a spatial aspect anyway because the sine
wave is so pure that, if it's a stationary wave, the standing waves have a palpable, physical presence in
that space.
I didn't invent that idea. La Monte Young did work with that, so I pay him my respects. If the wave slides
around, as in Memoriam, the wavelengths are getting shorter and they're reflecting in different ways, so
that the waves move around the space. In the hall the other night, it sounded as if the engineer was
raising and lowering the volume levels, but he never touches them. It's that the wave crests are moving
across you in one point in space. So that's a physical manifestation of these phenomenon, and they're not
electronic, they're physical.
FJO: You've talked about people not able to execute your music in performance. Early on you worked
pretty exclusively with electronics. Yet, since the '90s, you've worked frequently with classically trained
musicians: string quartet, pianist, trombone, orchestra pieces. What made you turn to, in essence,
classical music?
AL: Very simpleperformers started asking me to make them works. There was an ensemble at school,
they had seven players and they wanted a piece to inaugurate their first performance. They asked me,
and I was delighted because the reason I went into music was because of my love for classical music. So
my task was to find a way to use these instruments in my own way. And I think I found it. [laughs] Making
those instruments do what they can do without the gestures and the other things that go along with it.
FJO: One of my favorite pieces of yours is Panorama, a trombone and piano piece with no electronics in
it at all, but it does the same kinds of things. On the recording, I hear those acoustic phenomenon
working. The performers clearly got it.
AL: In Japan I did a piece for four kotos. We recorded it last night, and there's no electronics in that
either. They just pluck their strings. It's a very simple-minded form. They all start on the same pitch and
then over a period of twelve minutes one player moves to an F, one player moves to an E, one payer
moves to an F#. They go up at different intervals, slowing down as they do so. Very simple. They fan out
into this. And after a while you start really hearing the beats, the plucks, and of course they can't control
their speeds exactly. They don't use metronomes or anything, it's all done by innate sense of timing, so
you get this sort of random, rhythmic feeling. Beats occur because one player is 30 cents lower than the
next player and so forth. The string plucks last about four or five seconds, so when they overlap there's
some little sustains underneath it.
This piece for four kotos has this inexorable form where just one idea goes through the whole piece. They
all start in sync and then the piece speeds up very fast because they all move out of phase. By having a
simple form that doesn't change, speeds change within the piece. It starts in sync, it goes faster, and then
it slows down at the end. Pieces like Steve Reich's Come Out are essentially one process, but
unexpected things happen. In Jim Tenney's percussion piece [Koan: Having Never Written A Note For
Percussion], the directions are simply crescendo, diminuendo. So it looks like a joke. But when you roll on
a gong from very soft to very loud, along the way the gong steps into different modes. At a certain point
it's at a level where it's unstable. So something that's gradual in a form doesn't necessarily produce a
gradual result. Other composers wouldn't have had the patience to stay with the process because nothing
was happening. But you wait for it and then it does happen. Sometimes in my own pieces I dont hear the
phenomenon at the beginning. I think something's wrong with the performance or with myself. I can't
prove this, but it takes time to perceive it.
FJO: The time factor is crucial, but its interesting that many of your recent pieces are a lot shorter than
the earlier ones.
AL: I'm making pieces for performers that are shorter for practical reasons. If it were longer it would take
away from some other pieces that would be on the program.
FJO: But for listeners, those other things on the program are probably going to be very different listening
experiences than the kind of things you're doing. Imagine someone going in and hearing, say, a
Beethoven string quartet, and then hearing your quartet for Arditti. They require two different kinds of
listening. It's unfair to Beethoven but it's even more unfair to you.
AL: Well, we can be a little unfair to Beethoven.
FJO: But perhaps it's ultimately unfair to audiences to make them try to appreciate things that are so
different from each other.
AL: I was somewhat anxious [at] the concert at Tonic the other night. Charles Curtis and Anthony Burr
have made a double CD of these pieces and they're almost all sustain pieces. There's In Memoriam John
Higgins, there's a piece I wrote for Charles, there are two pieces from Still and Moving Lines. And I
thought, my god, this is about an hour and a half of music, you're in a club downtown, how are these
people going to sit and listen, because each piece is so similar in certain ways. And everyone was very
attentive, except me. I had this funny idea on the way back home that I was a little bit ahead of the curve,
at least my own curve, in making these works where players sustain long tones and they tune closely and
the beats speed up and slow down. But now I'm behind the curve because I need constant change and
contrast whereas audiences, at least that audience, just sat and shared the whole thing. I was very
surprised.
FJO: It's curious that much of your music is site specific, yet a lot of the way it reaches people is through
recordings where you have no way of knowing what the listening environment might be.
AL: You know people say, "Well, why do you do those? You can't get the same effect." Well, you do
something else. In pieces like Still and Moving Lines of Silence, and In Memoriam John Higgins, the
stereo is set up in such a way that an instrument is on one channel and the oscillator is on another
channel, and in your own room you hear not a performance of the piece but you're hearing the piece in
your own room and the physical phenomenon are happening in your room. They're not a document of
what happened in some other room.
FJO: The way people listen to music at home is very different than the way people listen to music in a
concert hall or in a gallery setting where they're just walking through. At home, most people are doing
other things when they listen to music.
AL: There's a wonderful CD that the Wandelweiser people in Germany did of Christian Wolff's piece
Stones. Five players chose stones, something very minimal, and over a period of an hour and ten
minutes those sounds are heard. There could be one or two minutes between sounds. So I play the CD in
one room and I'm in the other room and I forget it and all of a sudden I could hear xhock, this little sound
that I don't associate with the sounds of my environment. And then a minute after that I hear xhockxhock
[laughs]. It's beautiful. It's a different thing. It's just wonderful.
AL: The New York Philharmonic players did In C several years ago. It was just terrible. They moved the
pulse around from instrument to instrument. They had piano and marimba and xylophone and they would
soften and crescendo and it's just adding something to it that it doesn't need to havethat's what you
learn in music.
FJO: What should listeners be bringing to this music when they hear it? What's the ideal listener for you?
AL: They asked Wallace Stevens that and he said "an informed reader." I don't care whether my
audience is informed, but they should be open to these experiences. I have a friend who is very closed to
things. He'll say, "I hate opera." And his spouse loves opera. So, I felt like saying to him, "Well, how many
operas have you gone to?" Probably one. I should have said to him, "Why don't you go to an opera every
month for five years and then decide if you don't like opera?"
The idea of closing your mind immediately. I like this; I don't like this. It doesn't make any sense to me. My
students are very open, but I always say to them at the first class, "I'm not interested in your opinions."
[laughs] And they get a little upset. But I say, "I'm interested in your perceptions. So don't hear a piece
and decide. That doesn't interest me, whether you think it's good or not. What do you hear? Tell me what
you perceive." That's interesting to me. I just want people who are open and take it for what it is.
FJO: Last night I was re-reading through some of your CD booklet notes and came across the story of
your confrontation with a music critic who hated Music on a Long Thin Wire.
AL: That was at New Music Miami. There was a panel and one of the critics said, "I don't like wires." And
I said that in a piano, there are more than 88 of them! It's amazing. These critics don't know anything.
They're not educated in any particular way. The ones at The New York Times are; they know what they're
talking about. But there's not much critical ground in the United States. There aren't informed music critics
that discuss this kind of music.
FJO: Yet, despite that, there seems to be more of an openness among audiences for new music now
than ever before.
AL: Well, things are changing. Audiences are listening now. I did a performance the other night at school
and we put up a big wall by Sol Lewitt, a big curved wall in this art gallery, and some of the audience was
on the other side. We didn't do that intentionally, but during these pieces the students would go on the
other side of the wall, lay down on the floor, and they were just enjoying it.
FJO: What is your own experience as a listener? Do you enjoy listening to your own music? What else do
you listen to?
AL: I don't really enjoy listening to my own music too much. Something's wrong with my ego. [laughs] I
always think, "Why are people interested in what I'm doing?" I have friends that have egos and whatever
they do they think it's the best thing that's ever been written, and I wish I had part of that but I don't. But
maybe its good because it keeps me thinking and it keeps me from getting complacent. Why I'm writing
shorter pieces, I think is a courtesy to the audience, trying to make pieces for more conventional
audiences in a concert hall.
What do I listen to? Not much. I teach and I listen to all that music that I love from John Cage, through La
Monte Young and Bob [Ashley] and on up, younger composers. I listen to European composers that
interest me. Helmut Lachenmann, people like that seem to me to be writing extraordinary pieces. I teach
a course on Orpheus, so I have the Monteverdi opera, which I play sometime. I have Bach. I have Glenn
Gould, his new version of the Goldberg Variations which is very different from his original version. But I
don't play a lot of music.
The NPR station in the state of Connecticut is a complete disaster. They play one after the other of the
Baroque-Italian, you know what I mean. It's just wallpaper. So in my car, I play rock'n'roll.
FJO: And you enjoy that music?
AL: When I'm in my car, sure. It's got this energy. And I've been going to a fitness club and I have an
iPod, and I play pop music. It's wonderful music for exercising. It's got that energyyou have to move on
that treadmill when that music is being played. Eminem. Even Elton John, I'm sorry to say I enjoy. And the
Gipsy Kings.
FJO: Do you think it's going to eventually influence you as a composer?
AL: I don't think so. [laughs]