Alvin Lucier

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Alvin Lucier

Alvin Lucier (born May 14, 1931 in Nashua , New Hampshire ) is an American composer and sound artist.

Life

Lucier completed his schooling in Nashua and Portsmouth . He then studied composition at Yale and Brandeis and took part in the Tanglewood summer festivals . After graduating, he spent two years on a Fulbright Scholarship in Venice and Rome, where he learned about current developments in new music . In Venice he studied at the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello and attended concerts by John Cage and David Tudor , in Milan he made short experiments with tape compositions in Luciano Berio's electronic studio di Fonologia Musicale . In 1961 he took part in the Darmstadt summer courses as a listener , where he got to know the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and La Monte Young, among others .

Back in the United States, he led the university's chamber choir in Brandeis from 1963 to 1970. He put the emphasis on new music. Through the choir's concert activities, he got to know the composers Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma from the ONCE Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor and artists from the vicinity of John Cage. In 1965, at the suggestion of the physicist Edmond Dewan, Lucier experimented with low-frequency brain waves as musical material and wrote the piece Music for Solo Performer for it . John Cage, who had been invited by Lucier to a concert at the University's Rose Arts Museum, asked him to contribute a work himself and assisted in the premiere of the piece. Lucier himself regards Music for Solo Performer as the beginning of his work as an independent composer. In 1966 he founded the Sonic Arts Union with Ashley, Mumma and David Behrman , a composers collective that toured together until 1976 and gave concerts by a. in the field of live electronics . From 1970 to 2010 he taught as the John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan University .

In addition to activities in the USA, Lucier gives concerts, readings and performances all over the world. For example in 1988 in Japan , 1990–1991 with the DAAD artist program in Berlin, 1992 in India and Finland .

In October 1994 Wesleyan University honored Lucier with a five-day festival: Alvin Lucier: Collaborations . In April 1997 Lucier presented works from his Making Music series in Carnegie Hall and in October of the same year his sound installation Empty Vessels at the Donaueschinger Musiktage . In 1999 Lucier's Diamonds for Three Orchestras was performed at the Prague Spring Festival.

In 2006 he received the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award , in 2007 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth .

In 2012 he performed together with Ashley, Mumma and Behrmann again as Sonic Arts (Re) Union at the MaerzMusik -Festival in Berlin.

In 2016, the Zurich University of the Arts organized a one-week festival on the occasion of Lucier's 85th birthday with numerous international guests such as Joan La Barbara , Charles Curtis, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley from Sunn O))) . In addition to various European premieres and world premieres of pieces such as Double Rainbow (2016), Step, Slide and Sustain (2014), Hanover (2015) and many others, the live electronic classic I am Sitting in a Room (1970 ), Bird and Person Dyning (1975) and Music for Solo Performer (1965) by Alvin Lucier himself.

Work

Lucier preparing for Music for Solo Performer, The Hague 2010

Lucier explores the nature and effect of acoustics and sound in his work. He walks a tightrope between art performance, composition and science.

In his most famous piece, I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), Lucier plays a sound recording he has spoken in a room and simultaneously makes a recording of it. This is in turn played in the same room and recorded at the same time. This process is repeated until the voice on the recording can no longer be heard, but only the room acoustics, which have been multiplied many times, can be heard.

In his piece Music for Solo Performer (1965), Lucier uses devices that can register brain waves and amplify them electronically. These signals are used to control loudspeakers. Due to the low frequencies, they are not directly audible , but the diaphragms of the loudspeakers then cause various percussion instruments placed directly on the diaphragms to sound.

Lucier's work also includes a number of chamber pieces and orchestral works that deal with pure sounds in a minimalist way. So he designed a piece in which musicians create sounds on various instruments and try to make snare drums that are distributed in the room sound through these sound waves alone . In another piece, musicians try to exactly imitate the random feedback noises produced by a loudspeaker on their instruments , but this is never entirely successful.

Alvin Lucier also wrote music for plays and films. In 2004, Lucier played himself in the radio play Paralektronoia by Felix Kubin . I am Sitting in a Room was included in The Wire's legendary wirelist "100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening)" . In 2017 he took part in documenta 14 .

Works (excerpt)

  • Fragments for Strings (1961) for string quartet
  • Elegy for Albert Anastasia (1962–1965) with tapes and tones at the limit of the human hearing range
  • Music for Solo Performer (1965) for amplified brain waves and percussion
  • Whistler's (1967, withdrawn) recordings of ionospheric turbulence
  • (Hartford) Memory Space (1970) for any number of instruments and recordings of environmental sounds
  • I Am Sitting in a Room (1970) voice, tape and room acoustics
  • Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977) for tone generator and electronic monochord
  • Clackers and Swoopers (1989) for three fire sirens and dancers with wooden blocks
  • Amplifier and Reflector One (1991) for an open umbrella, frying pan and a clock
  • Two Stones (1994) for two basalt pieces
  • I Remember (1997) for choir and various sound boxes
  • What Day Is Today? (1999) Eight short pieces on tape based on sound waves from the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn
  • On a Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon (2000) for Koto and sound oscillator

Texts

  • Chambers: Scores by Alvin Lucier. Interviews with the composer by Douglas Simon . Wesleyan University Press, Middletown (CT) 1980.
  • Investigate, try out, explore. The tools of my work , in: MusikTexte 16, October 1986, 26–32.
  • "There is so much that happens". Thoughts on sound installation , in: MusikTexte 55, August 1994, 5–8.
  • Reflections. Interviews, notations, texts . 2nd, extended edition, MusikTexte, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-9803151-2-6 (first published in 1995, bilingual edition; Chambers is included in reflections ).
  • Those were the days. About the Sonic Arts Union , in: MusikTexte 85, August 2000, 52–55.
  • On a bright day. Avant-garde and Experiment , in: MusikTexte 92, February 2002, 13-14.
  • Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music . Wesleyan University Press, Middletown (CT) 2012.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ on the career cf. Lucier: Reflections, 2005, v. a. Pp. 25–35, conversation with William Duckworth (1981) and Warren Burt: Alvin Lucier (1931–) . In: Larry Sitsky (Ed.): Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook , pp. 269-274. Greenwood Press, Westport 2002 ( online on Google Books , accessed October 17, 2012).
  2. ↑ List of the winners of the Seamus Awards.
  3. ^ The Wesleyan Connection's Achievements: Lucier to Receive Honorary Doctorate of Arts for Contributions to Society. October 16, 2007 ( memento of March 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ Program: Friday, March 23, 2012 - 8:00 p.m. Program archive of MaerzMusik .
  5. ^ ZHdK: Alvin Lucier 85th Birthday Festival. In: www.zhdk.ch. Retrieved December 29, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Alvin Lucier. Documenta 14 website .
personal data
SURNAME Lucier, Alvin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American composer
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Nashua , New Hampshire