Music on a Long Thin Wire

Music on a Long Thin Wire is a work by the American composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier from 1977. The work, located on the border between sound installation and composition, bears the full name Music on a Long Thin Wire for sine wave generator and electronic monochord .

Structure and instructions

Alvin Lucier behind the horseshoe magnet, which is used to stimulate the wire to vibrate ( cover detail of the record release, Lovely Music 1980)

The work consists of a sound installation in which a long, stretched wire string is electronically excited and its vibrations are made audible via loudspeakers. A long, thin steel wire, such as piano wire, is stretched through a room and led over bridges at both ends, as with stringed instruments . Pickups are attached to the bridges and their signal is made audible via loudspeakers . The electronically amplified sinusoidal signal of a tone generator is passed through the wire . On one side of the installation, the wire runs through the gap of a strong horseshoe magnet and is set in vibration by the interaction of the current-carrying wire with the magnetic field . Lucier also suggests lighting the wire so that the vibrations can also be perceived optically.

After the installation, the installation works essentially without an interpreter , but the person responsible for the installation defines the situation and location-dependent parameters such as the type, length and tension of the wire and the frequency and strength of its electronic stimulation. The latter can also be varied in a concert situation, whereby the frequency should remain constant within the previously determined concert sections of any length. The strength of the stimulus may be changed very slowly and continuously in a section in order to explore the resulting sounds. The individual sections are separated from one another by pauses in which a new excitation frequency can be selected. A conscious control or selection of the sounds in the sense of an interpretation is expressly not desired, so that the work can also be realized as a pure sound installation with fixed parameters. Lucier himself recorded the record in 1979 without changing the intensity of the excitation within the four, almost 20-minute-long sections.

Publications and Realizations

Publications

• Alvin Lucier: Music on a Long Thin Wire. 4 variations, 74:44 min. Lovely Music 1980 (CD 1011, recorded 1979 at US Custom House, New York)
• OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music. Ellipsis Arts 2000, with an excerpt (6:43 min.) From the publication on Lovely Music

Realizations (selection)

• 1979 Winrock Shopping Center, Albuquerque , the installation has been uninterrupted for five days of KUNM-FM, the public radio station of the University of New Mexico sent
• 1980, Landmark Center, Saint Paul
• 1988, Gallery of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University
• 1999, Singuhr-Hoergalerie in the Parochialkirche (Berlin) as Twins, a variant of the work with two wires set up by Lucier (13 May - 13 June 1999)
• 2011, private realization by Tom Duff for the Internet radio station sfSoundRadio in San Francisco , which was also broadcast live for a full five days without interruption (April 8 - 12, 2011)
• 2011, Kunsthaus Zug as part of the Linea exhibition , November 21, 2010 - March 27, 2011
• 2013, Brno : Exposition of New Music -Festival, June 12, 2013
• 2015, Dartmouth College : Dartmouth's Digital Arts Exhibition (DAX), April 28, 2015

literature

• Alvin Lucier: Reflections. Interviews, notations, texts . 2nd extended edition, MusikTexte, Cologne 2005 (first published in 1995, bilingual edition, see pp. 184–195, 360–363, 505–511)

Web links

• CD release on Lovely Music 1980/92, with accompanying text and a short sound sample (English, accessed October 6, 2012)
• Music on a Long Thin Wire from Allmusic (accessed October 6, 2012)
• Data sheet for CD publication by Lovely Music by Allmusic with short sound examples under Tracks (English, accessed on October 6, 2012)
• Vertical Wire Music ( Memento from January 1st, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ). Reinterpretation of Alvin Lucier's Music On A Long Thin Wire by Martin Backes, Heidrun Schramm and Christoph Illingan at the University of the Arts Berlin , 2008 (accessed on July 21, 2013)
• Photos of the realization by Tom Duff for sfsound Radio, San Francisco 2011 (accessed October 6, 2012)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alvin Lucier: Reflexionen, 2005, pp. 360/361: Music on a Long Thin Wire for audio oscillator and electronic monochord. The German title is also mentioned there (bilingual edition).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Cover text of the CD release on Lovely Music (English, accessed October 6, 2012).
3. ↑ cf. Alvin Lucier: Reflections, 2005, p. 507.
4. ^ Alvin Lucier: Empty Vessels / Twins. singuhr-hoergalerie Berlin 1999 (accessed October 6, 2012).
5. ↑ sfSoundRadio: Live Broadcast of Alvin Lucier's "Music on a Long Thin Wire". MatrixSynth, April 8, 2011: "April 8-12 2011: sfSoundRadio presents a continuous broadcast of Alvin Lucier's 'Music on a Long Thin Wire' (1977) duplicating the historic 5-day radio broadcast from a shopping center in Albuquerque, New Mexico , 1979. Realization by Tom Duff, from his backyard in Berkeley, CA. "
6. ↑ Program (PDF; 381 kB) of the Linea exhibition , p. 6 (accessed on October 6, 2012).
7. ↑ Exposition of New Music -Festival: Program 2013 (English) ( Memento from September 17, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ).
8. ↑ cf. the video clip with a short statement by Lucier (0: 33–2: 40) on the Youtube Channel of Dartmouth College (English, accessed on September 15, 2015).