Alvin Lucier Live

Chelsea Art Museum, New York

Marcus Boon

(This review originally appeared in The Wire)

Speaking before this Electronic Music Foundation sponsored retrospective of his work at the newly opened Chelsea Art Museum, sound art pioneer Alvin Lucier recalled a remark made by Stravinsky, who called compositions which were based on classical models, but which were so original as to appear totally beyond them, “monstrous originals”.  Lucier commented wryly that he set out to produce such monsters - and Music for Solo Performer, which was first performed in 1965, indeed remains such a monster.  First conceived after conversations with an Air Force physicist regarding brain waves, it uses an EEG set up to register alpha wave brain activity which is then converted to sounds via a group of speakers set up around the room, which act as resonating triggers for a variety of percussive sound sources (bass drums, triangles, gongs and the like).

Now in his seventies, but speaking with the same gentle precision and intensity that can be heard on his electro-acoustic tape masterpiece I Am Sitting In A Room, Lucier said that he found it relatively easy to enter a mental state where he’s producing alpha waves.  This took nothing away from the theatrical intensity with which the composer seated himself alone in the center of the room, put on the EEG electrodes, and “composed” himself, almost motionless, with one hand on a modulating device on a nearby table, the other resting on his leg, meditation style.  Lucier commented that he was “touched by the image of the immobile if not paralyzed human being who by merely changing states of visual attention, can activate a large configuration of communication equipment with what appears to be power from a spiritual realm.”

The only real reference point for this performance for most people is the regular thump of the human heart beating – since, aside from the orifices, the human body is a silent, or rather, very quiet, object.  But, as Lucier observed, part of the charm of alpha waves is their irregularity.  As the EEG equipment picked up Lucier’s brain waves, complex, irregular, rumbling, chattering percussion patterns passed through the room.  Nothing that one would tag as obviously marking a brain wave – and yet, not through the instrumental sounds themselves, but the set up which cast them like shadows into the room, one could recognize that a living process – thinking, in this case – had been, in Lucier’s term, “spatialized”.

Lucier insisted that it was this interest in spatialization, in how any sound is always a sound manifesting in a particular space, that was the unifying thread in his work.  So, on Disappearances, a 1994 string quartet piece, the musicians’ subtle deviations around a single sustained tone caused various overtones and beating phenomena to appear and disappear, while on Wave Songs, Cage’s master vocal interpreter Joan La Barbara sang precise pitches that perturbed the pure tones coming from two sine wave oscillators.

“It’s hard for me to get the acoustic phenomena I want to get – so I have to search the room,” Lucier noted at one point.  This was a good, literal description of the evening’s other high point, a performance of his 1975 piece, Bird and Person Dyning, which utilized a binaural microphone system, inserted in the ears, allowing reproduction of sound almost exactly as someone hears it.  Lucier used this set up to carefully and precisely modulate feedback and other sonic peculiarities produced by an electric birdcall device positioned between the speakers and the microphones.  Making very subtle movements of his head, and slowly shifting his position in the room to catch and intervene in the intersection of different soundwaves  Lucier looked like a strange, Nietzschean ornithologist, seeking out the rarest birdsong, in full knowledge that birdsong comes not from the bird, nor from the listener, but their relative positions in a space.     

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