The Dec. 10 edition of Duck, You Sucker! featured compositions by the American minimalist composer and sound artist Alvin Lucie who died Dec. 1 at the age of 90.
Lucier’s sound installations and compositions tended to focus on the physical properties of sound itself, such as the resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches and the transmission of sound through physical media, as well as the sound of the human body.
His 1965 “Music for a Solo Performer – for enormously amplified brainwaves and percussion” was the first work in history to use brain waves to generate sound. Lucier accomplished this via a series of electrodes attached to his scalp that detected bursts of alpha waves created when the performer reached a meditative non-visual brain state. These alpha waves were then amplified, the resulting electrical signals vibrating percussions instruments dispersed around the performance space. Imagine seeing this performed live!
His most famous piece, “I am Sitting in a Room”, was composed and first record 1969 when Lucier was the University Chamber Chorus director at Brandies University. A native of New Hampshire, Lucier would ultimately move to Middletown where he took a position at Wesleyan University. Middletown remained his home until his passing.
Due to the room’s particular size and geometry, certain frequencies of the recording are emphasized while others are attenuated. Around the 15-minute mark of the piece and about nine repetitions of the recording, the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonant frequencies of the room itself. By 23 minutes in, it’s nothing but a drone.
In 1970, he made a second recording of “I am Sitting in a Room” at his apartment in Middletown. It’s an attempt to record the unique resonant harmonics of a given room and features Lucier recording himself narrating a text and then playing the tape recording back into the room. He then re-recorded it and the new recording is then played back and re-recorded. The process was repeated numerous times.
The ground-breaking status of the piece has lost little allure over the years. To celebrate Lucier’ 90th birthday in May, the Brooklyn-based ISSUE Project Room streamed a 26-hour undertaking of it with 90 performers contributing.
An immensely influential artist who collaborated with John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, David Behrman and many others celebrated experimental musicians of his generation, Lucier taught several contemporary avant-gardists such as Miguel Álvarez-Fernández, Arnold Dreyblat and Judy Dunaway, among others.