Sitting in a Room with Alvin Lucier, a Visionary Composer and a Passionate Teacher
Lucier died this week at 90 years old
Photo by Jack Vartoogian/Getty
Few composers ever understood the value of a good accident the way Alvin Lucier did. Of course, any good artist, in any discipline, must be attuned to the epiphanies and possibilities that present themselves in moments unguarded. But Lucier—the influential visionary of experimental music who died this week at the age of 90—created a body of work that seemed to exist in the sonic space between plan and happenstance, between entropy and control. Across a career that spanned 60 years, Lucier was a visionary who permanently expanded the boundaries of what music could be and how it could be created.
He was not a musical prodigy, but rather a conceptual artist who approached sound with a deep well of curiosity and eccentricity. Some composers deal in notes and scales; Lucier communed directly with the physics and acoustic phenomena of sound itself, embracing unpredictability and instability. If the simplest definition of music is “organized sound,” then Lucier was determined to tilt the balance away from the organized side of the equation and towards sheer processes of sound—with an attentive ear towards the properties of the space in which that sound might be heard.
One of the qualities of Lucier’s work was a guiding sense that the instability of a performance environment could be embraced as central to the work itself. Consider his most famous composition, ”I Am Sitting in a Room,” which is as iconic, and oddly quotable, as avant-garde sound art gets. It epitomizes Lucier’s genius for process-based music. Its conceptual basis is all explained within the work itself: The composer recorded the sound of his own voice describing the piece, then re-recorded the sound of that recording being played back into the room, then re-recorded the sound of that recording, and so on and so on, until the frequencies of the room overtake any semblance of intelligible words. “What you will hear then are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech,” Lucier explains. For those patient enough to sit with the piece for 45 minutes, it is hypnotic to hear Lucier’s calming voice dissolve into a distant alien whir, like a photograph of a photograph of a photograph.
The piece became a classic work of American minimalism, its influence echoing across a half-century of experimental and ambient music. You can sense Lucier’s influence in so many different corners of boundary-pushing music-making: from William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops and their use of tape decay and deterioration to the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka and its willingness to embrace the inherent instability of playback equipment to Laurie Anderson’s blurring of the line between music and performance art. Yo La Tengo are known to be big Lucier fans, as well—the trio performed with Lucier back in 2016, trading their usual deafening guitar noise for an eccentric piece performed with whispered voices funneled through balloons.
Like many of Lucier’s greatest pieces, “I Am Sitting in a Room” was conceived as the result of a happy accident. Lucier hatched the idea after someone told him about a sound engineer named Amar Bose, who had been testing his own speakers by using them to play back sounds made by the speakers themselves. This was a chiefly practical endeavor that Lucier reimagined into an artistic concept, one which thrives on the singular properties of the room in which the piece is performed.
After studying composition at Brandeis and the Tanglewood Music Festival (where his mentors included Aaron Copland) and beginning his career as a neoclassical composer, Lucier began to drift towards the American avant-garde after witnessing performances by John Cage and David Tudor in the early 1960s. Cage’s emphasis in his compositions on chance operations and randomness, such as coin tosses, had made “non-intention” fashionable in avant-garde circles. Lucier gradually embraced Cage’s belief, famously expressed in “4’33,”” that any sound could be musical, and he found new and inventive ways to advance Cage’s investigation of chance processes.
His pivotal early piece, “Music for Solo Performer” (1965), emerged from an encounter with the physicist Edmond Dewan, who provided Lucier with the use of a brain-wave amplifier. Lucier soon devised a piece in which a musician sits onstage, doing nothing, with electrodes attached to their head; the musician’s own alpha waves are amplified, causing 16 percussion instruments to vibrate.
Another piece, “Vespers” (1968), was inspired by a chance encounter with a person whose company produced hand-held pulse oscillators, known as Sondols, which are commonly used by blind people. These gadgets became unlikely musical instruments, too: Lucier had blindfolded performers move around a space holding the oscillators, which make frenetic clicking sounds as they approach walls or furniture. The result was a kind of pitter-patter percussive symphony that doubled as a “sound photograph” of the space in which the piece was performed.
In 1970—after establishing himself with major works like “Music for Solo Performer” and “I Am Sitting in a Room”—Lucier began teaching at Wesleyan University, where he remained a fixture of the music department for more than 40 years. His unique approach to teaching expanded the minds of thousands of students, both trained musicians and inspired amateurs, who studied under him.