I am sitting in a room

• I am sitting in a room (1970) for voice on tape

In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text.
    In I am sitting in a room, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated. The space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work.
I am sitting in a room was composed in 1970 and was first performed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that same year. A second version was made in 1972 to accompany the dance, Dune, performed by the Viola Farber Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since that time, numerous versions of this composition have been realized in various ways by other musicians, including a Swedish radio broadcast version.
    This recording was made by Alvin Lucier on October 29th and 31st, 1980, in the living room of his home in Middletown, CT. The material was recorded on a Nagra tape recorder with an Electro-Voice 635 dynamic microphone and played back on one channel of a Revox A77 tape recorder, Dynaco amplifier and a KLH Model Six loudspeaker. It consists of thirty-two generations of Alvin Lucier’s speech and was made expressly for Lovely Music, Ltd.

 

Alvin Lucier, recorded voice

Crossings

• In Memoriam Jon Higgins (1984) for clarinet in A and slow-sweep pure wave oscillator
• Septet for Three Winds, Four Strings and Pure Wave Oscillator (1985)
• Crossings (1982–84) for small orchestra with slow-sweep pure wave oscillator

Three works for classical instruments and oscillators (1982-85). Lucier explains the process:

“The three works on this compact disk explore interference phenomena between sound waves. When two or more closely tuned tones are sounded, their oscillations periodically coincide to produce audible beats of sound. The speed of the beating depends upon the distances between the pitches of the sounds. The further apart, the faster the beating; at unison, no beating occurs. Furthermore, under certain conditions, the beats may be heard to spin around the room . . .”

Thomas Ridenour, clarinet
The New World Consort of Wesleyan University

Clocker

• Clocker (1994) for amplified clock, performer with galvanic skin response sensor and digital delay system

 

Through the means of a galvanic skin response sensor driving a digital delay on a miked clock, Lucier creates the illusions of time expanding and contracting, and of a room that is chanhing in size.

 

Alvin Lucier, performer; recorded by Nicolas Collins 

Panorama

• Wind Shadows (1994) for solo trombone with closely tuned pure wave oscillators
• Music for Piano with One or More Snare Drums (1992)
• Music for Piano with Amplified Sonorous Vessels (1991)
• Panorama (1993) for trombone and piano

A gorgeous recording of works for trombone and piano, transformed by Lucier’s electronics and oscillators. Wind Shadows (1994), Music for Piano with One or More Snare Drums (1990), and Panorama (1993) were written for the Swiss musicians Roland Dahinden and Hildegard Kleeb, who play them on this CD. Also included: Music for Piano with Amplified Sonorous Vessels (1990), which was originally written for Margaret Leng Tan.

 

Roland Dahinden, trombone
Hildegard Kleeb, piano

Still Lives

• Music for Piano with Slow-Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators (1992)
• “On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon” (2000) for koto with slow-sweep pure wave oscillators 
• Still Lives (1995) for piano with slow-sweep pure wave oscillators

Three new works for pure waves and instruments.

 

Marilyn Nonken, piano
Ryuko Mizutani, koto
Joseph Kubera, piano

Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas

 

CD I 

• Clarinet, Thomas Ridenour
• Marimba, William Winant
• Viola, Dan Panner
• Voice, Rebecca Armstrong
• Xylophone, William Winant
• Violin Duet, Conrad Harris

CD II

• Flute, Susan Palma
• Glockenspiel, William Winant
• Cello, Gregory Hesslink
• Horn, James de Corsey
• Vibraphone, William Winant
• Violin Solo, Conrad Harris

Double CD release of of a four-part work, initiated in 1972 and recorded as presented here in 1983–84 and 2001. This reissues two long-out-of-print LPs on Lovely, with four added parts (the strings) released for the first time. A series of mostly solo instrument works for the likes of: clarinet, marimba, viola, voice, xylophone, violin, flute, glockenspiel, cello, horn, vibraphone. Performed by: Thomas Ridenour, William Winant, Dan Panner, Rebecca Armstrong, Conrad Harris, Susan Palma, Gregory Hesslink, James de Corsey. An absolute masterpiece of “interference sound.”

 

 

Vespers and Other Early Works

• Vespers (1969)
• Chambers (1968)
• North American Time Capsule (1967)
• (Middletown) Memory Space (1970)
• Elegy for Albert Anastasia (1961–1963)

Alvin Lucier (born 1931) is best known for his pioneering work in the mid-sixties in the exploration of sonic environments, particularly sounds that we would never perceive under ordinary circumstances. Vespers and Other Early Works restores to the catalog several of his key works from that time. In Vespers (1969) performers with Sondols (sonar-dolphin), hand-held pulse wave oscillators, explore the acoustic characteristics of given indoor or outdoor spaces by monitoring the echoes of the pulse waves off the walls, floors and ceilings, as well as any objects or obstacles in range of the sound waves. Over time, the listener receives an acoustic signature of the room. In Chambers (1968), battery-operated radios, tape recorders, and electronically powered toys of various kinds are hidden in paper bags, shoes, kettles, and small suitcases and other small resonant environments. As performers carry these small “rooms” into larger ones, such as concert halls, football stadiums and underground cisterns, the sounds, already altered by the acoustics of the small environments, are altered a second time by the acoustics of the larger ones. This version was recorded in 2002.

 

North American Time Capsule (1967), for voices and vocoder, is described metaphorically by Lucier as a message to listeners who don’t know about us. These could be very remote and exotic humans or the fabled “beings” in some other part of the universe. The message is encoded in accordance with the empirical fact that purely electronic signals are more easily transmitted through space (and through time) than the more complex waveforms of speech.

 

(Middletown) Memory Space (1970) is a reenactment of the composition called “(Hartford) Memory Space, for any number of instrumental players with recordings of environmental sounds.” The instructions for the original (city) composition say: “For performances in places other than Hartford, use the name of the place of performance in parentheses at the beginning of the title.” The instructions tell the performers to go out into the city and record, by any means-electronic recording, graphic notation, or memory—the sounds of the city, and to return to the inside performance space at any time and “re-create, solely by means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of memory devices (without additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations.” Elegy for Albert Anastasia (1961–1963) is described as composed “for electromagnetic tape using very low sounds most of which are below human audibility.” Liner notes by Robert Ashley.

 

 

Wind Shadows

 

Disc 1

• In Memoriam Stuart Marshall (1993/revised 2003)
• 40 Rooms (1996)
• In Memoriam Jon Higgins (1984)
• Letters (1992)

 

Disc 2

• Q (1996)
• A Tribute to James Tenney (1986)
• Bar Lazy J (2003)
• Fideliotrio (1987)
• Wind Shadows (1994) 

The Barton Workshop:

John Anderson, clarinet

Frank Denyer, piano

James Fulkerson, trombone

Marieke Keser, violin

Judith van Swaay, cello

Jos Tieman, double bass

 

The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier (born 1931) has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never “explanatory” (the goal of science) but, like all art, “revelatory.” This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in the usual sense of this term. On the contrary, it is the physical behavior of sound itself that he so elegantly reveals, each work unveiling an otherwise hidden or ephemeral aspect of aural phenomena and allowing us time to witness its beauty. He achieves this by ruthlessly excluding any trace of self-expression, or indeed anything extraneous to the phenomenon itself.

 

The Barton Workshop has been the only group to really work closely with Lucier in terms of doing “portraits” of his work (the first in 1995), commissioning new works (40 Rooms, Bar Lazy J, and Q) and performing older/extant pieces. This 2-CD set is the fruit of this long collaborative process.