Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Evan Johnson On the Record: Inside Alvin Lucier's Space

In Memoriam Stuart Marshall, 40 Rooms, In Memoriam Jon Higgins, Letters, Q, A Tribute to James Tenney, Bar Lazy J, Fideliotrio, Wind Shadows
Alvin Lucier
The Barton Workshop
New World 80628-2 (2 CDs)

Alvin Lucier�s music uniquely requires space. Not just those pieces that explicitly invoke it � through spatialization, overt resonance, or even echolocation � but all of his indescribably ear-bending music, with its impossibly close tunings and persistent timbres that burrow and swim in your head and occupy the air in all of its thick three-dimensionality. I had the rare privilege of seeing several pieces by Lucier performed live at the 2005 June in Buffalo festival, and it is difficult to imagine the shimmeringly transcendent experience being repeatable on record, even with a far better audio setup than mine. With that caveat, though, this is a brilliant collection of first recordings of nine works spanning the last twenty years, several of them written for the Barton Workshop.

In its own way, Lucier�s work is a powerful antidote to all aesthetic and stylistic debates. It returns us to the reason that music exists in the first place, the reason it is compelling to the human consciousness: the inherent affective power of the conjunction of two tones. Confronted with the surprising power of these disarmingly simple environments, everything else seems superfluous. All but two of the pieces on this two-CD set involve the slow, almost methodical exploration of small intervals through juxtaposition and transformation; the process may be objective, arithmetic and unambiguous, but the results are beautiful in the extreme. They remind us that beauty can be uncomfortable and alien, and that it can emerge in the most unexpected places.

It is too easy to describe a Lucier piece in words � so easy that it might seem unnecessary to listen. (Perhaps we should call this situation the �Cage Effect� in honor of the tiresomely endless debate over 4�33�; Lucier�s I Am Sitting in a Room, which is easily characterized as a simple experiment in feedback recording but whose aesthetic impact is indescribable, is perhaps the most dramatic example.) A pair of memorial pieces, In Memoriam Stuart Marshall and In Memoriam Jon Higgins, confront a soloist (bass clarinet in Marshall, B flat clarinet in Higgins) with a single sine tone; in the first piece it stays constant, while in the second it rises continuously and almost imperceptibly across the entire range of the clarinet over the piece�s twenty-minute duration. In the first piece, the clarinetist (here the superhuman John Anderson) produces a series of 43 small intervals in relation to the constant sine tone; in the second, he is responsible for a series of tones that intersect the slanting line of the rising electronic glissando, producing a continually changing pattern of strikingly perceptible beatings.

And that is all. A scientific experiment or acoustical demonstration rather than music, perhaps. A concept piece, interesting to ponder but unnecessary to sit through. It may seem so; but the results, particularly In Memoriam Jon Higgins, are devastating in their affective impact, and they will stay with you for a long time. Lucier played an excerpt from Higgins at a lecture at June in Buffalo, and when he switched it off I was taken aback by the power of my own desire to hear the rest � I knew I liked the piece, but I didn�t know I loved it until it was wrenched away.

Not all of the pieces in this set share the ascetic concentration of the In Memoriam pieces. Letters, a bagatelle for Lucier at six minutes, is a quintet whose score consists entirely of a musical transcription of the lines and curves described by the letters in a short message of greeting to a festival organizer (�HELLO BJORN CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR 100TH CONCERT��). The pitches are almost all C, E flat, F#, or A, with curvy glissandi interposed as required; the result is light and witty, almost silly, but still possessed of the meditative focus that is Lucier�s fingerprint. 40 Rooms, by contrast, is a product of Lucier�s relatively recent interest in the possibilities of detaching and recontextualizing local acoustic environments with computer technology. The musical material is quite different here, with as many notes played in a few minutes as can probably be found on the entire rest of the pieces on this recording; but, as the booklet thought-provokingly point out, the notes here are absolutely immaterial. The focus of 40 Rooms is on the acoustical properties of each of these notes from each of these particular physical instruments, in their unique patterns of decay, resonance, and bloom, as the instrumentalists are digitally placed in a series of artificial resonant environments.

There are nine pieces on these discs, and sitting through even one can be as exhausting as it is exhilarating; this is not a record to be listened to in the space of two-plus hours, then, but it could make for an amazing weekend.

Lucier is one of the American greats, and as unrecordable as his work may be, this is a major release, one of the records of the year for sure. Kudos all around � to the Barton Workshop for their absolute mastery of the unique demands of these scores, to New World Records for the enterprising commercial venture, and to Lucier himself for reminding us why music is worth our time in the first place.

posted by Evan Johnson 12/28/2005