Alvin Lucier

Alvin Lucier ( born May 14, 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire) is an American composer and sound artist.

Life

Lucier was educated in Nashua and Portsmouth. He then studied at Yale and Brandeis composition and participated in summer festivals at Tanglewood. After graduating, he spent two years as a 1960-62 Fulbright Scholar in Venice and Rome, where he became acquainted with the latest developments in new music. In Venice, he studied at the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello and attended concerts by John Cage and David Tudor, in Milan he made in Luciano Berio's electronic studio di Fonologia Musicale short experiments with tape compositions. In 1961 he participated as listeners participated in the Darmstadt Summer Courses, where he met the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and La Monte Young, among others.

Back in the U.S. he directed at Brandeis from 1963 to 1970 the Chamber Choir of the University. He put an emphasis on the new music. Due to the concerts of the choir he learned the composer Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma from the environment of the ONCE Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor as well as artists from the area around John Cage know. 1965 experimented Lucier at the instigation of the physicist Edmond Dewan with low-frequency brain waves as musical material, and wrote for the piece Music for Solo Performer. John Cage, who had been invited by Lucier to a concert at the Rose Arts Museum of the University, invited him to contribute a work itself and assisted at the first performance of the piece. Lucier himself considers Music for Solo Performer as the beginning of his work as a composer. In 1966 he founded with Ashley, Mumma and David Behrman, the Sonic Arts Union, a composer collective that toured together until 1976 and concerts va was in the field of live electronics. From 1970 to 2010 he taught as John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.

In addition to activities in the U.S. Lucier concerts, readings and performances around the world. For example, in 1988 in Japan, 1990-1991 by DAAD Artists in Berlin Programme 1992 in India and Finland.

In October 1994, Wesleyan University, Lucier honored with a five-day Festival: Alvin Lucier: Collaborations. In April 1997, Lucier presented works from his series Making Music at Carnegie Hall and in October of the same year his sound installation Empty Vessels at the Donaueschingen Music Days. Lucier's 1999 piece Diamonds for Three Orchestras was performed at the Prague Spring Festival.

In 2006 he was awarded the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, 2007, he received an Honorary Doctorate ( Honorary Doctorate of Arts) at the University of Plymouth.

In 2012, he joined forces with Ashley, Mumma and Behrmann again as Sonic Arts ( Re) Union on the March music festival in Berlin.

Working

Lucier explored in his work, the nature and effect of acoustic sounds. He is doing a balancing act between art performance, composition and research.

In his best-known piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1969 ) Lucier plays a voice recording of him into a room and simultaneously makes a recording of it. This in turn is played in the same room and recorded simultaneously. This process is repeated until the voice is no longer to be understood on the recording, but only the often multiplied room acoustics can be heard.

In his piece Music for Solo Performer (1965 ) uses Lucier devices that register brain waves and can amplify electronically. These signals are used to drive loudspeakers. Due to the low frequencies they are not directly audible, the membranes of the loudspeaker then bring but by their different vibrations, placed directly on the membranes percussion instruments to sound.

To Lucier's work also includes a series of chamber pieces and orchestral works that deal on a minimalist style with pure sounds. So he designed a piece that produce sounds in the musicians on various instruments and try solely by these sound waves spread in space snare drums to bring the blades. In another piece musicians try their instruments the resulting randomly feedback sounds a speaker to imitate exactly what but never completely succeed.

Alvin Lucier also wrote music for plays and films. 2004 Lucier played himself in the radio play Paralektronoia of Felix Kubin. I am Sitting in a Room was recorded in the legendary list Wire The Wire 's " 100 Records That Set The World On Fire (While No One Was Listening ) ".

Works (excerpt)

• Fragments for Strings (1961 ) for string quartet
• Elegy for Albert Anastasia (1962-1965) with tapes and notes at the limit of human hearing
• Music for Solo Performer (1965 ) for amplified brain waves and percussion
• Whistler (1967, withdrawn) recordings of ionospheric turbulence
• (Hartford ) Memory Space (1970 ) for any number of instruments and recordings of environmental sounds
• I Am Sitting in a Room (1970 ) voice, tape and room acoustics
• Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977 ) for tone generator and electronic monochord
• Clackers and Swoopers (1989 ) for three fire sirens and dancers with wooden blocks
• Amplifier and Reflector One ( 1991) for open umbrella, and a frying pan clock
• Two Stones (1994) for two basalt pieces
• I Remember (1997 ) for choir and various sound box
• What Day Is Today? (1999 ) Eight short pieces on tape, based on sound waves from the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn
• On a Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon ( 2000) for koto and sound oscillator