Music on a Long Thin Wire
Music on a Long Thin Wire is a work of the American composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier from the year 1977., Which falls on the border between sound installation and composition work bears the full name of Music on a Long Thin Wire for sinusoidal signals and electronic monochord.
Design and performance instruction
The work consists of a sound installation in which a long string taut wire electronically excited and their vibrations through speakers are made audible. A long thin steel wire, piano wire is about, to strained through a room and out at both ends as with stringed instruments via webs. At the webs pickups are mounted, the signal is made audible through speakers. Through the Wire electronically amplified sine signal a tone generator is passed. On one side of the installation of the wire passes through the nip of a powerful horseshoe magnet and is rotated by the interaction of the current flowing through the wire with the magnetic field to oscillate. Lucier is also proposing to illumination of the wire to the vibrations also can visually perceive.
The installation comes out after the device is substantially without an artist, but who puts the situation-and site- dependent parameters such as the type, length and tension of the wire and the frequency and strength of its electronic excitation laid for the establishment responsible. The latter can be in a concert situation also varied with the frequency should remain constant within each of the predetermined and as long concert sections. The strength of the excitation may be changed very slowly and continuously in a section to explore the resulting sounds. The individual sections are deducted one another by pauses in which a new excitation frequency can be selected. A conscious control or choice of sounds in terms of interpretation is not allowed, so that the work can also be implemented as a pure sound installation with fixed parameters. Lucier himself played the 1979 publication on record without changing the Anregungsintensitivität within the four, about 20 minutes long sections a.
Publications and realizations
Publications
- Alvin Lucier: Music on a Long Thin Wire. 4 Variations, 74:44 min. Lovely Music 1980 ( CD 1011 recorded in 1979 at the U.S. Custom House, New York)
- OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music. Ellipsis Arts 2000, with a cutout ( 6:43 min. ) From the publication on Lovely Music