On Wed, Jun 25, 2014
Sitting in a room with Alvin Lucier
The 83-year-old US composer was in Dundalk at the weekend to discuss and perform his seminal work Sitting in a Room. Tom Parkinson was there too
Alvin Lucier performs I Am Sitting in a Room
‘
This is music about listening’
“If you listen to Beethoven, I guess you’re listening to what Beethoven is giving you in time – how it moves from point to point, key changes, modulations and stuff like that. In my music, you have to concentrate on one or two things … one thing actually. I’ve been told that listening to it is paying attention to how you’re listening. It’s contemplative.”
So says composer Alvin Lucier, apparently too busy making music to appreciate a late upsurge in recognition. “My nose is in my work. I’m getting more concerts and stuff nowadays but then I’m older, too. When you’re older, either you’re out in the pasture or you’re … you know what I’m saying …”
The 83-year-old Lucier is genially addressing me and my fanboy comrades in the front room of a guest house in the tiny rural town of Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland, where he is about to do a concert of among other pieces, his seminal Sitting in a Room of 1969. We’ve made the pilgrimage here because, for a quietly gathering audience, his ultra-economical music defines Lucier as the composer of his age. Distancing himself from the idea that music should reflect the “random access” of contemporary existence, he says: “It seems to be a very modern idea, we can listen to many things at one time. Maybe it’s old fashioned but for some reason I went in another direction.”
That direction led him towards greater simplicity and an enduring reputation. Out of a generation of American post-war experimentalists, Lucier – the composer with the lightest touch – may yet prove the hardiest. His fidelity to the properties inherent to sound gives his music the impression of having been discovered rather than composed. If it is possible for music to have less imposed content than 4’33” – the “silent piece” by his friend and colleague John Cage – Lucier’s is it. He describes the compositional process as peeling away layers until there is nothing left but a single idea. Out of this comes music of compelling richness, its apparent simplicity making way for ear-cleansing experiences that recompose hearing itself.
Encouraged by Steve Reich (“He said, ‘There’s all these players, they study their instruments – give them music to play’”), Lucier moved away from purely electronic music in the early 80s. In For Charles Curtis, one of the other works performed tonight, long sine waves and sustained cello notes appear to dance with each other, their waveforms rhythmically interacting through precise microtonal shifts in tuning.
American experimental composer Alvin Lucier
Creator of perhaps the most profound statement of what it is to be human and have ears … composer Alvin Lucier
But his most singular work remains Sitting in a Room. What could be mistaken for poetic didacticism combines speech and acoustics to create perhaps the most profound statement about what it is to be human and have ears that has ever been produced. It is senseless to describe it in generic terms; this is music about listening. Sitting in a Room begins with Lucier (whose signature stutter is as pronounced now as it was on the original recording) explaining the piece: “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I’m going to play it back into the room again and again until any semblance of my speech with perhaps the exception of rhythm is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”
True to fanboy type, we’d spent most of the journey to Ireland dissecting the text, but Lucier explained that its conception was almost mundane: “I sat there and thought, ‘I’ve got to say something … I’ll tell them what’s happening.’ I just wrote it out and that was it. It could have been anything.”
Nevertheless, the text specifies that the room in which the recording takes place is “different from the one you are in now”, so a question mark hung over its translation to a live context with the audience in the same room as its performer. In the event, Lucier sat in front of us in the cavernous hall of Dundalk’s converted jail and read the text from his book Chambers, amended to: “I am sitting in the same room you are in now …” He then remained there with eyes closed, listening with the rest of us while an engineer recycled his speech back into the room again and again, his words slowly giving way to a pulsing wall of harmony, uniquely produced by the natural acoustics of the venue – joined, as it happened, by a droning earth-hum that jumped into the loop on its second iteration.
In the 1960s Cage had encouraged him to embrace the potential of failure. Commenting afterwards on whether he was disappointed, he said simply: “It happened. I’m happy with it.”
The fact that the concert – which also included the world premiere of the astonishingly beautiful OCCAM XVI for bass clarinet, by Eliane Radigue – happened at all is some kind of miracle performed by Eamonn Quinn, an unsung angel of contemporary music. Since 2006, Quinn’s Louth Contemporary Music Society has been programming events of international importance that would be the pride of any major city. Through a dogged love for the music, he consistently convinces such figures as Phillip Glass, Arvo Pärt and John Zorn to appear in front of Dudalk’s curious and loyal audience. The relaxed humility with which this latest concert was presented belies the five years that it took to arrange Lucier’s unlikely appearance in this particular room.
Tom Parkinson is a composer working primarily in an interdisciplinary context. Follow him on Twitter @tomparkinson
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