Alvin
Lucier

Alvin Lucier has been one of the central figures of the US American music avant-garde since the 1970s. The intrinsic life of auditory processes and their respective situated perceptual reflections form the core of his artistic explorations. In his works, the composer and sound artist focuses on the subtleties of audible phenomena. Lucier makes use of ostensibly “secondary” shifts in sound—such as interference and beats—to open up a unique musical perspective on the dialectic of reduction and complexity, on transformations and emergences.

The composer, who died in 2021, once wrote about his works that they were close to alchemy, which was intent on transforming simple metals into pure gold. Accordingly, his works often have the character of acoustic experimental arrangements, whereby Lucier is less interested in purely physical circumstances than in settings that test the perceptibility of certain acoustic phenomena without stripping them of their magic.

An example here is his well-known piece I am sitting in a room (1969), in which a voice spoken on tape is transformed into cascading spatial resonances. Over the course of this musical performance, the voice recording is repeatedly played into the space and re-recorded until the spoken word is transformed into a sequence of notes—generating a melody unique to each performance space. Lucier also produced a German-language version of this piece in Berlin as part of the 1986 Inventionen festival co-organized by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and the Electronic Studio of the TU Berlin. Another example is his Music for Solo Performer (1965), in which Lucier used amplifiers and transducers to transmit brain waves, or more precisely alpha waves, to spatially arranged percussion instruments, thus transforming the waves into a kind of somnambulistic, remote-controlled percussive music. During his stay in Berlin as an Artists-in-Berlin Program fellow from August 1990 to the end of February 1991, Lucier also performed this piece at the Centre Culturel Français in Berlin.

In conjunction with the 1991 Inventionen festival, the daadgalerie presented an exhibition of Lucier’s sound sculptures from February 2 to March 3. In addition to the iconic Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums, and Acoustic Pendulums (1980), the work Sound on Paper was also presented, consisting of ten framed sheets of paper with different textures and surfaces to which one or more speakers were attached, causing the sheets to resonate sinusoidal vibrations in accordance with their material characteristics. During the fellowship, Lucier developed new performative and installative works that incorporated everyday objects in particular. For instance, the performance Amplifier and Reflektor I (1990), in which an alarm clock, a baking tray, and an umbrella were used to spatially project acoustic impulses. For another work created during this period with the allusive title Berlin is a Resonant City (1991), Lucier embedded loudspeakers emitting urban sounds in Berlin garbage cans, which were installed in the stairwell of the former daadgalerie in Kurfürstenstraße.

Following his Artists-in-Berlin Program fellowship, Lucier has maintained his relationship with Berlin and its important music and sound art scene. The singuhr—hoergalerie dedicated its first festival to the composer in 1999: alvin lucier—resonanzen. As a central player at MaerzMusik in 2017 and as part of his collaboration with the Ever Present Orchestra in 2018, Lucier often returned to Berlin well into old age.

Text: Jan Thoben
English Copy-Editing: Erik Smith
Photo: Alvin Lucier, Parochialkirche 1999 / Michael Schrödter