• Wind Shadows (1994)

• Music for Piano with One or More Snare Drums (1992)

• Music for Piano with Amplified Sonorous Vessels (1991)

• Panorama (1993)

A gorgeous recording of works for trombone and piano, transformed by Lucier’s electronics and oscillators. Wind Shadows, Music for Piano with One or More Snare Drums, and Panorama were written for the Swiss musicians Roland Dahinden and Hildegard Kleeb, who play them on this CD. Also included: Music for Piano with Amplified Sonorous Vessels, which was originally written for Margaret Leng Tan.

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• I am sitting in a room (1970)

In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of forty minutes and thirty-two repetitions of a simple paragraph of text.

In I am sitting in a room, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated. The space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound. All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work.

I am sitting in a room was composed in 1970 and was first performed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City that same year. A second version was made in 1972 to accompany the dance, Dune, performed by the Viola Farber Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since that time, numerous versions of this composition have been realized in various ways by other musicians, including a Swedish radio broadcast version.

This recording was made by Alvin Lucier on October 29th and 31st, 1980, in the living room of his home in Middletown, CT. The material was recorded on a Nagra tape recorder with an Electro-Voice 635 dynamic microphone and played back on one channel of a Revox A77 tape recorder, Dynaco amplifier and a KLH Model Six loudspeaker. It consists of thirty-two generations of Alvin Lucier’s speech and was made expressly for Lovely Music, Ltd.

• Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings (1995)

• Theme (1994)

• Music for Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers (1994)

Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings

A work in which the strings of a piano sound by themselves. Several E-bows (small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars) which would cause the piano strings to vibrate and sound are placed on the strings of the piano. The pianist works from a prose score which describes the process and suggests she freely position and reposition five E-bows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of varying density and texture. Much of her time is spent listening for harmonics, audible beating, occasional rhythms produced as one or more magnets vibrates against adjacent strings, and other acoustic phenomena.

Theme

Setting a poem of John Ashbery’s to music, Lucier didn’t want to violate the flow of the words of the poem by fragmentation or any other cut-up method. The stanzas seemed musical enough just as they were and he wanted the audience to hear the poem more or less in its pristine state, so, working intuitively and by ear, he wrote out the poem for four readers in the order it was written, repeating words and phrases, overlapping and superimposing them in various ways. To “set” the poem, he inserted microphones into the mouths of various vessels, including a small milk bottle, a sea shell, a vase and an empty ostrich egg, to pick up the words as they were sounding inside the vessels. The readers speak normally, allowing the pitches of their voices which match those resonances of the vessels to create musical sounds. Occasionally, however, a reader will tend to emphasize certain pitches more than others, reading in an almost chant-like way, to sound the resonances of the vessels more clearly. Theme is performed on this CD by Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert and Joan La Barbara.

Music for Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers

Wanting to make a work for Javanese gamelan, but wary of using someone else's music in his own work, it wasn't until he started imagining the bowl-shaped bonangs of the gamelan orchestra more as resonant chambers to be sounded than objects to be struck, that Lucier felt he could make a work for gamelan that he could call his own. During the performance four players place bonangs of various sizes over microphones, creating feedback, the pitch of which is determined by the shape and size of the bowl and the resonant characteristics of the room. Three gender players strike the bars on their metallaphones, searching for the pitches of the feedback strands. Since it is virtually impossible that a strand of feedback will match exactly a pitch on any fixed-pitch instruments, audible beats—bumps of sound which occur as sound waves coincide—occur. The closer the tuning, the slower the beating. When the players reach near-unison with a feedback strand they slow down or speed up their playing, creating beating patterns between the pitches of their instruments and those of the feedback.

• Navigations for Strings (1991)

• Small Waves (1997)

Navigations for Strings (1991) was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk (German Radio). Musically it consists of four tones, for which a long stream of continually changing melodic and instrumental combinations occur. As the players move through the combinations, they raise and lower the pitches in imperceptibly small increments, some smaller than the human ear can hear. As the size of the interval contracts, the players gradually lower the dynamic level and slow down the tempo, allowing the sounds to lengthen like shadows and recede into the ambiance of the room. Because of the closeness of the tunings, audible beats are heard at speeds determined by the distances between the pitches.

In Small Waves (1997), six glass vessels, some partially filled with water, are mounted on pedestals scattered around the performance space. Microphones are inserted into the mouths of the vessels, then routed through compressor-limiters to amplifiers and monitor speakers. During the course of the performance, the volume levels of the amplifiers are raised and lowered, causing feedback at pitches determined by the size and shape of the containers and their proximity to the loudspeakers. Following a sequence notated in the score, the players closely tune with the feedback strands causing interference patterns. At times, two water pourers empty water from one container to another, raising and lowering the pitches of the sounds from those containers.

• Piper (2000)

• Fan (2003)

• 947 (2001)

• Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (1988)

• Ever present (2002)

Alvin Lucier’s works on this CD, for solos and trios, continue to explore his unique sound world, exploration of microtones, and use of unusual instrumentation.

Piper is probably one of the few avant-garde pieces composed for the bagpipe. The piper is asked to walk slowly around the performance space, sounding his instrument as he does so. From time to time he detunes the chanters, creating beating patterns of slightly varying speeds and minor spatial disturbances (imaginary dopplers).

In Fan, 4 koto players play a long series of plucked tones over a 12-minute time span, gradually stepping up to 4 semitones above the starting tone and slowing down to 1 beat every 2, 3, 4, and 5 seconds. As they do so, audible beating at various speeds occurs among the plucked sounds of the instruments.

During the course of 947, 4 pure tones are sounded in all their combinations. As they do so a flutist sustains closely tuned long tones against them, creating audible beats at speeds determined by the distances between her tones and those of the pure waves. The farther apart the faster the beating. At unison no beating occurs. Occasionally the flutist bends her pitches a few cycles per second causing the beating patterns to slow down and speed up.

In Silver Streetcar, the player dampens the triangle with the thumb and forefinger of one hand while tapping the instrument with the other. The performance consists of moving the geographical locations of these two activities and changing the pressure of the fingers on the triangles as well as the speed and loudness of the tapping. During the course of the performance, the acoustic characteristics of the folded metal bar are revealed.

Ever Present is inspired by Robert Irwin's garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Tone waves in constant motion sweep up and down as the players sustain long tones across them, creating beating patterns at speeds determined by the closeness of the tunings.

Liner notes by the composer.

Four first recordings.