Lucier Alvin - Chambers: Scores by Alvin Lucier

Scores copyright 1980 by Alvin Lucier

Interviews copyright 1980 by Alvin Lucier and Douglas Simon

Several of these scores and interviews have appeared in similar or different form in Arts in Society; Big Deal; The Painted Bride Quarterly; Parachute; Pieces 3; The Something Else Yearbook; Source Magazine; and Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America, edited by Alan Sondheim (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977).

Typography by Jill Kroesen

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of a Wesleyan University Project Grant.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lucier, Alvin.

[Works. Selections]

Chambers.

Concrete music.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Concrete music. 2. Chance compositions. 3. Lucier, Alvin. 4. ComposersUnited StatesInterviews. I. Simon, Douglas, 1947 II. Title.

M1470.L72S5 789.98 79-24870

ISBN 0-8195-5042-6

Distributed by Columbia University Press

136 South Broadway, Irvington, N.Y.

Printed in the United States of America

First edition

For Ellen Parry and Wendy Stokes

I first met Alvin Lucier in 1968 when he came to Wesleyan University, where I was an undergraduate, to offer a course in new music. He was still teaching at Brandeis University then and traveled to Middletown, Connecticut, once a week from Waltham, Massachusetts. It was an exciting class that had a strong influence on my own ideas, and when I chose a subject for an honors thesis in 1969, I decided to write on Alvins work.

At that time, I was most familiar with his piece Chambers. I had watched it taking shape in 1968 and had helped perform it more than once by the time I began my project, so it seemed a good candidate for my choice of subject matter. A major portion of the thesis was to be devoted to a careful, objective description of a single performance of Chambers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which I had performed, and I felt I needed a block of personal information from Alvin to balance that. If the description of the piece were to be of a specific performance, the idea of a specific conversation, an interview, seemed a promising parallel. And so it was.

In December of 1968, we sat in the greenroom of the Slosberg Music Center at Brandeis, a very resonant, intimate space, and talked with each other. I have a clear memory of the effort involved in making oneself understood with a tape recorder running, but Alvin and I were both pleased with the results.

When we examined the transcription, we found more to please us. Alvin felt his ideas were stimulated and organized by the questions and enjoyed seeing his thoughts on paper. I appreciated that, and also found that his observations and, perhaps more importantly, his mode of expression suggested several lines of inquiry in my thesis. We were soon excited about the possibilities of continuing the interviews, and we decided to conduct several more with an eye toward publication. Of the many we did, the best ones were always those devoted to particular compositions, and we grew to accept that as the organizing influence in the book.

Alvin is a stutterer, and so has always to be prepared to say something unexpected. I consider this his verbal signature. The kind of compositional decisions discussed here seem all the more revealing to me in the light of this enforced verbal flexibility. To me, Alvins explanations of his acceptance of multi-level images in the realization of his ideas (the crickets in Vespers, the campfire in Tyndall Orchestrations) seem to be truly sympathetic to his verbal character.

Id like to suggest that Alvins scores, included here as the formal representations of his compositions, may be illuminated by the interviews, informal representations of the same procedures. They are about his music while they are like his music. With this in mind, the reader (who perhaps will also have the opportunity to attend one or more of Alvins performances) may in fact experience a significant portion of a working artists reality over an extended and productive period of his career.

Douglas Simon

New York1978

Collect or make large and small resonant environments.

1. Sea Shells

2. Rooms

3. Cisterns

4. Tunnels

5. Cupped Hands

6. Mouths

7. Subway Stations

8. Bowls

9. Shoes

10. Hollows

11. Caves

12. Suitcases

13. Ponds

14. Stadia

15. Water Spouts

16. Bays

17. Tombs

18. Conduits

19. Canyons

20. Boilers

21. Pots

22. Ovens

23. Barrels

24. Bulbs

25. Bottles

26. Cabins

27. Wells

28. Bells

29. Capsules

30. Craters

31. Empty Missiles

32. Cacti

33. Beds

34. Webs

35. Pools

36. Boats

37. Cones

38. Funnels

39. Bones

40. Stills

41. Gins

42. Draws

43. Tubes

44. Theatres

45. Cars

46. Springs

47. Flumes

48. Trees

49. Others

Find a way to make them sound.

50. Blowing

51. Bowing

52. Rubbing

53. Scraping

54. Tapping

55. Moving

56. Fingering

57. Breaking

58. Burning

59. Melting

60. Chewing

61. Jiggling

62. Wearing

63. Swinging

64. Bumping

65. Dropping

66. Orbiting

67. Creaking

68. Caressing

69. Bouncing

70. Jerking

71. Flipping

72. Levitating

73. Hating

74. Skimming

75. Ignoring

76. Talking

77. Singing

78. Sighing

79. Whistling

80. Walking

81. Snapping

82. Cracking

83. Snoring

84. Boring

85. Praying

86. Loving

87. Spraying

88. Bowling

89. Channeling

90. Freezing

91. Squeezing

92. Frying

93. Exploding

94. Poking

95. Screwing

96. Lowering

97. Shaking

98. Impeding

99. Dancing

100. Others

Sounds of portable resonant environments such as sea shells and cupped hands may be carried out into streets, countrysides, parks, campuses, through buildings and houses, until outer limits are reached where minimum audio contact can be maintained by a player with at least one other player.

Sounds of the outer environment encompassed by the players may be heard with reference to the sounds of the portable resonant environments carried by the players. Sounds of determinate pitch in the outer environment may be heard in simple or complex relationships to the pitches of the portable resonant environments. Sounds of indeterminate pitch in the outer environment may be heard to take on the pitch, timbral, dynamic, and durational characteristics of the sounds of the portable resonant environments.

Sounds of fixed resonant environments such as cisterns and tunnels may be made portable by means of recordings, or radio or telephone transmission, and carried into inner or outer environments. When carried into inner environments, such as theatres into beds, the sounds of the now-portable resonant environments may either mingle with or take over the sounds of the inner environment. When carried to outer environments, such as boilers into parks, the sounds of the now-portable resonant environments may be treated as original portable environments.