Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

Abstract

Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music. By Alvin Lucier. Middletown, CT Wesleyan University Press, 2012. xiv + 218pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Index. ISBN 978-0-81957297-4. Price: $24.95 Those who know the composer Alvin Lucier may know him best for his 1969 electronic work I Am Sitting in a Room, in which he records a short text, plays it back while recording the playback, and repeats the process until the natural resonance of the room's architecture pulverizes the speech into ghostly musical tones. His later works, however, are no less novel; one of my favorites is Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (1988, recorded on Mode 178), a twenty-minute work in which a percussionist gradually reveals the many acoustic properties of a triangle through varying in performance the tempo, loudness, damping, damping location, and beater location. During his career, Lucier has heroically and uncompromisingly explored a simple question: what is the effect of listening carefully to different kinds of sounds in particular kinds of spaces? For his admirers, the answer is an experience unlike any other, and one not infrequently very beautiful. Music 109 refers, as Lucier relates in a short note at the end of the book, to lectures on new music he taught at Wesleyan University for over forty years. Most of the music he discusses was written by composers who, in one way or another, produced experimental music of their time: Ives, Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Ashley Glass, Reich, Anderson, Kagel, and Lucier himself. Compositions and techniques are introduced in the context of broad topics: genres, places, concepts, and so on--a partial list includes Symphony, Town Hall, Bell Labs, Repetition, Prose, Long String Instrument, Opera, Words, and String Quartets. Is the text here literally a transcription of class lectures? I sometimes think so, as in this part of a description of the first movement from Ives's first symphony: "This movement is only about three minutes long. It's marked maestoso. That's Italian for majestic or stately." At other times, I'm not so sure. Either way, this book doesn't simply present lecture notes: Lucier knows personally many of the composers he mentions and more than often enough worked with them, too. I love reading stories about new music composers and concerts, and Lucier tells many good ones. Here's a sample (an excerpt from his account of the New York Philharmonic's notorious performance of Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis and works by Feldman and Wolff): Bernstein gave a little speech before performing the three works, denigrating the music. …