Chambers. Alvin Lucier

CHAMBERS

      CHAMBERS

      Scores by ALVIN LUCIER

      Interviews with the composer

      by DOUGLAS SIMON

      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. Composers—United States—Interviews. I. Simon, Douglas, 1947– II. Title.

      M1470.L72S5 789.9′8 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

      CONTENTS

       Preface

       1. Chambers

       2. Vespers

       3. “I Am Sitting in a Room”

       4. (Hartford) Memory Space

       5. Quasimodo the Great Lover

       6. Music for Solo Performer

       7. The Duke of York

       8. The Queen of the South and Tyndall Orchestrations

       9. Gentle Fire

       10. Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas

       11. Outlines and Bird and Person Dyning

       12. Music in a Long Thin Wire

       Bibliography

       Index

      PREFACE

      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 Alvin’s 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, Alvin’s 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.

      I’d like to suggest that Alvin’s 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 Alvin’s performances) may in fact experience a significant portion of a working artist’s reality over an extended and productive period of his career.

      Douglas Simon

      New York—1978

       CHAMBERS

      CHAMBERS (1968)

      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.