Chambers. Alvin Lucier

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.

      Mixtures of these materials and procedures may be used.

      Increasing and lessening of any characteristics of any sounds may be brought about.

      How did I happen to write the piece? Well, it happened in various stages . . . let me see . . . I remember a film of a Jules Verne book, I think it was a Jules Verne book, something like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or one of those books. There’s a wonderful scene where men have built an underwater boat, and to get from the shore to the boat, which is moored under the water, several of them are walking along the floor of the ocean with huge conch shells over their heads, as if filled with air. This was nineteenth-century science fiction and the image struck me as something wonderful, walking on the floor of the ocean with those conch shells. I thought of making a piece with instruments, tubas or French horns, in which the players would do something like that, just an idea. And then I thought of actually getting conch shells, huge ones which I could make into bass instruments, conch shells three or four feet high, bass shells, and the openings could be bowed.

      About that time Pauline Oliveros invited me to San Diego to perform Whistlers, a piece in which I tried to get ionospheric sounds in real time with a radio receiver and antenna. There’s something about California, being from the East, palm trees and all that, so I asked Pauline, “Can we get any conch shells?” and she answered, “Well, we’ll see.” Every day we drove along the ocean front, and we used to pass a funny little store that had a sign that said “Sea Shells.” One day I asked her to stop the car. The store was filled with hundreds of seas shells of different kinds and sizes, and the man who owned the store said, “You know, people who live in the Islands have blown conch shells for centuries.” Where did I just see in a film, someone blowing a conch shell?

      Lord of the Flies?

      Tibet! I heard a recording of Tibetan chants on which they played conch shells. Now how do they get conch shells up in Tibet? But that’s one of their instruments anyway. So I thought it would be wonderful to make a piece using conch shells as musical instruments, either blown, or bowed, or struck. It struck me as very beautiful that the organisms that produce these gorgeous shells are somewhere down on the bottom of the ocean. What a wonderful origin of a musical insturment, to have it be made for a functional purpose, to protect some animal. When the animal dies, it is a remainder, there it is, it’s left in the world, and it’s such a beautiful thing it should be put to some use.

      My first idea was just to have people blow them. I wouldn’t compose it