Nicolas Horvath Plays Alvin Lucier

courtesy of Naxos of America

A little less than a month ago, Grand Piano released its latest recording of pianist Nicolas Horvath. Readers may recall that I have been following Horvath’s work for Grand Piano through his Glassworlds, project, which has now yielded six volumes of performances of the solo piano music of Philip Glass. His new release takes his taste for the adventurous in a new direction. The title of the album is Music for Piano XL, and it consists of an extended performance of a single composition by Alvin Lucier that lasts for a little over an hour in duration.

I have been aware of Lucier’s work for quite some time. When I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I first become aware of him, because he was setting up an electronic music studio at Brandeis University. Not long after I first met him, I saw him perform at Brandeis as a member of the Sonic Arts Group (which would later be known as the Sonic Arts Union), performing highly (if not outrageously) inventive works with his colleagues Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma.

Lucier seemed almost consistently aware of trying to work with sound at what might be called the “atomic” level. This approach was probably most evident in his Music on a Long Thin Wire album, which presented roughly 75 minutes of exploring subtle instances of sympathetic vibration. The full title of the composition on the new Horvath album is “Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillators XL.” If Music on a Long Thin Wire involved capturing and amplifying reverberations in a “natural” environment, the piano composition explores the “interference” frequencies that arise when sound sources are superposed. More specifically, individual tones from the piano induce new sonorities when mixed with the most basic sonorities of a single-frequency sine wave (a “pure wave”). When an oscillator provides a “slow sweep” of the sounded frequency, it will “interfere” with single tones played at the piano, inducing progressions that are not evident in either the solo piano sounds or the dynamics of frequency shift in the sine waves.

As listening experiences go, the result is as imaginative as the concept is simple. Furthermore, this is one of those rare Lucier compositions in which the notes to be played are explicitly written into the score, chosen for their interference effects on the tones from the two sine-wave oscillators. Nevertheless, the pianist can change the interference pattern one the basis of how (s)he times the note from the piano, since when the note actually sounds will determine the nature of that pattern.

When this piece was composed in 1992, the performance lasted a little more than fifteen minutes. This new extended version provides the pianist with more time in which to explore and exploit the different ways in which those interference effects can be induced. That version was created for Horvath, who gave the world premiere performance this past October in Strasbourg. However, the recording sessions for Grand Piano took place earlier, on April 11 and 12 at the La Fabrique des Rêves Recording Studio in Misy-sur-Yonne, France. Those sessions may have allowed Horvath to familiarize himself with technique for inducing those interference patters, which would then prepare him to perform the music in recital.

My guess is that there will be few opportunities to attend such a recital performance; and, if one of those opportunities arises in San Francisco, I suspect I shall waste no time in planning to attend!