Lucier Explores Hidden Pipe Organ Sonorities

I am now ready to complete the promise I made this past Friday to account for five new recordings scheduled for release this coming Friday. The final release is an album devoted entirely to compositions by Alvin Lucier, who died on December 1, 2021. I first came to know Lucier during my student days, when he was teaching at Brandeis University and performing as a member of the Sonic Arts Group, which would later be known as the Sonic Arts Union.

As a composer, Lucier was primarily interested in the nature of sound itself and the role that sound contributes to the nature of what Martin Heidegger called “being-in-the-world.” (This is my own attempt at useful terminology. I never encountered any reference Lucier may have made to Heidegger!) One of the earliest of his pieces that I encountered involved the performers orienting themselves in darkness by drawing upon echo location. This involved devices that would simply click, requiring the performer to interpret any echo as an “orientation cue.”

Lucier’s best-known composition is probably “I Am Sitting in a Room,” in which he explored his own speech impediment. This involved reading a text which would then go through a series of re-recordings. His stammer would, from time to time, interrupt the fluency of his narration; and he designed the re-recording process, in his words, “as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.” One might say that this is a composition in which the devil was in the details; but, through the layers of multiple re-recording, that devil gradually transformed into an angel.

The title of the new album is Swing Bridge, which is also the title of the longest of the three tracks, situated in the middle of the sequence. It is the title of a work commissioned by the Australian Art Orchestra, completed in 2015 and scored for “organ, ensemble & pipe wavers.” The objective involved the exploration of natural harmonics, a rather challenging demand given the “acoustic rigidity” of most pipe organs.

Back cover of the album being discussed, showing the members of the Australian Art Orchestra performing with organist Austin Buckett (courtesy of Naxos of America)

The performance took place in the Melbourne Town Hall, which has its own “Grand Organ.” Fortunately, the city allowed this instrument to be manipulated according to the requirements of Lucier’s score. Those requirements included the removal of specific pipes, which were then relocated in three “offset chests,” each accommodating two pipes. Those six relocated pipes were then to be manipulated by three or more performers; and those performers were the “pipe wavers.” The result is that an instrument known for its rigid intonation was repurposed into one with a capacity for microtonality. Thus, as the performance progresses, the attentive listener becomes aware of sonorities that one might not expect from the usual pipe organ; and those sonorities are reinforced by the string players in the ensemble.

Those familiar with Lucier’s works will probably settle into the keen attention required to appreciate subtle shifts in those sonorities. Those encountering Lucier for the first time may well be perplexed, if not annoyed, by what he conceived as a listening experience. Since my own Lucier experiences now take in more than half a century, I have no trouble seeking out the subtleties and following them down the paths they lead. Those inclined to “standard” concert experiences are more likely to feel frustrated, if not annoyed.

Some of that frustration may be eased, however, by the tracks preceding and following “Swing Bridge.” These are two different performances of “Sizzles,” a composition for (to quote the full title) “organ, various drums & vibrating materials.” The music involves following a set of instructions, rather than the usual score notation. Lucier specified those instructions as follows:

Drums of various sizes are randomly placed throughout the performance space. Fine materials such as lentils, chickpeas, and candy hearts are sprinkled on the drumheads. As low organ tones are sounded, the skins of the drums vibrate sympathetically, causing the drums to sound and the material to move. Each drum is individually amplified with a contact or air microphone and a separate amplifier.

In other words, like most of Lucier’s other works, “Sizzles” is “about” how a diversity of sonorities emerge from a pre-determined physical setting. No two performances are (or should be) identical. Thus, having experienced both the “first version” of the opening track and the lengthier content of “Swing Bridge,” the attentive listener should be well prepared for the differences that emerge during the final track.

As has been the case with the previous four new recordings, Swing Bridge is available for pre-order from Amazon.com, whose Web page also includes a generously detailed account of the nature of the music being performed.

2022: My Year of Nicolas Horvath Recordings

Readers that have been visiting this site for some time probably know that I follow up on my “Month-by-Month Memories” of performances with a less-structured “Memorable Recordings” article. However, this was the year in which Fate led me to take a “deep dive” into the recordings made by pianist Nicolas Horvath. At the beginning of this year, Horvath was no stranger to me. In 2021 I had written in March about the album of his performances of music by Alvin Lucier, followed by an “‘Unknown’ Debussy” article in October;” and, in April of this year, I wrote an article entitled “Horvath Begins Project to Record Tailleferre.”

Nevertheless, I was not prepared for what would happen shortly thereafter. I received electronic mail from Horvath informing me of the albums he had released under his own Nicolas Horvath Discoveries label. Most ambitious was his project to record the complete piano works of Jean Catoire, amounting to 30 hours of music divided across a series of eight volumes. These were to be released through Bandcamp, whose Web page for the first release described Catoire as “the very first (and totally forgotten & neglected) french [sic] minimalist composer.” I wrote my first article about Catoire on July 26, and my account of the final volume appeared on August 25.

For the remainder of this year, I did my best to catch up on other Discoveries releases. Every now and then, I would encounter albums with familiar content. This was the case where John Cage was concerned, as was Hans Otte, whose Das Buch der Klänge (the book of sounds) had been known to me through the album he recorded of his own performance in 1982. My most recent article, which appeared a little more than two weeks ago, involved another “Long-Duration Release” (three hours and 22 minutes), this time of The Chord Catalogue by Tom Johnson.

Visiting Horvath’s Bandcamp page is a sobering reminder that I shall never be able to keep up with all of his recording activities. Since he is based in Paris, I also doubt that I shall have an opportunity to experience one of his concert performances. Nevertheless, I owe much to the Nicolas Horvath Discoveries releases for their impact on how I continue to reflect on both the experience of listening and the attempt to document that experience with text as pretty much my only resource.

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!

SOURCE Nostalgia

Every now and then I like to wax nostalgic over how the Downtown Music Gallery has helped me find the CDs to replace some of the more valued vinyls that I had to give up upon moving into smaller quarters.  In the past I have focused on Brian Eno’s Obscure series;  but lately, due in part to my writing on Examiner.com about The San Francisco Tape Music Festival, I have found myself listening to the CD collection that replaced the vinyl records included with selected issues of Source magazine.  I first learned about Source in the summer of 1968.  I have previously described this summer as “the first time I did any serious writing about [Merce] Cunningham's approach to choreography and John Cage's approach to the composition and performance of music,” although it was from Gordon Mumma, who worked with Cage and David Tudor in providing the music for performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, that I first learned about Source.  Mumma had a keen sense of signal processing, how he wanted to use it, and how he could build circuits to satisfy his goals;  so he provided me with many wonderful opportunities to converse about music and technology.  He was the one who encouraged me to subscribe to Source;  and eventually I managed to acquire a complete set of all published issues (something I still wish I could have done with Die Reihe), which I continue to treasure.

Source was one of the best channels for content about avant-garde music for its time.  It included articles, interviews, and scores.  It provided me with my first opportunity to examine the score for Cage’s 4’33”.  It also facilitated my reflections on my first serious encounter with the avant-garde through a performance given by the Sonic Arts Group, which had emerged from the ONCE Group and would late be known as the Sonic Arts Union.  (Under that name they give a performance at the Guggenheim Museum in a series that also offered me my first exposure to the music of Philip Glass.)

Six ten-inch vinyls were included in selected issues of Source during the run of the magazine.  There was an emphasis on in-concert recordings of what, at the time, was called “live electronic music,” conceived with an emphasis on performance, rather than conception.  However, with the Tape Music Festival about to begin on Friday, I find myself thinking back on “I am sitting in a room,” by Alvin Lucier.  Among the avant-garde composers, Lucier was “geographically closest” when I first got to know him, since he was running the Electronic Music Studio at Brandeis University when I was doing my doctoral research in computer music at MIT.

Thanks to WikiProject Classical music, “I am sitting in a room” has its own Wikipedia entry;  and it deserves it.  Lucier conceived it to deal with his stuttering.  It begins with a tape recording of his reading his own speaking voice, describing what he is doing and occasionally impeded by stutters.  He then began a repetitive process of recording that tape on another tape, doing the same with the resulting tape, and so on “through many generations,” as Lucier described the process in Source.  What happens is that the physics of the room gradually enhances certain resonant frequencies, making the source text less and less intelligible.  However, while the frequencies of the vocal formants give way to the resonant frequencies of the room, the rhythm of the speech endures, meaning that the rhythms of the stutters begin to articulate the sounds of the frequencies imposed by the room.  This is a gradual process, so listening requires more than a little patience.  However, the phenomenon leads to interesting effects that the patient will find rewarding.  I am not sure I would call this work a “classic;”  but it is one that deserves the attention of anyone aspiring to be a serious listener.

Recovering Ambience

Thanks to the good graces of the Downtown Music Gallery, I have been recovering several instances of favorite material that I had given up when I got rid of all of my vinyls. Many of those recordings were produced by Brian Eno as part of his Ambient and Obscure series, and some of them are real gems. For example it was from the Obscure series that I first discovered the music of Gavin Bryars; and, when I finally had an opportunity to talk about this with Bryars himself, I learned that he was the only person who had written to me directly to request a copy of my doctoral thesis (which I provided)!

There is a tendency to associate the "ambient movement" (to the extent that it was a movement) with Windham Hill Records, which, in turn, came to be viewed as the standard bearer for New Age music at its most vacuous. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for New Age music nicely captures this perspective:

New Age music is music of various styles, which is intended to create inspiration, relaxation, and positive feelings, often used by listeners for yoga, massage, inspiration, relaxation, meditation,^[1] and reading as a method of stress management^[2] or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments often
associated with environmentalism and New Age spirituality.^[1]

From my own point of view, however, Eno had far less to do with New Age thinking and far more to do with advancing the philosophy of John Cage, who believed that, since there was no such thing as absolute silence, we could find things to listen to where we least expected to find them. Eno had a way of finding such listening experiences in places that even Cage had not considered looking. This emerged through his own compositions, through his collaborations with others (such as Harold Budd), and through his support of those who worked independently of his own activities. While Gavin Bryars was my prime example of this latter category, I discovered that one of the Obscure releases that included a Bryars composition also included the entirety of John Adams' three-movement American Standard suite (only one movement of which, "Christian Zeal and Activity," has ever been available through any other source). Now that I have settled in San Francisco and become a champion of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I take delight in the fact that Eno's release of Adams' music consists of a recording of a live performance by The New Music Ensemble of the Conservatory made on March 23, 1973.

I continue to listen to Eno's projects, particularly since they provide me with useful data points in my efforts to gain a better understanding of the nature of listening to music. I find that Eno found his own path from Cage by beginning with Cage's philosophy to take sounds just as we hear them and instead holding the acoustic equivalent of a magnifying glass to those sounds. This may involve repeated motifs in the spirit of Philip Glass (or, as I have observed, Ludwig van Beethoven); but it can also involve sounds that emerge of their own accord by nature of the audio equipment being used (an approach that can also be found in the music of composers such as Alvin Lucier). In either case the result, for me at least, has less to do with creating any kind of New Age "spiritual aura" and far more to do with focusing the mind on listening with a concentration that may well exceed the level of attention we give to Beethoven. What more can we ask of a composer?