Installed by Ben Manley
“Extend a long metal wire… Drive the wire with a sine wave oscillator…(to produce) nodal shifts, echo trains, noisy overdrivings, rhythmic figures at low frequencies, phase-related time lags, simple and complex harmonic structures, larger self-generative cyclic patterns, stops and starts, and other audible and visible phenomena.” - Music on a Long Thin Wire, 1977
Alvin Lucier was born in 1931 in Nashua, New Hampshire. He was educated in Nashua public and parochial schools, the Portsmouth Abbey School, Yale, and Brandeis and spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship. While at Yale he studied music theory with Howard Boatwright and composition with Richard Donavan, David Kraehenbuehl and Quincy Porter; at Brandeis with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapiro. During summers of 1958-60, he studied orchestration with Aaron Copeland and composition with Lukas Foss at Tanglewood. From 1962 to 1970 he taught at Brandeis, where he conducted the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus, which devoted much of its time to the performance of new music. In 1966 he co-founded, with Robert Ashley, David Behrman and Gordon Mumma, The Sonic Arts Union, which, until 1979, gave numerous concerts in the United States and Europe. Since 1970 he has taught at Wesleyan University where he is John Spencer Camp Professor of Music.
Lucier’s early electronic music includes the use of brain waves in live performance (Music for Solo Performer, 1965); the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media (The Queen of the South, 1972), and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes (Vespers, 1969, and I am sitting in a room, 1970). His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which rhythms and spatial phenomena are created by means of close tuning.
His most recent instrumental works include Coda Variations for 6-valve solo tuba; Twonings for cello and piano; Canon, commissioned by the Bang on a Can All Stars, and Music with Missing Parts, a re-orchestration of Mozart’s Requiem, premiered at the Mozarteum, Salzburg in December 2007.
Alvin Lucier has collaborated with John Ashbery and Robert Wilson and is currently working with Italian artist Maurizio Mochetti on an exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, in October 2008. His recent sound installation, 6 Resonant Points Along a Curved Wall, accompanied Sol LeWitt’s enormous sculpture, Curved Wall, in Graz, Austria, and in the Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University in January 2005.
Mr. Lucier has participated in numerous festivals and residencies including the DAAD Kunster Program in Berlin, New Music Days, Ostrava, Czech Republic; June in Buffalo, and the Sparks Festival at the University of Minnesota. In April 1997, Lucier presented a concert of his works on the Making Music Series at Carnegie Hall. In March 2008 he will present a concert of his works on the musicadhoy Festival in Madrid.
Lucier regularly contributes articles to books and periodicals. Reflections/Reflexionen, a bi-lingual edition of Lucier’s scores, interviews and writings, is available from MusikTexte, Köln. In addition, several of his works are available on Antiopic (Sigma Editions), Cramps (Italy), Disques Montaigne, Source, Mainstream, Mode, New World, CBS Odyssey, Lovely Music, Nonesuch and Wergo.
In 2006, Alvin Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States and in December 2007 received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth, England, during the Dartington College of the Arts Awards.
Composer and experimenter Ben Manley explores the natural variability of wind, amplified small vibrations, and resonant objects to generate dynamic musical environments. Manley has worked extensively in music and audio in New York City and has presented solo performances and installations of light and sound across the country and overseas. Manley has collaborated with Sean G. Meehan, Connie Crothers, Ursula Scherrer, Jim Staley, Dan Evans Farkas, Jens Brand, Linda Austin, the Manley Family Trio, and has appeared with Composers Inside Electronics at the Lincoln Center and with Essential Music and the Downtown Ensemble. He has installed realizations of works by Alvin Lucier, including The Queen of the South and Music on a Long Thin Wire, at Studio Five Beekman, Greenwich House Music School, Subtropics 18 in Miami, and MFA, Boston. As a curator, Manley has presented festivals of experimental music at the Jack Tilton Gallery and elsewhere including House Mix: 19 Pianos, 19 Improvisers & 19 Microphones (a collective performance/recording/playback event), Electro-Whammy (w/ Ron Kuivila, Ben Manley, Matt Rogalsky), and say YES! to experimental music (w/ Jens Brand, Dan Evans Farkas, Ben Manley, Phill Niblock). As an audio engineer for concert events, Manley has recorded over 1,000 performances in more than 200 NYC venues and serves as a technical consultant to arts organizations, recording studios, architects, and visual/media artists.