On Father’s Day, Sunday, June 19th - 2pm ET, The Stokes-Lucier family and ISSUE Project Room will host a memorial for the late Alvin Lucier (May 14th, 1931 - Dec. 1st, 2021), revolutionary American composer and beloved pioneer of experimental music. ISSUE will be publicly livestreaming the full memorial online with speeches from Alvin’s family and friends including Wendy Stokes & Amanda Lucier, David Behrman, Susan Foster, and James Fei as well as performances of his work from Charles Curtis and the Ever Present Orchestra including Vespers, Three Cardboard Boxes, an archival presentation of I am sitting in a room, and more. The in-person memorial is by invitation of the family only.
In lieu of flowers, the Stokes-Lucier family has requested that you consider a contribution to: Black Lives Matter and/or ISSUE Project Room. An online Guest Book will be available for all in the community to sign.
Alvin Lucier deeply influenced the culture of experimental music and the sonic arts. Lucier’s delicate and lyrical compositional legacy shows an enduring engagement with contextual listening and the elusive characteristics of how acoustic mechanics are rediscovered, considered, and performed. Lucier pioneered many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, the minute exploration of audible beating between closely-tuned pitches, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. Alvin Lucier's work has pioneered a general theory of sound, one suggestive of our entangled perceptual position in the sonic world, as well as our attempts to hear the yet-to-be heard. Alvin Lucier presented a large number of programs of his work at ISSUE Project Room, where he was a long-standing member of the organization's Artistic Advisory Council, and where he was recognized at the 2018 Gala for his exceptional leadership in the experimental arts community.