Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room

Thursday, November 9th, ISSUE presents the second evening of a two day series observing the work of revolutionist American composer Alvin Lucier in partnership with Zürcher Hochschule der Kunste in Zurich, Switzerland (ZHDK). The occasion intersects both Lucier’s resonant history with ISSUE as well as ZHDK’s recent festival that celebrated Lucier’s 85th birthday.

Held in October of 2016, ZHDK’s festivities were centered around three days of concerts, installations, workshops, and symposiums that featured Lucier and prominent figures such as Joan La Barbara, Charles Curtis, Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Gary Schmalzl, as well as many University students and faculty members spanning the disciplines of composition, music theory, musicology, sound studies, aesthetics, critical theory, and art history. ISSUE presents a crucial New York staging of the 2016 happenings, involving many of its participants, including Oren Ambarchi, Gary Schmalzl, and the University initiated Ever Present Orchestra, an ensemble dedicated to specifically performing Lucier’s work. The series also sees the publication of documents from the festival, including a box set that includes four LPs (12 “/ 180 gram), a CD, as well as a discursive publication of essays, interviews, scientific articles and archival photos edited by Bernhard Rietbrock. Lucier will conduct a signing session of the box set after the concert.

The November 9th program features a performance of Lucier’s 2013 piece Criss-Cross for two electric guitars, featuring celebrated guitarist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi and renowned German live and studio guitarist Gary Schmalzl. Originally premiered at Illan Volkov’s Tectonics Glasgow in May 2013, the piece was staged at ISSUE in 2014 by Stephen O’Malley & Oren Ambarchi on a program that featured works by Eyvind Kang, Iancu Dumitrescu and Giacinto Scelsi and performances by Crys Cole and Jessika Kenney. This marks a reprisal of Lucier’s first and only piece for electric guitar.

The Ever Present Orchestra, consisting of an ensemble of four guitarists (including Oren Ambarchi), three saxophonists, four violinists, and a pianist, also perform the New York premieres of 2012 piece Two Circles and Double Cross-Hatch, a piece written this year.

The evening concludes with Lucier himself staging his paradigmatic 1970 work I am sitting in a room. The piece consists of several sentences of recorded speech simultaneously played back into a room where they are re-recorded sequentially. As the repetitive sequence continues, those sounds and resonances common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforced. The others are gradually eliminated. As the album notes for the Lovely Music edition of the piece state, “the space acts as a filter; the speech is transformed into pure sound [...] All the recorded segments are spliced together in the order in which they were made and constitute the work.” A fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text. Composer and former student of Alvin Lucier Nicolas Collins notes that “l am sitting in a room would seem to be a piece that needs no further explanation. It begins, after all, by stating in plain English exactly what is going to happen and why – a radical notion at the time (1969), and one that spawned a whole school of compositional activity in the United States and England.” He goes on, “Somehow, somewhere in the course of 40 minutes the meaning of what we've been listening to has slipped from the domain of language to that of harmony.”

The program observes Lucier’s delicate and lyrical compositional legacy and his enduring engagement with the elusive characteristics of how sound materializes -- with how acoustic mechanics are rediscovered, considered, and performed. Lucier has 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, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His sensitivity to sound as a physical phenomenon and his attention to rich aural experience is often practiced through tactical, research-oriented strategies dedicated to contextual listening. A vital figure within experimental music, the compositions of Lucier highlight 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.